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In Brief Google has released its monthly security patches for Android this week, addressing 17 critical vulnerabilities, 6 of which affect Android Mediaserver component that could be used to execute malicious code remotely. Besides patches for Mediaserver, Google also fixed 4 critical vulnerabilities related to Qualcomm components discovered in Android handsets, including Google's Nexus 6P, Pixel XL, and Nexus 9 devices. According to the Google security bulletin for Android  published Monday, this month's security update is one of the largest security fixes the company ever compiled in a single month. Google has split Android's monthly security bulletin into security "patch levels": Partial security patch level (2017-05-01) covers patches for vulnerabilities that are common to all Android devices. Complete security patch level (2017-05-05) includes additional fixes for hardware drivers as well as kernel components that are present only in some d...

Rapidly growing, insecure internet-connected devices are becoming albatross around the necks of individuals and organizations with malware authors routinely hacking them to form botnets that can be further used as weapons in DDoS and other cyber attacks. But now finding malicious servers, hosted by attackers, that control botnet of infected machines gets a bit easier. Thanks to Shodan and Recorded Future. Shodan and Recorded Future have teamed up and launched Malware Hunter – a crawler that scans the Internet regularly to identify botnet command and control (C&C) servers for various malware and botnets. Command-and-control servers ( C&C servers ) are centralized machines that control the bots ( computers, smart appliances or smartphones ), typically infected with Remote Access Trojans or data-stealing malware, by sending commands and receiving data. Malware Hunter results have been integrated into Shodan – a search engine designed to gather and list information abo...

Updated: Since the below-reported vulnerability is highly critical and it would take a few weeks for sysadmins to protect their enterprise network, the research team has not yet disclosed the technical details of the vulnerability. Meanwhile, I have talked with Maksim Malyutin, a member of Embedi research team who discovered the vulnerability in March, and updated my article based on the information provided by him. A critical vulnerability has been discovered in the remote management features on computers shipped with Intel processors for past seven years (and not decade), which could allow attackers to take control of the computers remotely, affecting all Intel systems, including PC, laptops, and servers, with AMT feature enabled. As reported earlier, this critical flaw (CVE-2017-5689) is not a remote code execution, rather Malyutin confirmed to The Hacker News that it's a logical vulnerability that also gives remote attackers an opportunity to exploit this bug using add...

After releasing 10 back-to-back episodes of the Season 5 premiere of Netflix's " Orange Is the New Black ," a hacking group calling itself The Dark Overlord is threatening to leak a trove of other unreleased TV shows and movies. The Dark Overlord (TDO) posted links to the first 10 episodes of the upcoming season of "Orange Is the New Black" show to a piracy website after Larson Studios and Netflix failed to fulfill the group's ransom demand. According to Netflix's website, the season 5 of "Orange Is the New Black" show is scheduled to debut June 9 and supposed to run 13 episodes. But TDO claimed that only the first 10 episodes were available at the time the group gained access to the show. On Saturday, the group headed on to Twitter and posted links to a Pastebin page, GitHub profile, and the Pirate Bay torrent site sharing Episode 1 of "Orange Is The New Black" season 5 show. At the time of writing, the Pastebin ( web arc...

A team of researchers from the University of Michigan discovered that hundreds of applications in Google Play Store have a security hole that could potentially allow hackers to steal data from and even implant malware on millions of Android smartphones. The University of Michigan team says that the actual issue lies within apps that create open ports — a known problem with computers — on smartphones. So, this issue has nothing to do with your device's operating system or the handset; instead, the origin of this so-called backdoor is due to insecure coding practices by various app developers. The team used its custom tool to scan over 100,000 Android applications and found 410 potentially vulnerable applications — many of which have been downloaded between 10 and 50 Million times and at least one app comes pre-installed on Android smartphones. Here I need you to stop and first let's understand exactly what ports do and what are the related threats. Ports can be eit...