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If you are an iPhone user and use Uber app, you would be surprised to know that widely popular ride-hailing app can record your screen secretly. Security researcher Will Strafach recently revealed that Apple selectively grants (what's known as an " entitlement ") Uber a powerful ability to use the newly introduced screen-recording API with intent to improve the performance of the Uber app on Apple Watch. The screen-recording API allows the Uber app to record user's screen information even when the app is closed, giving Uber access to all the personal information passing through an iPhone screen. What's more?  The company's access to such permission could make this data vulnerable to hackers if they, somehow, able to hijack Uber's software. "It looks like no other third-party developer has been able to get Apple to grant them a private sensitive entitlement of this nature," Strafach told Gizmodo , who first reported about the issue. ...

A severe programming error has been discovered in Apple's latest macOS High Sierra 10.13 that exposes passwords of encrypted Apple File System (APFS) volumes in plain text. Reported by Matheus Mariano, a Brazilian software developer, the vulnerability affects encrypted volumes using APFS wherein the password hint section is showing the actual password in the plain text. Yes, you got that right—your Mac mistakenly reveals the actual password instead of the password hint. In September, Apple released macOS High Sierra 10.13 with APFS (Apple File System) as the default file system for solid-state drives (SSDs) and other all-flash storage devices, promising strong encryption and better performance. Mariano discovered the security issue while he was using the Disk Utility in macOS High Sierra to add a new encrypted APFS volume to a container. When adding a new volume, he was asked to set a password and, optionally, write a hint for it. So, whenever the new volume is mounted, m...

It seems sophisticated hackers have changed the way they conduct targeted cyber operations—instead of investing in zero-days and developing their malware; some hacking groups have now started using ready-made malware just like script kiddies. Possibly, this could be a smart move for state-sponsored hackers to avoid being attributed easily. Security researchers from multiple security firms, including Arbor Networks and FireEye , independently discovered a series of malware campaigns primarily targeting aerospace, defence contractors and manufacturing sectors in various countries, including the United States, Thailand, South Korea and India. What's common? All these attack campaigns, conducted by various hacking groups, eventually install same information and password stealer malware—dubbed FormBook —on the targeted systems. FormBook is nothing but a " malware-as-as-service ," which is an affordable piece of data-stealing and form-grabbing malware that has been ...

A Greek court has approved the U.S. extradition of a 38-year-old Russian national accused of laundering more than $4 billion in bitcoin for culprits involved in hacking attacks, tax fraud and drug trafficking with the help of the now-defunct BTC-e exchange. Alexander Vinnik , an alleged operator of BTC-e—a digital currency exchange service that has been in operation since 2011 but seized by the authorities right after Vinnik's arrest in a beachside village in northern Greece in late July 2016 at the request of US law enforcement authorities. Since his arrest, Moscow has also requested Vinnik be returned home, as it has previously done with other Russian nationals wanted by the United States. However, the Greek court ruled Wednesday (4 October) to extradite Vinnik to the U.S., where he will face trial on the charges with the operation of an unlicensed money service business, money laundering, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and engaging in unlawful monetary transact...

The Apache Tomcat team has recently patched several security vulnerabilities in Apache Tomcat, one of which could allow an unauthorised attacker to execute malicious code on affected servers remotely. Apache Tomcat, developed by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), is an open source web server and servlet system, which uses several Java EE specifications like Java Servlet, JavaServer Pages (JSP), Expression Language, and WebSocket, and provides a "pure Java" HTTP web server environment for Java concept to run in. Unlike Apache Struts2 vulnerabilities , which have recently been exploited to breach the systems of American credit reporting agency Equifax , Apache Tomcat flaws are less likely to be exploited. The critical Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability (CVE-2017-12617) discovered in Apache Tomcat is due to insufficient validation of user-supplied input by the affected software. Only systems with HTTP PUTs enabled (via setting the "read-only" initi...

