The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Source for Cybersecurity News — Index Page

A 21-year-old former Langley High School student, who won a Programmer of the Year Award in high school, pleaded guilty on Friday to charges of developing and selling custom key-logging malware that infected thousands of victims. Zachary Shames from Virginia pleaded guilty in a federal district court and now faces a maximum penalty of up to 10 years in prison for his past deeds. Shames was arrested this summer while he was working as a technical intern at Northrop Grumman, a security and defense government contractor, developing front-end site code and backend Java software and managing a MySQL database, according to what appears on his Linkedin page. According to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice, Shames developed a keylogger in 2013 that allowed users to steal sensitive information, including passwords and banking credentials, from a victim's computer, while he was still a high school student in 2013. Keylogger is malicious software designed to recor...

What is a backdoor? By definition: "Backdoor is a feature or defect of a computer system that allows surreptitious unauthorized access to data, " either the backdoor is in encryption algorithm, a server or in an implementation, and doesn't matter whether it has previously been used or not. Yesterday, we published a story based on findings reported by security researcher Tobias Boelter that suggests WhatsApp has a backdoor that "could allow" an attacker, and of course the company itself, to intercept your encrypted communication. The story involving the world's largest secure messaging platform that has over a billion users worldwide went viral in few hours, attracting reactions from security experts, WhatsApp team, and Open Whisper Systems, who partnered with Facebook to implement end-to-end encryption in WhatsApp. Note: I would request readers to read complete article before reaching out for a conclusion. And also, suggestions and opinions are ...

Important Update — Most Security Experts argued, " It's not a backdoor, rather it’s a feature ," but none of them denied the fact that, if required, WhatsApp or a hacker can intercept your end-to-end encrypted chats. Read detailed explanation on arguments in my latest article. Most people believe that end-to-end encryption is the ultimate way to protect your secret communication from snooping, and it does, but it can be intercepted if not implemented correctly. After introducing " end-to-end encryption by default " last year, WhatsApp has become the world's largest secure messaging platform with over a billion users worldwide. But if you think your conversations are completely secure in a way that no one, not even Facebook, the company that owned WhatsApp, can intercept your messages then you are highly mistaken, just like most of us and it's not a new concept. Here's the kick: End-to-end encrypted messaging service, such as WhatsApp and Te...

Former New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has been appointed as a cyber security advisor for the President-elect Donald Trump, but it appears that he never actually checked the security defenses of his own company's website. Giuliani is going to head a new Cybersecurity Working group for the President-elect, and "will be sharing his expertise and insight as a trusted friend concerning private sector cyber security problems and emerging solutions developing in the private sector," the Trump's Transition Team announced Thursday. Trump administration has appointed Giuliani after citing his 16 years of experience "providing security solutions in the private sector," but the news met online criticism with many users on Twitter asking: 'What does the former New York mayor know about cyber security?' As the news broke, online users started scanning his website " www.giulianisecurity.com " and found that the site for Giuliani Sec...

The company that sells digital forensics and mobile hacking tools to others has itself been hacked. Israeli firm Cellebrite , the popular company that provides digital forensics tools and software to help law enforcement access mobile phones in investigations, has had 900 GB of its data stolen by an unknown hacker. But the hacker has not yet publicly released anything from the stolen data archive, which includes its customer information, user databases, and a massive amount of technical data regarding its hacking tools and products. Instead, attackers are looking for possible opportunities to sell the access to Cellebrite system and data on a few selected IRC chat rooms, the hacker told Joseph Cox, contributor at Motherboard , who was contacted by the hacker and received a copy of the stolen data. Meanwhile, Cellebrite also admitted that it recently experienced "unauthorized access to an external web server," and said that it is "conducting an investigation ...