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MIRAI – possibly the biggest IoT-based malware threat that emerged last year, which caused vast internet outage in October last year by launching massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against the popular DNS provider Dyn . Now, the infamous malware has updated itself to boost its distribution efforts. Researchers from Russian cyber-security firm Dr.Web have now uncovered a Windows Trojan designed to built with the sole purpose of helping hackers spread Mirai to even more devices. Mirai is a malicious software program for Linux-based internet-of-things (IoT) devices which scan for insecure IoT devices, enslaves them into a botnet network, and then used them to launch DDoS attacks, and spreads over Telnet by using factory device credentials. It all started early October last year when a hacker publicly released the source code of Mirai . Dubbed Trojan.Mirai.1, the new Trojan targets Windows computers and scans the user's network for compromisable Linux-...

More than a hundred banks and financial institutions across the world have been infected with a dangerous sophisticated, memory-based malware that's almost undetectable, researchers warned. Newly published report by the Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab indicates that hackers are targeting banks, telecommunication companies, and government organizations in 40 countries, including the US, South America, Europe and Africa, with Fileless malware that resides solely in the memory of the compromised computers. Fileless malware was first discovered by the same security firm in 2014, has never been mainstream until now. Fileless malware is a piece of nasty software that does not copy any files or folder to the hard drive in order to get executed. Instead, payloads are directly injected into the memory of running processes, and the malware executes in the system's RAM. Since the malware runs in the memory, the memory acquisition becomes useless once the system gets reboot...

Last week, we reported about a critical zero-day flaw in WordPress that was silently patched by the company before hackers have had their hands on the nasty bug to exploit millions of WordPress websites. To ensure the security of millions of websites and its users, WordPress delayed the vulnerability disclosure for over a week and worked closely with security companies and hosts to install the patch, ensuring that the issue was dealt with in short order before it became public. But even after the company's effort to protect its customers, thousands of admins did not bother to update their websites, which are still vulnerable to the critical bug and has already been exploited by hackers. While WordPress includes a default feature that automatically updates unpatched websites, some admins running critical services disable this feature for first testing and then applying patches. Even the news blog of one of the famous Linux distribution OpenSUSE (news.opensuse.org) was ...

Your government is spying on you! Businesses are spying on you! Your phone and browser are constantly spying on you! Even your TV is spying on you! Yes, you should also worry about your "smart" TV, as one of the world's biggest smart TV makers Vizio has been caught secretly collecting its consumers' data through over 11 Million smart TVs and then selling them to third-parties without the user's explicit consent. But the good news is that the home entertainment hardware maker has been fined heavily for this practice. The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced on Monday that Vizio had spied on almost every customer from its Vizio smart TVs through its Smart Interactivity feature, and rather than fighting back the accusation any longer, the company has agreed to pay a $2.2 Million fine to settle the lawsuit. "To settle the case, Vizio has agreed to stop unauthorized tracking, to prominently disclose its TV viewing collection practices, and to g...

In what considered to be the largest system hack in the country's history and a massive attack on the financial sector, several banks in Poland have been infected with malware. What's surprising? The source of the malware infection is their own financial regulator, the Polish Financial Supervision Authority (KNF) -- which, ironically, is meant to keep an eye out for the safety and security of financial systems in Poland. During the past week, the security teams at several unnamed Polish banks discovered malicious executables on the workstations of several banks. The KNF confirmed that their internal systems had been compromised by someone " from another country, " although no specifications were provided. After downloads of suspicious files that were infecting various banking systems had been discovered on the regulator's servers, the KNF decided to take down its entire system " in order to secure evidence. " Here's what happened: An ...