Spain's National Court ruled on Tuesday to extradite a 36-year-old Russian computer programmer, accused by American authorities of malicious hacking offences, to the United States, according to a court document. Peter Yuryevich Levashov , also known as Peter Severa, was arrested in April this year when he was travelling with his family to Barcelona, Spain from his home in Russia—a country without an extradition treaty with the United States—for his role in a huge computer botnet. However, since Levashov has previously worked with for Vladimir Putin's United Russia Party for ten years, he fears that the US authorities would torture him for information about his political work if sent there to face the charges against him. " If I go to the U.S., I will die in a year. They want to get information of a military nature and about the United Russia party ," RIA news agency quoted Levashov as saying. " I will be tortured, within a year I will be killed, or I wil...

The largest known hack of user data in the history just got tripled in size. Yahoo, the internet company that's acquired by Verizon this year, now believes the total number of accounts compromised in the August 2013 data breach, which was disclosed in December last year, was not 1 billion—it's 3 Billion . Yes, the record-breaking Yahoo data breach affected every user on its service at the time. Late last year, Yahoo revealed the company had suffered a massive data breach in August 2013, which affected 1 billion user accounts . The 2013 hack exposed user account information, including names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of births, hashed passwords (using MD5), and, in some cases, "encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers," Yahoo said in 2016. At that time, Yahoo did confirm that hackers did not obtain bank account details or credit card information tied to the Yahoo accounts. The data breach was attributed to state-sponsored ...

Etherparty announced Sunday that its ICO (Initial Coin Offering) website selling tokens for a blockchain-based smart contract tool was hacked and the address for sending funds to buy tokens was replaced by a fraudulent address controlled by the hackers. Vancouver-based Etherparty is a smart contract creation tool that allows its users to create smart contracts on the blockchain. Companies like this launch ICO to let them raise funding from multiple sources. Etherparty said the company launched its Fuel token sale on Sunday, October 1 at 9 A.M. PDT, but just 45 minutes, some unknown attackers hacked into its ICO website and replaced the legitimate address by their own, redirecting cryptocurrencies sent by investors into their digital wallet. According to the details released by the Etherparty team, the company detected the hack after just 15 minutes and immediately took its website down for nearly one and half hour to fix the issue, preventing more people from sending funds to ...

Security researchers have discovered not one or two, but a total of seven security vulnerabilities in the popular open source Dnsmasq network services software, three of which could allow remote code execution on a vulnerable system and hijack it. Dnsmasq is a widely used lightweight network application tool designed to provide DNS (Domain Name System) forwarder, DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) server, router ads and network boot services for small networks. Dnsmasq comes pre-installed on various devices and operating systems, including Linux distributions such as Ubuntu and Debian, home routers, smartphones and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. A shodan scan for "Dnsmasq" reveals around 1.1 million instances worldwide. Recently, Google's security team reviewed Dnsmasq and discovered seven security issues, including DNS-related remote code execution, information disclosure, and denial-of-service (DoS) issues that can be triggered via DNS or DHCP. ...

Equifax data breach was bigger than initially reported, exposing highly sensitive information of more Americans than previously revealed. Credit rating agency Equifax says an additional 2.5 million U.S. consumers were also impacted by the massive data breach the company disclosed last month, bringing the total possible victims to 145.5 million from 143 million. Equifax last month announced that it had suffered a massive data breach that exposed highly sensitive data of hundreds of millions of its customers, which includes names, social security numbers, dates of birth and addresses. In addition, credit card information for nearly 209,000 customers was also stolen, as well as certain documents with personally identifying information (PII) for approximately 182,000 Equifax consumers. The breach was due to a critical vulnerability ( CVE-2017-5638 ) in Apache Struts 2 framework, which Apache patched over two months earlier (on March 6) of the security incident. Equifax was e...

