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In last October, the Feds told they would probably just  liquidate the bitcoins  seized from the online black market Silk Road, once they were legally free to do so. Finally the United States District Judge  J. Paul Oetken   signed off  on the forfeiture order for the Bitcoins, clearing the government to sell the assets. Last September, the FBI had seized  29,655 Bitcoins from the online black market Silk Road after its alleged 29-year-old mastermind, Ross William Ulbricht , aka ' Dread Pirate Roberts ' was arrested and charged with possessing controlled substances and committing or conspiring to commit computer hacking offenses, among other charges. This new ruling represents the largest-ever forfeiture of Bitcoins . The assets include the Silk Road hidden website and 29,655 Bitcoins , worth more than $28 Million according to current exchange rates. Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said: "With today's forfeiture...

Browser extensions are extra features and functionality that you can easily add to Google Chrome, Firefox and other popular Browsers, but they can be used to serve malicious adware , which automatically renders advertisements in order to generate revenue for its author.  Hackers are now taking their business rather more seriously than we thought. Even a single instance of malicious adware on your PC can inject bad ads or malware to your browser. Ads are a legitimate way to monetize. However, creating and spreading a fresh add-on to get a large user base is always tough, but now adware companies found a new trick i.e. Buying trusted browser extensions with a large user-base and exploiting their auto-update status to push out adware. Recently, the developer of ' Add to Feedly ' Chrome extension with 30,000+ users, Amit Agarwal , was approached by some mysterious buyers. " It was a 4-figure offer for something that had taken an hour to create and I agreed to the deal ," ...

Have you given shed to Zombies in your house? No???? May be you have no idea about it. After Computers, Servers, Routers, Mobiles, Tablets…. Now its turn of your home appliances to be a weapon or a victim of cyber war. Recently Security Researchers from Proofpoint  found more than 100,000 Smart TVs, Refrigerator, and other smart household appliances compromised by hackers to send out 750,000 malicious spam emails. As the ' Internet of Things ' becoming smart and popular it became an easy weapon for cyber criminals to launch large scale of cyber attacks. " The attack that Proofpoint observed and profiled occurred between December 23, 2013 and January 6, 2014, and featured waves of malicious email, typically sent in bursts of 100,000, three times per day, targeting Enterprises and individuals worldwide." Previously, such attacks were only drafted theoretically by researchers, but this is the first such proven attack involved smart household appliances that are used as ' thingB...

The Holiday data breach at TARGET appeared to be part of a broad and highly sophisticated international hacking campaign against multiple retailers, involving the heist of possibly 110 million Credit-Debit cards, and personal information. Target confirmed last weekend that a malicious software was embedded in point-of-sale (POS) equipment at its checkout counters to collect secure data as the credit cards were swiped during transactions. The Malware called ' BlackPOS ' also known as " reedum " or ' Kaptoxa ' is an effective crimeware  kit, that was created in March 2013 and available in underground sites for $1800-$2000. Investigators from IntelCrawler found a 17-years old hacker who actually developed the BlackPOS crimeware kit. His nickname is ' ree4 ' and original name: ' Sergey Taraspov ' from  St . Petersburg  and  Nizhniy Novgorod ( Russian Federation). IntelCrawler's sources mentioned that the BlackPOS malware was created i...

After the exposure of various surveillance programs, including PRISM, XKeyscore, MUSCULAR, DROPOUTJEEP in recent revelation, NSA has come up as the only ' Government that Actually Listen '. Another day and here comes another revelation - According to the The Guardian , National Security Agency (NSA) has collected almost 200 million text messages per day from across the globe and is using them to extract data including location, contact networks and even credit card details. The two names that come in the limelight are,  DISHFIRE  that collects " pretty much everything it can "and PREFER  that conducted automated analysis of the untargeted communications. The program was designed to collect the text messages automatically from various service providers, to pull the details of financial transactions, roaming charges, delayed flights, missed calls and scheduled alerts, address book contacts, credit cards, bank accounts and visited locations. Now If I am not wrong...

Watch out, coffee drinkers. If you are one of those 10 million Starbucks customers, who purchases drinks and food directly from their Smartphones, this news is for you! If you use Starbucks' official iOS app, you should know that the company is not encrypting any of your information, including your password. The app allows the Starbucks customers to check their balance, transaction history, fund transfer, and store location, etc. A Security researcher Daniel E. Wood found a vulnerability (CVE-2014-0647) in STARTBUCKS v2.6.1. iOS mobile application, that stores your credential details and GPS locations in plain text format into the file system. To extract the information from the mobile, an attacker just needs to connect the device to a computer and accessing ' session . clslog ' file from the location given below: /Library/Caches/ com . crashlytics . data/ com . starbucks . mystarbucks /session . clslog The vulnerability , however, requires that the hacker has physical...