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Image Source: Libelium Here's a new danger to your smartphone security: Your mobile device can be hijacked and tracked without your knowledge. Remember Stingrays ? The controversial cell phone spying tool, also known as " IMSI catchers ," has long been used by law enforcement to track and monitor mobile users by mimicking a cellphone tower and tricking their devices to connect to them. Sometimes it even intercepts calls and Internet traffic, sends fake texts, and installs spyware on a victim's phone. Setting up such Stingrays-type surveillance devices , of course, is expensive and needs a lot of efforts, but researchers have now found a new, cheapest way to do the same thing with a simple Wi-Fi hotspot. Yes, Wi-Fi network can capture IMSI numbers from nearby smartphones, allowing almost anyone to track and monitor people wirelessly. IMSI or international mobile subscriber identity is a unique 15-digit number used for authentication of a person when movi...

Note — We have published  an updated article on what really happened behind the alleged DDoS attack against Liberia using Mirai botnet. Someone is trying to take down the whole Internet of a country, and partially succeeded, by launching massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks using a botnet of insecure IoT devices infected by the Mirai malware. It all started early October when a cyber criminal publicly released the source code of Mirai – a piece of nasty IoT malware designed to scan for insecure IoT devices and enslaves them into a botnet network, which is then used to launch DDoS attacks. Just two weeks ago, the Mirai IoT Botnet caused vast internet outage by launching massive DDoS attacks against DNS provider Dyn, and later it turns out that just 100,000 infected-IoT devices participated in the attacks. Experts believe that the future DDoS attack could reach 10 Tbps, which is enough to take down the whole Internet in any nation state. One such inc...

Computer viruses do not discriminate. They are not just hacking your email and online banking accounts anymore. Computer viruses do not distinguish between a personal computer or a hospital machine delivering therapy to patients — and the results could prove deadly. Cyber attacks on hospitals have emerged as a significant cyber security risk in 2016, which not only threaten highly sensitive information but also potentially harm the very lives of those being protected. In the latest incident, hundreds of planned operations, outpatient appointments, and diagnostic procedures have been canceled at multiple hospitals in Lincolnshire, England, after a "major" computer virus compromised the National Health Service (NHS) network on Sunday. In a bright-red alert warning labeled "Major incident" on its website, the Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust (NLAG) said its systems in Scunthorpe and Grimsby were infected with a virus on October 30. Th...

Over a month ago we reported about two critical zero-day vulnerabilities in the world's 2nd most popular database management software MySQL: MySQL Remote Root Code Execution (CVE-2016-6662) Privilege Escalation (CVE-2016-6663) At that time, Polish security researcher Dawid Golunski of Legal Hackers who discovered these vulnerabilities published technical details and proof-of-concept exploit code for the first bug only and promised to release details of the second bug (CVE-2016-6663) later. On Tuesday, Golunski has released proof-of-concept (POC) exploits for two vulnerabilities: One is the previously promised critical privilege escalation vulnerability ( CVE-2016-6663 ), and another is a new root privilege escalation bug ( CVE-2016-6664 ) that could allow an attacker to take full control over the database. Both the vulnerabilities affect MySQL version 5.5.51 and earlier, MySQL version 5.6.32 and earlier, and MySQL version 5.7.14 and earlier, as well as MySQL forks...

Due to the worldwide promotion of Mirai botnet that knocked down half of the Internet last Friday, hackers and even script kiddies have started creating their own botnet networks by hacking millions of IoT devices and selling them as DDoS-for-hire service to overwhelm targets with data. A 19-year-old student from Hertford has pled guilty to running one such DDoS-for-hire service that shortly became one of the most popular DDoS booter tools in the market to conduct distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Dubbed Titanium Stresser , the tool was used to conduct coordinated DDoS attacks around the world and brought Adam Mudd an income of more than US$385,000 (£315,000 A$505,000), according to the Eastern Region Special Operations Unit (ERSOU). On 28 October at the Old Bailey, Mudd pleaded guilty to two counts of the Computer Misuse Act and one count of money laundering offense and will be sentenced in December. Mudd, who was arrested at his home in 2015, admitted to comm...