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A hacker who was arrested last year for hacking into celebrities' email accounts to steal the unreleased movie and television scripts, their private messages, and tapes to sell them has finally been sentenced five years in prison. Alonzo Knowles , a 24-year-old Bahamian man, was convicted by U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer in Manhattan on Tuesday. Knowles, who maintained a list of emails and phone numbers of 130 celebrities, pleaded guilty in May to charges of identity theft and criminal copyright infringement. The sentence is twice longer than the amount of years the federal sentencing guidelines suggested, as the judge felt that Knowles "would be a clear and present danger to commit the very same crime again," the New York Times reports . The hacker expressed remorse in court and had already handed over unreleased scripts, songs, and $1,900 in cash. The authorities arrested Knowles late December and seized his laptop that was later destroyed by inv...

A 5-year-old serious privilege-escalation vulnerability has been discovered in Linux kernel that affects almost every distro of the Linux operating system, including Redhat, and Ubuntu. Over a month back, a nine-year-old privilege-escalation vulnerability, dubbed " Dirty COW ," was discovered in the Linux kernel that affected every distro of the open-source operating system, including Red Hat, Debian, and Ubuntu. Now, another Linux kernel vulnerability ( CVE-2016-8655 ) that dates back to 2011 disclosed today could allow an unprivileged local user to gain root privileges by exploiting a race condition in the af_packet implementation in the Linux kernel. Philip Pettersson, the researcher who discovered the flaw, was able to create an exploit to gain a root shell on an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS system (Linux Kernel 4.4) and also defeated SMEP/SMAP (Supervisor Mode Execution Prevention/Supervisor Mode Access Prevention) protection to gain kernel code execution abilities. In ...

If you have visited any popular mainstream website over the past two months, your computer may have been infected — Thanks to a new exploit kit discovered by security researchers. Researchers from antivirus provider ESET released a report on Tuesday stating that they have discovered an exploit kit, dubbed Stegano , hiding malicious code in the pixels of banner advertisements that are currently in rotation on several high profile news websites. Stegano originally dates back to 2014, but since early October this year, cyber crooks had managed to get the malicious ads displayed on a variety of unnamed reputable news websites, each with Millions of daily visitors. Stegano derived from the word Steganography , which is a technique of hiding messages and content inside a digital graphic image, making the content impossible to spot with the naked eye. In this particular malvertising campaign, operators hide malicious code inside transparent PNG image's Alpha Channel, which def...

North Korea's own homegrown computer operating system, that's supposed to be fully hacker proof and more secure than foreign OS, like Microsoft's Windows, can easily be hacked remotely. A group of hackers managed to break into Red Star OS — North Korea's government sanctioned Linux-based OS — using just a link. Red Star OS is North Korea's own homegrown OS that looks remarkably just like Apple's OS X and gives North Korean authorities more control over the computers, providing not only security but also spying tools that help track files in a way that if the government wants, every bit of user's data can be traced easily. According to the information security company Hacker House , Red Star OS contains a critical vulnerability that makes it possible for hackers to gain remote access to any PC running North Korea's OS just by tricking victims into opening a hyperlink. The latest version of Red Star OS ships with a Firefox-based web browser cal...

Another day, another data breach. This time a popular video sharing platform DailyMotion has allegedly been hacked and tens of millions of users information have been stolen. Breach notification service LeakedSource announced the data breach on Monday after the company obtained 85.2 Million records from Dailymotion. According to LeakedSource, the DailyMotion data breach appears to have taken place on October 20, 2016, which means it is possible that hackers have been circulating the data for over a month. The stolen data consists of 85.2 Million unique email addresses and usernames and around 20 percent of the accounts (more than 18 Million users) had hashed passwords tied to them. The passwords were protected using the Bcrypt hashing algorithm with ten rounds of rekeying, making it difficult for hackers to obtain user's actual password. Bcrypt is a cryptographic algorithm that makes the hashing process so slow that it would literally take centuries to actual brute-...