Remember the infamous encryption fight between the FBI and Apple for unlocking an iPhone belonging to terrorist Syed Farook behind the San Bernardino 2015 mass shooting that killed 14 people? The same Apple vs. FBI case where Apple refused to help feds access data on the locked iPhone and, later the Federal Bureau of Investigation reportedly paid over a million dollars to a vendor for unlocking the shooter's iPhone. For keeping the iPhone hack secret, three news organizations—The Associated Press, USA Today, and Vice Media—sued the FBI last year under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and forced the agency to reveal the name of the company and the amount it was paid to unlock the iPhone . However, unfortunately, they failed. A US federal judge ruled Saturday that the FBI does not have to disclose the name of or how much it paid a private company for an  iPhone hacking tool that unlocked Farook's iPhone. Apple vs. FBI was one of the biggest legal battles in ...

" Always keep your operating system and software up-to-date ." This is one of the most popular and critical advice that every security expert strongly suggests you to follow to prevent yourself from major cyber attacks. However, even if you attempt to install every damn software update that lands to your system, there is a good chance of your computer remaining outdated and vulnerable. Researchers from security firm Duo Labs analysed over 73,000 Macs systems and discovered that a surprising number of Apple Mac computers either fails to install patches for EFI firmware vulnerabilities or doesn't receive any update at all. Apple uses Intel-designed Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) for Mac computers that work at a lower level than a computer's OS and hypervisors—and controls the boot process. EFI runs before macOS boots up and has higher-level privileges that, if exploited by attackers, could allow EFI malware to control everything without being detecte...

Another day, another data breach. This time Amazon-owned grocery chain has fallen victim to a credit card security breach. Whole Foods Market—acquired by Amazon for $13.7 billion in late August— disclosed Thursday that hackers were able to gain unauthorized access to credit card information for its customers who made purchases at certain venues like taprooms and full table-service restaurants located within some stores. Whole Foods Market has around 500 stores in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. The company did not disclose details about the targeted locations or the total number of customers affected by the breach, but it did mention that hackers targeted some of its point-of-sale (POS) terminals in an attempt to steal customer data, including credit details. The company also said people who only shopped for groceries at Whole Foods were not affected, neither the hackers were able to access Amazon transactions in the security breach. Instead, only certain venu...

Mining cryptocurrencies can be a costly investment as it takes a monstrous amount of computing power, and thus hackers have started using malware that steals computing resources of computers it hijacks to make lots of dollars in digital currency. Security researchers at security firm ESET have spotted one such malware that infected hundreds of Windows web servers with a malicious cryptocurrency miner and helped cybercriminals made more than $63,000 worth of Monero (XMR) in just three months. According to a report published by ESET today, cybercriminals only made modifications to legitimate open source Monero mining software and exploited a known vulnerability in Microsoft IIS 6.0 to secretly install the miner on unpatched Windows servers. Although ESET's investigation does not identify the attackers, it reports that the attackers have been infecting unpatched Windows web servers with the cryptocurrency miner since at least May 2017 to mine 'Monero,' a Bitcoin-like...

United States authorities arrested suspected dark web drug kingpin late last month while he was travelling from his base in France to the United States of America for this year’s annual World Beard and Mustache Championships. Gal Vallerius, a 38-year-old French national, was travelling to Austin, Texas, for the competition but was caught by U.S. authorities on August 31 upon landing at Atlanta International Airport on a distribution complaint filed in Miami federal court, The Miami Herald reported Tuesday. Authorities confirmed Vallerius' identity to the online moniker " OxyMonster ," which was previously used to sell drugs on an illegal underground dark web marketplace called Dream Market by searching his laptop that the brown-beard contestant carried with him. Alleged Moderator/Admin Of Dark-Web Dream Market According to Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) affidavit filed in September, Vallerius was an administrator, senior moderator and vendor on Dream ...

A bug in Linux kernel that was discovered two years ago, but was not considered a security threat at that time, has now been recognised as a potential local privilege escalation flaw. Identified as CVE-2017-1000253, the bug was initially discovered by Google researcher Michael Davidson in April 2015. Since it was not recognised as a serious bug at that time, the patch for this kernel flaw was not backported to long-term Linux distributions in kernel 3.10.77. However, researchers at Qualys Research Labs has now found that this vulnerability could be exploited to escalate privileges and it affects all major Linux distributions, including Red Hat, Debian, and CentOS. The vulnerability left "all versions of CentOS 7 before 1708 (released on September 13, 2017), all versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 before 7.4 (released on August 1, 2017), and all versions of CentOS 6 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 are exploitable," Qualys said in an advisory published yesterday....

