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Remember a young hacker who hacked jail systems in an attempt to release his prison inmate early? Well, that hacker will now be joining his inmate behind bars. Konrads Voits of Ypsilanti, Michigan, has been sentenced to seven years and three months in prison for attempting to hack the Washtenaw County Jail computer system and modifying prison records to get his friend released early. Besides spending 87 months in prison, Voits has also been ordered to pay $235,488 in fine to Washtenaw County for the cost accrued in investigating and cleaning up the infiltration that resulted in the compromise of personal information of around 1,600 employees, the US Justice Department announced last week. Between January 24th, 2017 and March 10th, 2017, Voits successfully tricked IT staff at Washtenaw County Jail into visiting a phony website at "ewashtenavv.org," which mimics the official URL, "ewashtenaw.org." The malicious website then installed malware on the IT ...

Earlier this month, Oracle patched a highly critical Java deserialization remote code execution vulnerability in its WebLogic Server component of Fusion Middleware that could allow attackers to easily gain complete control of a vulnerable server. However, a security researcher, who operates through the Twitter handle @pyn3rd and claims to be part of the Alibaba security team, has now found a way using which attackers can bypass the security patch and exploit the WebLogic vulnerability once again. WebLogic Server acts as a middle layer between the front end user interface and the backend database of a multi-tier enterprise application. It provides a complete set of services for all components and handles details of the application behavior automatically. Initially discovered in November last year by Liao Xinxi of NSFOCUS security team, the Oracle WebLogic Server flaw (CVE-2018-2628) can be exploited with network access over TCP port 7001. If exploited successfully, the fl...

"Alexa, are you spying on me?" — aaaa.....mmmm.....hmmm.....maybe!!! Security researchers have developed a new malicious 'skill' for Amazon's popular voice assistant Alexa that can turn your Amazon Echo into a full-fledged spying device. Amazon Echo is an always-listening voice-activated smart home speaker that allows you to get things done by using your voice, like playing music, setting alarms, and answering questions. However, the device doesn't remain activated all the time; instead, it sleeps until the user says, "Alexa," and by default, it ends a session after some duration. Amazon also allows developers to build custom 'skills,' applications for Alexa, which is the brain behind millions of voice-activated smart devices including Amazon Echo Show, Echo Dot, and Amazon Tap. However, security researchers at cybersecurity firm Checkmarx created a proof-of-concept voice-driven 'skill' for Alexa that forces device to indefin...

Only a few hours after the Drupal team releases latest updates to fix a new remote code execution flaw in its content management system software, hackers have already started exploiting the vulnerability in the wild. Announced yesterday, the newly discovered vulnerability ( CVE-2018-7602 ) affects Drupal 7 and 8 core and allows remote attackers to achieve exactly same what previously discovered Drupalgeddon2 (CVE-2018-7600) flaw allowed—complete take over of affected websites. Although Drupal team has not released any technical details of the vulnerability to prevent immediate exploitation, two individual hackers have revealed some details, along with a proof-of-concept exploit just a few hours after the patch release. If you have been actively reading every latest story on The Hacker News, you must be aware of how the release of Drupalgeddon2 PoC exploit derived much attention, which eventually allowed attackers actively hijack websites and spread cryptocurrency miners , b...

If you often leave your valuable and expensive stuff like laptop and passports in the hotel rooms, then beware. Your room can be unlocked by not only a malicious staff having access to the master key, but also by an outsider. A critical design vulnerability in a popular and widely used electronic lock system can be exploited to unlock every locked room in a facility, leaving millions of hotel rooms around the world vulnerable to hackers. The vulnerability has been discovered in Vision by VingCard locking system—made by the world's largest lock manufacturer, Assa Abloy, and deployed in more than 42,000 facilities in 166 different countries, which equals to millions of doors. After thousands of hours work, F-Secure researchers Tomi Tuominen and Timo Hirvonen managed to build a master key that could be used to unlock doors and gain entry to any of the hotel rooms using the Vision by VingCard digital lock technology, without leaving a trace on the system. How Hackers Built ...