The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Source for Cybersecurity News — Index Page

The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is becoming more sophisticated and complex with the increase in the skills of attackers and so, has become one of favorite weapon for the cyber criminals to temporarily suspend or crash the services of a host connected to the Internet and till now nearly every big site had been a victim of this attack. Since 2013, Hackers have adopted new tactics to boost the sizes of Distributed Denial of Service ( DDoS ) attack known as ‘ Amplification Attack ’, leveraging the weakness in the UDP protocols. One of the commonly used by hacker is (Domain Name System) DNS Reflection Denial of Service (DrDoS). WHAT IS DrDoS ATTACK? The DNS Reflection Denial of Service (DrDoS) technique exploits security weaknesses in the Domain Name System (DNS) Internet protocol. Using Internet protocol spoofing, the source address is set to that of the targeted victim, which means all the replies will go to the target and the target of the attack receives re...

Hardly two month ago we reported about the first widely spread Android Bootkit malware , dubbed as ' Oldboot.A ', which infected more than 500,000 Smartphone users worldwide with Android operating system in last eight months, especially in China. Oldboot is a piece of Android malware that's designed to re-infect Mobile devices even after a thorough cleanup. It resides in the memory of infected devices;  It modify the devices’ boot partition and booting script file to launch system service and extract malicious application during the early stage of system’s booting. Yet another alarming report about Oldboot malware has been released by the Chinese Security Researchers from ' 360 Mobile Security '. They have discovered a new variant of the Oldboot family, dubbed as ' Oldboot.B ', designed exactly as Oldboot.A, but new variant has advance stealth techniques. Especially, the defense against with antivirus software, malware analyzer, and automatic a...

So, is your Safari Web Browser Updated?? Make sure you have the latest web browser updated for your Apple Macintosh systems, as Apple released Safari 6.1.3 and Safari 7.0.3 with new security updates. These Security updates addresses multiple vulnerabilities in its Safari web browser, which has always been the standard browser for Mac users. This times not five or ten, in fact about two dozen. Apple issued a security update to patch a total of 27 vulnerabilities in Safari web browser, including the one which was highlighted at Pwn2Own 2014 hacking competition. The available updates replace the browser running OSX 10.7 and 10.8 with the latest versions of browser 6.1.3, and OSX 10.9 with 7.0.3. Among the 27 vulnerabilities, the most remarkable vulnerability addressed in the update is CVE-2014-1303 , a heap-based buffer overflow that can be remotely exploited and could lead to bypass a sandbox protection mechanism via unspecified vector. This vulnerability is ...

So, How do Hackers compromise a Website? Simply by exploiting the flaws in it, that means they took advantage of the error in the developers’ code. Now, this time the hackers itself has left behind a crucial flaw in its malware code which can be exploited by us to help save our computer systems. Believe me, it’s not an April Fools’ joke! A malicious software program that holds the victims’ computer files hostage by wrapping them with strong encryption until the victim pays a ransom fee to get them decrypted, has a critical flaw in its malware code itself that it leaves the decryption key on the victim’s computer. The Anti-virus firm Symantec examined a sophisticated malware program dubbed as CryptoDefense (Trojan.Cryptodefense) ransomware , which appeared in the end of the last month. CryptoDefense is one of the complex malware programs that include a number of effective techniques, including Tor anonymity tool usage and Bitcoin digital currency to extort money from victims. Cryp...

Imagine, You Open a Winrar archive of MP3 files, but what if it will install a malware into your system when you play anyone of them. WinRAR, a widely used file archiver and data compression utility helps hackers to distribute malicious code. Israeli security researcher  Danor Cohen (An7i)   discovered the WinRAR file extension spoofing vulnerability. WinRAR file extension spoofing vulnerability allows hackers to modify the filename and extension inside the traditional file archive, that helps them to hide binary malicious code inside an archive, pretending itself as '.jpg' , '.txt' or any other format. Using a Hex editor tool, he analysed a ZIP file and noticed that winrar tool also adds some custom properties to an archive, including two names - First name is the original filename (FAX.png) and second name is the filename (FAX.png) that will appear at the WINRAR GUI window. Danor manipulated the second filename and extension to prepare a special Z...

A year back, Security Researchers from the Antivirus firm Kaspersky found a sophisticated piece of malware which they dubbed as ‘ MiniDuke ’, designed specifically to collect and steal strategic insights and highly protected political information, which is a subject to states’ security. Now, once again the MiniDuke virus is spreading in wild via an innocent looking but fake PDF documents related to Ukraine , while the researcher at F-Secure were browsing the set of extracted decoy documents from a large batch of potential MiniDuke Samples. " This is interesting considering the current crisis in the area ," Mikko Hypponen, the CTO of security research firm F-Secure, wrote on Tuesday. The Hacker News reported a year ago about the malicious malware that uses an exploit ( CVE-2013-0640 ) of the famous and actively used Adobe Reader . MiniDuke malware written in assembly language with its tiny file size (20KB), and uses hijacked Twitter accounts for Command ...