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If you can't find it on Google, you will definitely find it on the Dark Web . Black markets on the Dark web are not known for just buying drugs, it is a massive hidden network where you can buy pretty much anything you can imagine—from pornography, weapon, and counterfeit currencies, to hacking tools, exploits, malware, and zero-days. One such type of underground marketplace on Dark Web is RDP Shop, a platform from where anyone can buy RDP access (remote desktop protocol) to thousands of hacked machines for a small fee. While investigating several underground RDP shops, security researchers from the McAfee's Advanced Threat Research team discovered that someone is selling remote access linked to security systems at a major International airport for as low as $10. Yes, that's $10, I didn't miss any zeros. Instead of buying RDP credential, researchers used the Shodan search engine to find the correct IP address of the hacked Windows Server machine, whose ad...

Facebook has been fined £500,000 ($664,000) in the U.K. after the country's data protection watchdog concluded that its data-sharing scandal broke the law, making it as the social network's first fine over the Cambridge Analytica scandal . Yes, £500,000—that's the maximum fine allowed by the UK's Data Protection Act 1998, and equals to what Facebook earns every 8 minutes. Facebook has been under scrutiny since earlier this year when it was revealed that personal data of 87 million users was improperly gathered and misused by political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica, who reportedly helped Donald Trump win the US presidency in 2016. According to the social media giant, a Cambridge University lecturer named Aleksandr Kogan collected the users' data legitimately through a quiz app but then violated its terms by sharing the data with Cambridge Analytica, which was then hired by the Trump presidential campaign. The UK's Information Commissioner's...

Intel has paid out a $100,000 bug bounty for new processor vulnerabilities that are related to Spectre variant one ( CVE-2017-5753 ). The new Spectre-class variants are tracked as Spectre 1.1 (CVE-2018-3693) and Spectre 1.2, of which Spectre 1.1 described as a bounds-check bypass store attack has been considered as more dangerous. Earlier this year, Google Project Zero researchers disclosed details of Variants 1 and 2 (CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5715), known as Spectre, and Variant 3 (CVE-2017-5754), known as Meltdown. Spectre flaws take advantage of speculative execution, an optimization technique used by modern CPUs, to potentially expose sensitive data through a side channel by observing the system. Speculative execution is a core component of modern processors design that speculatively executes instructions based on assumptions that are considered likely to be true. If the assumptions come out to be valid, the execution continues, otherwise discarded. New Spectre-Cla...

Yet another incident which showcases that you should not explicitly trust user-controlled software repositories. One of the most popular Linux distros Arch Linux has pulled as many as three user-maintained software repository AUR packages after it was found hosting malicious code. Arch Linux is an independently developed, general-purpose GNU/Linux distribution composed predominantly of free and open-source software, and supports community involvement. Besides official repositories like Arch Build System (ABS), Arch Linux users can also download software packages from several other repositories, including AUR (Arch User Repository), a community-driven repository created and managed by Arch Linux users. Since AUR packages are user-produced content, Arch maintainers always suggest Linux users to carefully check all files, especially PKGBUILD and any .install file for malicious commands. However, this AUR repository has recently been found hosting malware code in several inst...

It's time to gear up your systems and software for the latest July 2018 Microsoft security patch updates. Microsoft today released security patch updates for 53 vulnerabilities, affecting Windows, Internet Explorer (IE), Edge, ChakraCore, .NET Framework, ASP.NET, PowerShell, Visual Studio, and Microsoft Office and Office Services, and Adobe Flash Player. Out of 53 vulnerabilities, 17 are rated critical, 34 important, one moderate and one as low in severity. This month there is no critical vulnerability patched in Microsoft Windows operating system and surprisingly, none of the flaw patched by the tech giant this month is listed as publicly known or under active attack. Critical Flaws Patched In Microsoft Products Most of the critical issues are memory corruption flaws in IE, Edge browser and Chakra scripting engine, which if successfully exploited, could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on a targeted system in the context of the cur...