Android is now the most used mobile operating system in the world—even Microsoft’s Founder Bill Gates has recently revealed that he is currently using an Android device. Mobile devices have become a powerful productivity tool, and it can now be used to hack and test the security of your networks and computer systems. This week we introduced a new online course at THN Store, " Learn Hacking/Penetration Testing Using Android From Scratch ," which will help you learn how to use your Android device for hacking and penetration testing, just like any computer. This online video training course offers 47 lectures, which focuses on the practical side penetration testing using Android without neglecting the theory behind each attack. This course will help you learn how to turn your Android smartphone into a hacking machine, practically perform various cyber attacks, and at the same time, how you can protect yourself against such attacks. This course will walk you through ...

You have now another good reason to update your iPhone to newly released iOS 11—a security vulnerability in iOS 10 and earlier now has a working exploit publicly available. Gal Beniamini, a security researcher with Google Project Zero, has discovered a security vulnerability (CVE-2017-11120) in Apple's iPhone and other devices that use Broadcom Wi-Fi chips and is hell easy to exploit. This flaw is similar to the one Beniamini discovered in the Broadcom WiFi SoC (Software-on-Chip) back in April, and BroadPwn vulnerability disclosed by an Exodus Intelligence researcher Nitay Artenstein, earlier this summer. All flaws allow a remote takeover of smartphones over local Wi-Fi networks. The newly discovered vulnerability, which Apple fixed with its major iOS update released on September 19, could allow hackers to take control over the victim's iPhone remotely. All they need is the iPhone's MAC address or network-port ID. And since obtaining the MAC address of a connec...

Forget fingerprint authentication, retinal scanning or advanced facial recognition that has recently been implemented by Apple in its iPhone X—researchers developed a new authentication system that doesn't require any of your interaction, as simply being near your device is more than enough. A group of computer scientists at the University of Buffalo, New York, have developed a new cardiac-scan authentication system that uses your heart's shape and size as a unique biometric to identify and authenticate you. Dubbed Cardiac Scan , the new authentication system makes use of low-level Doppler radar to wirelessly and continuously map out the dimensions of your beating heart, granting you access to your device so long as you're near it. In simple words, your office device should be able to recognise that it is you sitting in front of the computer, and sign you in without any password or interaction, and automatically should log you out if you step away from your compute...

Popular instant messaging app WhatsApp has already been struggling for its existence in China ever since July when Chinese government blocked its users from sending photos and videos over the app. Now, it appears that China has largely blocked Facebook-owned WhatsApp in its latest step to tighten censorship as the country prepares for a major Communist Party gathering next month. Yes, WhatsApp no longer works in the country at all. China has a long history of blocking and limiting access to web services, especially social networks and Western-owned sites through its Great Firewall . The service currently blocks some 171 out of the world's leading websites, including Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and many Google services in mainland China. And now, it is WhatsApp. Although it's unclear how long the messaging app may remain inaccessible in the country, according to Symbolic Software, a Paris-based research firm that monitors WhatsApp's situation in Chi...

Nearly a year after the disclosure of the Dirty COW vulnerability that affected the Linux kernel, cybercriminals have started exploiting the vulnerability against Android users, researchers have warned. Publicly disclosed last year in October, Dirty COW was present in a section of the Linux kernel—a part of virtually every Linux distribution, including Red Hat, Debian, and Ubuntu—for years and was actively exploited in the wild. The vulnerability allows an unprivileged local attacker to gain root access through a race condition issue, gain access to read-only root-owned executable files, and permit remote attacks. However, security researchers from Trend Micro published a blog post on Monday disclosing that the privilege escalation vulnerability (CVE-2016-5195), known as Dirty COW, has now been actively exploited by a malware sample of ZNIU, detected as AndroidOS_ZNIU. This is the first time we have seen a malware sample to contain an exploit for the vulnerability designed...