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Vodafone , the world’s second-largest mobile carrier with more than 400 million customers around the world has issued its first " Law Enforcement Disclosure Report ", reveals that the governments in some of the countries it operates, have direct access to its network allowing them to listen to all conversations. The Company has broken its silence on government surveillance and after Snowden's revelations about NSA , this is the only most comprehensive transparency report ever published by an International company detailing that how some Governments are taking advantage of their laws to infiltrate citizens privacy. Vodafone operates in 29 countries, where the government agencies need legal notices to tap into customers’ communications, but some of those countries are actually tapping directly into their network, without any need for a warrant or any explanation. There are many countries like Albania, Egypt, Hungary, India , Malta, Qatar, Romania, South Africa and Turk...

Today Microsoft has released its Advance Notification for the month of June 2014 Patch Tuesday releasing seven security Bulletins, which will address several vulnerabilities in its products, out of which two are marked critical and rest are important in severity. This Tuesday, Microsoft will issue Security Updates to address seven major vulnerabilities and all those are important for you to patch, as the flaws are affecting various Microsoft software, including Microsoft Word, Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer. CRITICAL VULNERABILITY THAT YOU MUST PATCH Bulletin one is considered to be the most critical one, which will address a the zero-day Remote Code Execution vulnerability, affecting all versions of Internet Explorer, including IE11 in Windows 8.1.  All server versions of Windows are affected by this vulnerability, but at low level of severity because by default, Internet Explorer runs in Enhanced Security Configuration and just because Server Core ver...

Remember OpenSSL Heartbleed vulnerability ? Several weeks ago, the exposure of this security bug chilled the Internet, revealed that millions of websites were vulnerable to a flaw in the OpenSSL code which they used to encrypt their communications. Now once again the OpenSSL Foundation has issued software updates to patch six new vulnerabilities, and two of them are critical. MAN-IN-THE-MIDDLE ATTACK (CVE-2014-0224) First critical vulnerability (CVE-2014-0224) in OpenSSL is " CCS Injection " - resides in ChangeCipherSpec (CCS) request sent during the handshake that could allow an attacker to perform a man-in-the-middle attack against the encrypted connection servers and clients.  By exploiting this vulnerability an attacker could intercept an encrypted connection which allows him to decrypt, read or manipulate the data. But the reported flaw is exploitable only if both server and client are vulnerable to this issue. According to the OpenSSL advisory , " An attacker...

We have seen cybercriminals targeting PCs with Ransomware malware that encrypts your files or lock down your computer and ask for a ransom amount to be paid in a specified duration of time to unlock it. To deliver the Ransomware malwares to the mobile devices, cyber criminals have already started creating malicious software programs for android devices. Last month, we reported about a new Police Ransomware malware that locks up the devices until the victims pay a ransom to get the keys to unlock the phone. But, the malware just lock the mobile screen and a loophole in the its implementation allowed users to recover their device and data stored on SDcard. Now, in an effort to overcome this, threat actors have adopted encryption in the development of mobile Ransomware malwares. Recently, the security firm ESET has discovered a new Android ransomware, dubbed as Android/Simplocker.A , that has ability to encrypt the files on the device SD card and then demand a ransom from the victim ...

Privacy of Internet users is dead somewhere as the Intelligence agencies can watch our every move, hear our every conversation and read our every email and find out anything related to our personal and private life.  Last year, Edward Snowden revealed about the mass surveillance carried out by NSA and other countries intelligence agencies on every citizen of their country. The US Government has allotted a large share of its ' Black Budget ' for secret surveillance programs and to make this happen, NSA has used a number of unethical ways and labelled as legal solutions, harvesting hundreds of millions of Metadata from emails, web activity, chats, social networks, and everything else around the world. The revelations encouraged Internet users think about their privacy and digital rights, and the time came when different organisations started several campaigns to block mass surveillance and fight back against the U.S. National Security Agency ( NSA ). RESET YOU...

Attackers care about ROI – they want to accomplish their objective with the least investment of time and resources possible. The same is true for you - to most effectively manage vulnerabilities, you need to think like an attacker. Ask yourself: How would you go about compromising systems, exfiltrating valuable information and making money? What are the key assets in your network that you would target? How would you get to these assets? Attackers are looking for vulnerabilities that are exposed – ones offering them an easy way to penetrate your network and pivot into the truly valuable assets on your network. Although zero-day exploits are heavily publicized, attackers more often use older, proven exploits very effectively. Fortunately, many such exploits are well known and have clear remediation methods. So, how can you determine if a known vulnerability is actually exploitable? The key is to correlate system vulnerabilities with threat intelligence so you can prioriti...