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

Buying popular plugins with a large user-base and using it for effortless malicious campaigns have become a new trend for bad actors. One such incident happened recently when the renowned developer BestWebSoft sold a popular Captcha WordPress plugin to an undisclosed buyer, who then modified the plugin to download and install a hidden backdoor. In a blog post published on Tuesday, WordFence security firm revealed why WordPress recently kicked a popular Captcha plugin with more than 300,000 active installations out of its official plugin store. While reviewing the source code of the Captcha plugin, WordFence folks found a severe backdoor that could allow the plugin author or attackers to remotely gain administrative access to WordPress websites without requiring any authentication. The plugin was configured to automatically pull an updated "backdoored" version from a remote URL — https[://]simplywordpress[dot]net/captcha/captcha_pro_update.php — after installati...

Due to the recent surge in cryptocurrency prices, not only hackers but also legitimate website administrators are increasingly using JavaScript-based cryptocurrency miners to monetize by levying the CPU power of your PC to mine Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. Just last week, researchers from AdGuard discovered that some popular video streaming and ripper sites including openload, Streamango, Rapidvideo, and OnlineVideoConverter hijacks CPU cycles from their over hundreds of millions of visitors for mining Monero cryptocurrency. Now, researchers from Moscow-based cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab have uncovered a new strain of Android malware lurking in fake anti-virus and porn applications, which is capable of performing a plethora of nefarious activities—from mining cryptocurrencies to launching Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Dubbed Loapi , the new Android Trojan can perform so many more malicious activities at a time that can exploit a handset to the e...

Moscow-based cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab has taken the United States government to a U.S. federal court for its decision to ban the use of Kaspersky products in federal agencies and departments. In September 2017, the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a Binding Operational Directive (BOD) ordering civilian government agencies to remove Kaspersky Lab software from their computers and networks within 90 days. The order came amid mounting concern among United States officials that the Kaspersky antivirus software could be helping Russian government spy on their activities, which may threaten the U.S. national security. U.S. President Donald Trump also signed into law last week legislation that bans the use of Kaspersky products within the U.S. government, capping a months-long effort to purge Kaspersky from federal agencies amid concerns it's vulnerable to Kremlin influence. The Kaspersky's appeal is part of an ongoing campaign by the c...

One of the most common network security solutions is the branch firewall. Branch firewall appliances can pack into a single device a wide range of security capabilities including a stateful or next-generation firewall, anti-virus, URL filtering, and IDS/IPS. But the reality is that most of these edge devices lack the processing power to apply the full scope of capabilities on all of the necessary traffic. If the firewall deployed in the branch cannot scale to address critical security needs, an alternative strategy must be used. Wholesale appliance upgrades are easy but expensive. Regional security hubs are complex and also costly. A new approach, called firewall bursting , leverages cloud scalability to offer an easier, more cost-effective alternative to branch office security. (You can find a great table comparing the different Firewall approaches here .) Costly Appliance Upgrades and Secure Hub Architectures The existing methods of evolving branch security force IT int...

Security researchers have discovered and disclosed details of two unpatched critical vulnerabilities in a popular internet forum software—vBulletin—one of which could allow a remote attacker to execute malicious code on the latest version of vBulletin application server. vBulletin is a widely used proprietary Internet forum software package based on PHP and MySQL database server. It powers more than 100,000 websites on the Internet, including Fortune 500 and Alexa Top 1 million companies websites and forums. The vulnerabilities were discovered by a security researcher from Italy-based security firm TRUEL IT and an unknown independent security researcher, who disclosed the details of the vulnerabilities by Beyond Security's SecuriTeam Secure Disclosure program. The vulnerabilities affect version 5 of the vBulletin forum software and are currently unpatched. Beyond Security claims, it tried to contact vBulletin since November 21, 2017, but received no response from the compa...