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Google has fixed a series of serious vulnerabilities in its Chrome OS , including three high-risk bugs that could be used for code execution on vulnerable machines. Bug bounties is the cash prizes offered by open source communities to anyone who finds key software bugs have been steadily on the rise for several years now. As part of its reward program, Google paid out $31,336 to a researcher who found three of the vulnerabilities . Google's post notes : " We're pleased to reward Ralf-Philipp Weinmann $31,336 under the Chromium Vulnerability Rewards Program for a chain of three bugs, including demo exploit code and very detailed write-up. We are grateful to Ralf for his work to help keep our users safe. " The three-bug chain credited to Weinmann exploited O3D, a JavaScript API (application programming interface) designed for crafting interactive 3-D graphics-based Web applications. The API and supporting browser plug-in were created by Google, with a preliminary ve...

The Guardian's Twitter accounts have been taken over by pro-Syrian government hackers ' Syrian Electronic Army ' , who previously targeted the Associated Press BBC , al-Jazeera, the Qatari government and National Public Radio in the United States, as well as France 24 TV. " We are aware that a number of Guardian Twitter accounts have been compromised and we are working actively to resolve this ," a Guardian spokesperson said. Nine bogus tweets were broadcast in an hour, including some with anti-Israeli sentiments, and others saying “ Long Live Syria ” and “ Syrian Electronic Army Was Here ”.  Cyber-security experts believe the SEA have targeted a series of western media organisations in an apparent attempt to cause disruption and spread support for President Bashar al-Assad's regime, which has been under increasing Western pressure to end an ongoing bloody civil war in Syria. The group's domain names were apparently registered by the Syr...

McAfee said it has found a vulnerability in Adobe Systems' Reader program that reveals when and where a PDF document is opened. The issue emerges when some users launch a link to another file path, which calls on a JavaScript application programming interface (API), while Reader alerts a user when they are going to call on a resource from another place. The issue is not a serious problem and does not allow for remote code execution, but McAfee does consider it a security problem and has notified Adobe. It affects every version of Adobe Reader, including the latest version, 11.0.2. " We have detected some PDF samples in the wild that are exploiting this issue. Our investigation shows that the samples were made and delivered by an ‘email tracking service' provider. We don't know whether the issue has been abused for illegal or APT attacks ," wrote McAfee's Haifei Li. McAfee declined to reveal the details of the vulnerability as Adobe i...

Cyber crime enterprise is showing a growing interest in monetization of botnets , the most targeted sector in recent months is banking. One of most active malware that still menaces Banking sector is the popular Zeus . Zeus is one of the oldest, it is active since 2007, and most prolific malware that changed over time according numerous demands of the black-market. Recently, Underground forums are exploded the offer of malicious codes, hacking services and bullet proof hosting to organize a large scale fraud. Cyber criminals are selling kits at reasonable prices or entire botnets for renting, sometimes completing the offer with information to use during the attacks. The model described, known also as a Fraud-as-a-Service , is winning, malicious code such as Zeus, SpyEye , Ice IX, or even Citadel have benefited of the same sales model, cyber criminals with few hundred dollars are able to design their criminal operation. Since now the sales model and the actor invol...

After only a few days since the developer edition of Google Glass landed, Jay Freeman aka " Saurik " has jailbroken it. Though Google Glass run on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, he get root access using an exploit first discovered by another hacker named B1nary .  Freeman, who obtained the device by pre-ordering it at Google I/O last year, announced his success on Friday via Twitter. Such tactics give the user full command of the operating system without restriction. Freeman is not the first to crack Glass, though: just yesterday, another developer, Liam McLoughlin, also got root on his device. Although both jailbreaks were successful on the current Explorer Edition of Glass, it's not clear whether those holes will still be available in the consumer edition. Freeman says that Glass could be made to store data on the device itself or on a nearby phone connected by Bluetooth, instead of sending data to Google servers. McLoughlin says that Google Gla...

The Dutch police have confirmed the arrest of a 35-year-old man suspected of taking part in a massive DDoS attack against the anti-spam group Spamhaus back in March . The attack's bandwidth peaked at over 300Gbps, making it the largest DDoS attack in history. Their target, Spamhaus, is a company which creates blacklists of spam sites and sells them to Internet Service Providers. Spamhaus was attacked with DDOS and the website overcrowded with traffic and went offline. Later CloudFlare was hired by Spamhaus to protect against such attacks. The suspect was arrested by Spanish authorities in Barcelona based on a European arrest warrant and is expected to be transferred to the Netherlands soon. The man arrested is believed to be Sven Kamphuis, the owner and manager of Dutch hosting firm Cyberbunker that has been implicated in the attack. This DDoS attack was believed to have been sparked when Spamhaus placed CyberBunker on its spam blacklist. Cyberbunker i...