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In an effort to expand its certificate authority capabilities and build the "foundation of a more secure web," Google has finally launched its root certificate authority. In past few years, we have seen Google taking many steps to show its strong support for sites using HTTPS, like: Giving more preference to HTTPS websites in its search rankings than others. Warning users that all HTTP pages are not secure. Starting an industry-wide initiative, Certificate Transparency − an open framework to log, audit, and monitor certificates that CAs have issued. However, Google has been relying on an intermediate Certificate Authority (Google Internet Authority G2 - GIAG2) issued by a third party, with the latest suppliers being GlobalSign and GeoTrust, which manages and deploys certificates to Google's products and services. Google announced Thursday the creation of its own certified, and independent Root Certificate Authority called Google Trust Services , allowing...

Hacking password for a Facebook account is not easy, but also not impossible. We have always been advising you to enable two-factor authentication — or 2FA — to secure your online accounts, a process that requires users to manually enter, typically a six-digit secret code generated by an authenticator app or received via SMS or email. So even if somehow hackers steal your login credentials, they would not be able to access your account without one-time password sent to you. But, Are SMS-based one-time passwords Secure? US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is also no longer recommending SMS-based two-factor authentication systems , and it's not a reliable solution mainly because of two reasons: Users outside the network coverage can face issues Growing number of sophisticated attacks against OTP schemes So, to beef up the security of your account, Facebook now support Fido-compliant Universal 2nd Factor Authentication (U2F), allows users to log into ...

The biggest mistake companies make with data security is leaving all their secrets unprotected at one place, which if attacked, they are all gone in one shot. An unnamed law enforcement agency has reportedly accessed billions of compromised usernames, email IDs, and their passwords, collected by LeakedSource, a popular breach notification service. LeakedSource, launched in late 2015, that exposed some of the largest data breaches in 2016, including LinkedIn , DailyMotion , Rambler.ru , Last.fm , VK.com , Weebly, and Foursquare , might be facing a permanent shut down after law enforcement officers allegedly raided its operator. The LeakedSource website that allowed visitors to look up for their account details that had been collected from multiple data breaches has suddenly disappeared, and its associated social media accounts have been suspended. The data breach aggregation service had always been criticized for its unethical policy of allowing anyone to look up hacked acco...

It seems like the new American President's Twitter account could easily be hacked due to security blunders he made with the most powerful Twitter account in the world, experts warned. Days after we got to know that the newly inaugurated President Donald Trump was still using his old, insecure Android smartphone, it has now been revealed that the official @POTUS Twitter account was linked to a private Gmail account. Since we are already aware of the potential scandal with government officials using outside email systems following the hack of private e-mail servers of Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush , the choice of using private, non-government email address by Trump has raised serious concerns about the security of the White House's closely watched account. To gain control of the official @POTUS Twitter account, which may or may not is secured with some form of two-factor authentication , all an attacker needs to do is hack the email address associated with the acc...

The IT threat landscape has changed dramatically over the last three-four years. With no shortage of threat actors, from hacktivists to nation-states, criminals to terrorists, all of them are now after something new. It's no more just about stealing your money, credit cards and defacing websites, as now they are after the intellectual property, mass attacks and most importantly, our critical infrastructures. We have long-discussed nightmare scenarios of cyber attacks against nation's critical infrastructure, but now these scenarios have come to the real world, and we have seen many such incidents in the past years. The latest example is cyber attacks against Ukrainian power grid . Just two weeks back, Ukraine's national power company Ukrenergo confirmed that electricity outage on 17-18th December last year was caused by a cyber attack. Such sophisticated cyber attacks have revealed the extent of vulnerabilities in the systems that are operating the most critic...