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Have you considered the possibility that someone could be watching you through your webcam? Or Listening to all your conversations through your laptop's microphone? Even a bit of thought about this probability could make you feel incredibly creepy. But most people think that they have a solution to these major issues i.e. simply covering their laptop's webcam and microphone with tape, just like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and FBI Director James Comey . But it's 2016, and a piece of tape won't help you, as a new experiment has proved that how easily hackers can turn your headphones into a microphone to spy on all your conversations in the background without your knowledge. A group of Israeli security researchers at Ben Gurion University have created a proof-of-concept code (malware) that converts typical headphones into microphones and then use them to record all your conversations in the room just like a fully-featured spying device. Speake(a)r Malware Weaponize...

A proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for a critical vulnerability in the Network Time Protocol daemon (ntpd) has been publically released that could allow anyone to crash a server with just a single maliciously crafted packet. The vulnerability has been patched by the Network Time Foundation with the release of NTP 4.2.8p9, which includes a total of 40 security patches, bug fixes, and improvements. The NTP daemon is used in almost every device that needs to synchronize time on computer clocks. NTP got the most attention in late 2014 and 2015 when hackers used it to launch highly amplified DDoS attacks against services. The flaw which affects NTP.org's nptd versions prior to 4.2.8p9, but not including ntp-4.3.94, has been discovered by security researcher Magnus Stubman, who privately disclosed it to the Network Time Foundation on June 24. A patch for the vulnerability was developed and sent to Stubman on 29th September and just two days later, the researcher acknowledged t...

ATM hackers who long relied on tactics of stealing payment card numbers and online banking credentials to steal millions are now targeting the bank itself to steal cash directly from the machines. Earlier this year, a gang of cyber criminals infected several ATMs with malware in Taiwan and Thailand that caused the machines to spit out millions in cash, and the gang members then stood in front of the infected ATMs at the appointed hour and collected the money. Now, the FBI has warned U.S. banks of the potential for similar ATM jackpotting attacks, saying that the agency is "monitoring emerging reports indicating that well-resourced and organized malicious cyber actors have intentions to target the U.S. financial sector." ATM jackpotting is a technique used to force automated teller machines to spit out cash. According to Russian cyber security firm Group-IB, cyber crooks have remotely infected ATMs with malware in more than dozen countries across Europe this year, ...

AI agents promise to automate everything from financial reconciliations to incident response. Yet every time an AI agent spins up a workflow, it has to authenticate somewhere; often with a high-privilege API key, OAuth token, or service account that defenders can't easily see. These "invisible" non-human identities (NHIs) now outnumber human accounts in most cloud environments, and they have become one of the ripest targets for attackers. Astrix's Field CTO Jonathan Sander put it bluntly in a recent Hacker News webinar : "One dangerous habit we've had for a long time is trusting application logic to act as the guardrails. That doesn't work when your AI agent is powered by LLMs that don't stop and think when they're about to do something wrong. They just do it." Why AI Agents Redefine Identity Risk Autonomy changes everything: An AI agent can chain multiple API calls and modify data without a human in the loop. If the underlying credential is exposed or overprivileged, each addit...

Yes, Oracle just bought the DNS provider company that brought down the Internet last month. Business software vendor Oracle announced on Monday that it is buying cloud-based Internet performance and Domain Name System (DNS) provider Dyn. Dyn is the same company that was hit by a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack by the Mirai botnet last month which knocked the entire Internet offline for a few hours, crippling some of the world's biggest and most popular websites. Since the company provides cloud-based DNS service to customers such as Spotify, Netflix, Twitter and Pfizer, the acquisition will help Oracle's cloud customers to optimize their infrastructure costs and performance. According to the press release , the Dyn acquisition "extends the Oracle cloud computing platform and provides enterprise customers with a one-stop shop for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)." "Oracle Cloud customers will...

If you came across any Facebook Message with an image file (exactly .SVG file format) send by any of your Facebook friends, just avoid clicking it. An ongoing Facebook spam campaign is spreading malware downloader among Facebook users by taking advantage of innocent-looking SVG image file to infect computers. If clicked, the file would eventually infect your PC with the nasty Locky Ransomware , a family of malware that has quickly become one of the favorite tools among criminals due to its infecting capabilities. Discovered by malware researcher Bart Blaze , the attack campaign uses Facebook Messenger to spread a malware downloader called Nemucod that takes the form of .SVG image files. Why SVG file? Hackers considered SVG (or Scalable Vector Graphics) files for spreading the malware downloader, because SVG has the ability to contain embedded content such as JavaScript, and can be opened in a modern web browser. Crooks added their malicious JavaScript code right inside th...