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A years ago when the mysterious hacking group ' The Shadow Brokers ' dumped a massive trove of sensitive data stolen from the US intelligence agency NSA, everyone started looking for secret hacking tools and zero-day exploits . A group of Hungarian security researchers from CrySyS Lab and Ukatemi has now revealed that the NSA dump doesn't just contain zero-day exploits used to take control of targeted systems , but also include a collection of scripts and scanning tools the agency uses to track operations of hackers from other countries. According to a report published today by the Intercept, NSA's specialized team known as Territorial Dispute (TeDi) developed some scripts and scanning tools that help the agency to detect other nation-state hackers on the targeted machines it infects. NSA hackers used these tools to scan targeted systems for 'indicators of compromise' (IoC) in order to protect its own operations from getting exposed, as well as to fin...

Great news for hackers. Now you can download and install Kali Linux directly from the Microsoft App Store on Windows 10 just like any other application. I know it sounds crazy, but it's true! Kali Linux, a very popular, free, and open-source Linux-based operating system widely used for hacking and penetration testing, is now natively available on Windows 10, without requiring dual boot or virtualization. Kali Linux is the latest Linux distribution to be made available on the Windows App Store for one-click installation, joining the list of other popular distribution such as Ubuntu , OpenSUSE and SUSE Enterprise Linux . In Windows 10, Microsoft has provided a feature called " Windows Subsystem for Linux " (WSL) that allows users to run Linux applications directly on Windows. "For the past few weeks, we've been working with the Microsoft WSL team to get Kali Linux introduced into the Microsoft App Store as an official WSL distribution, and today we...

The bar has been raised. As more amplified attacks were expected following the record-breaking 1.35 Tbps Github DDoS attack , someone has just set a new record after only four days — 1.7 Tbps DDoS attack. Network security and monitoring company Arbor Networks claims that its ATLAS global traffic and DDoS threat data system have recorded a 1.7Tbps reflection/amplification attack against one of its unnamed US-based customer's website. Similar to the last week's DDoS attack on GitHub, the massive bandwidth of the latest attack was amplified by a factor of 51,000 using thousands of misconfigured Memcached servers exposed on the Internet. Memcached, a popular open source distributed memory caching system, came into news earlier last week when researchers detailed how attackers could abuse it to launch amplification DDoS attack by sending a forged request to the targeted Memcached server on port 11211 using a spoofed IP address that matches the victim's IP. A few b...

Security researchers have discovered a set of severe vulnerabilities in 4G LTE protocol that could be exploited to spy on user phone calls and text messages, send fake emergency alerts, spoof location of the device and even knock devices entirely offline. A new research paper [ PDF ] recently published by researchers at Purdue University and the University of Iowa details 10 new cyber attacks against the 4G LTE wireless data communications technology for mobile devices and data terminals. The attacks exploit design weaknesses in three key protocol procedures of the 4G LTE network known as attach, detach, and paging. Unlike many previous research, these aren't just theoretical attacks. The researchers employed a systematic model-based adversarial testing approach, which they called LTEInspector , and were able to test 8 of the 10 attacks in a real testbed using SIM cards from four large US carriers. Authentication Synchronization Failure Attack Traceability Attack Nu...

Around 600 powerful devices specifically designed for mining bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have been stolen from Icelandic data centers in what has been dubbed the "Big Bitcoin Heist." To make a profit, so far criminals have hacked cryptocurrency exchanges , spread mining malware , and ransomware —and even kidnapped cryptocurrency investors for ransom and tried to rob a bitcoin exchange , but now the greed has reached another level. The powerful computers are estimated to be worth around $2 million, Associated Press reports , and are used to generate cryptocurrency that at the time of this writing are worth $11,500 each. The theft, which took place between late December and early January, is one of the biggest series of robberies Iceland has ever experienced, according to law enforcement. "This is grand theft on a scale unseen before," said Police Commissioner Olafur Helgi Kjartansson of the southwestern Reykjanes peninsula. There were four differe...