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DDoS attackers attempted to bring down an Banking services earlier this week using one of the largest Distributed denial of service attack using DNS reflection technique. Prolexic, the global leader in Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection services, announced  that it has successfully mitigated the largest DNS reflection attack ever recorded, which peaked at 167 Gigabits per second (Gbps). The company did not name the target of the digital assault. DNS-reflection was the attack method used in Operation Stophaus , an attack waged in March by The Spamhaus Project, a Geneva-based not-for-profit organization dedicated to fighting Internet spam . When Spamhaus was assaulted by a vast 300Gbps peak DNS reflection attack, it engaged the help of a content delivery network (CDN) called CloudFlare to help defend itself. The DNS Reflection Denial of Service (DrDoS) technique exploits security weaknesses in the Domain Name System (DNS) Internet protocol. Using Inte...

A Drupal data breach was announced by the official Drupal Association, that Passwords for almost one million accounts on the Drupal.org website are being reset after hackers gained unauthorized access to sensitive user data. The security of the open source content management system has been compromised via third-party software installed on the Drupal.org server infrastructure, and was not the result of a vulnerability within Drupal itself. As countermeasure it is resetting the passwords for nearly one million accounts in the wake of a data breach . Information exposed includes usernames, email addresses, and country information, as well as hashed passwords . The Drupal.org hasn't revealed the name of the third-party application exploited during the attack. Evidence of the Drupal data breach was found during a routine security audit: “ Upon discovering the files during a security audit, we shut down the association.drupal.org website to mitigate any possible ongoing security i...

Google will release details of any zero-day flaws it finds in software, if the affected vendor fails to issue a patch or disclose the issue itself within a week. Now, Google is shortening that timeline a good bit to just 7 days. “ Based on our experience...we believe that more urgent action within 7 days is appropriate for critical vulnerabilities under active exploitation ”, wrote Google Security engineers Chris Evans and Drew Hintz in a blog post . “ The reason for this special designation is that each day an actively exploited vulnerability remains undisclosed to the public and unpatched, more computers will be compromised. ” Right now, companies use either responsible disclosure or full disclosure when dealing with vulnerabilities . Responsible disclosure allows a company as much time as they want to patch an exploit, and the details surrounding the bug aren't revealed to the public until a patch is issued. Full disclosure, on the other hand, means the company and th...

Server Administrators are being urged to update their Ruby on Rails servers following the discovery of an active malware campaign targeting vulnerable versions of the web development framework. According to security researcher Jeff Jarmoc , Hackers are exploiting a known and patched vulnerability in coding language Ruby on Rails, which allows a remote user to edit the web server's crontab to download a file to the /tmp directory where it is compiled and executed. The exploit that is currently being used by attackers adds a custom cron job (a scheduled task on Linux machines) that executes a sequence of commands. " Functionality is limited, but includes the ability to download and execute files as commanded, as well as changing servers ," Jarmoc blogged. " There's no authentication performed, so an enterprising individual could hijack these bots fairly easily by joining the IRC server and issuing the appropriate commands ." The original fla...

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) presented the research that it is possible to trigger malware hidden in mobile devices using music, lighting, or vibration. In a research paper titled “ Sensing-Enabled Channels for Hard-to-Detect Command and Control of Mobile Devices ”, the researchers reported that they triggered malware hidden in mobile devices using music from 17 meters away in a crowded hallway. Malware once activated would carry out programmed attacks either by itself or as part of a wider botnet of mobile devices. Presenting their findings at a conference earlier this month, the researchers explained how sensors in ubiquitous mobile devices have opened the door to a new generation of mobile malware that unsuspecting users unwittingly downloaded onto their devices. Since the trigger needs to be relatively close to the smartphone to active any hidden malware, any threats would be limited to the local environment. “ We showed that these senso...

The Password serves to protect your financial transactions, your social networking sites, and a host of other nominally secure websites online. People often say, " don't use dictionary words as passwords. They are horribly unsecure ", but what if hackers also managed to crack any 16 character password ? Criminals or trespassers who want to crack into your digital figurative backyard will always find a way. A team of hackers has managed to crack more than 14,800 supposedly random passwords from a list of 16,449 converted into hashes using the MD5 cryptographic hash function. The problem is the relatively weak method of encrypting passwords called hashing.  Hashing takes each user's plain text password and runs it through a one-way mathematical function. This creates a unique string of numbers and letters called the hash. The article reports that, using a commodity computer with a single AMD Radeon 7970 graphics card, it took him 20 hours to crack 14...