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Just few days after the announcement that Russian government will pay almost 4 million ruble (approximately equal to $111,000) to the one who can devise a reliable technology to decrypt data sent over the Tor , now the government wants something which is really tough. APPLE & SAP, HAND OVER YOUR SOURCE CODES Russian government has asked Apple to provide the access to the company's source code in an effort to assure its iOS devices and Macintoshes aren't vulnerable to spying. Not just this, the government has demanded the same from SAP as well, which is an enterprise software that manages business operations and customer relationships. Russia proposed this idea last Tuesday when Communications Minister Nikolai Nikiforov met SAP's Russian managing director Vyacheslav Orekhov , and Apple's Russian general manager Peter Engrob Nielsen, and suggested that both the companies give Russian government access to their source code. APPLE iOS BACKDOOR CONTROVERSIES The idea...

A critical vulnerability in Tor — an encrypted anonymizing network considered to be one of the most privacy oriented service, which is used by online users in order to hide their activities from law enforcement, government censors and others — was probably being used to de-anonymize the identity of Tor users, Tor project warned on Wednesday. 115 MALICIOUS ToR RELAYS WERE DE-ANONYMIZING USERS According to a security advisory , Tor Team has found a group of 115 malicious fast non-exit relays (6.4% of whole Tor network), those were actively monitoring the relays on both ends of a Tor circuit in an effort to de-anonymize users. " While we don't know when they started doing the attack, users who operated or accessed hidden services from early February through July 4 should assume they were affected, " Tor said. When you use Tor anonymizing network, your IP address remains hidden and it appears that your connection is coming from the IP address of a Tor exit rela...

Two days ago, we reported at The Hacker News about a critical issue in the most popular image and video sharing service, Instagram app for mobiles , that allows an attacker to hijack users' account and successfully access private photos, delete victim's photos, edit comments and also post new images. Yesterday, a London developer Stevie Graham has released a tool called " Instasheep " a play on the 2010 Facebook stealer Firesheep , a Firefox extension that can be used to compromise online accounts in certain circumstances automatically using a click of mouse. Graham discovered the Instagram issue years ago and was shocked when he realized it hadn't been fixed by Facebook yet. He released the tool after claiming Facebook refused to pay a bug bounty for his reported vulnerabilities affecting the Instagram iOS mobile application. Graham tweeted about the issue: " Denied bug bounty. Next step is to write automated tool enabling mass hijacking of accounts, " he wrote. " ...

Good News for Privacy Lovers!! An open source software group Open Whisper Systems has released the first free and Open Source phone call application for iPhone users, which is specifically designed to make secure and encrypted calls. When we talk about the privacy of our messages and voice calls, Open Whisper Systems has usually a very strong track record. Whisper is the company behind the development of RedPhone and TextSecure for Android, providing encrypted calls and texts respectively to users. Moving on to iOS devices , the company decided to produce simplest and easiest interfaces yet. Better known as Signal , a free iOS app designed to enable easy and strongly encrypted voice calls . The Signal application for iPhone is completely compatible with OWS's time-tested and well-known RedPhone . Eventually, Signal will be a combination of both RedPhone and TextSecure in a single Android application , according to a blog post . Signal makes use of end-to-en...

Due to the majority in the mobile platform, Google's Android operating system has been a prior target for cybercriminals and a recently exposed weakness in the way the operating system handles certificate validation, left millions of Android devices open to attack. Researchers at BlueBox security , who identified the vulnerability, dubbed the flaw as Fake ID , which affects all versions of Android operating system from 2.1 ( released in 2010 ) up to Android 4.4, also known as KitKat . ALL VERSIONS ARE VULNERABLE UPTO KITKAT Researchers marked the vulnerability as critical because it could allow a fake and malicious app to masquerade as a legitimate and trusted application, enabling an attacker to perform various actions such as inserting malicious code into a legitimate app, infiltrating your personal information or even take complete control of an affected device. Specifically, devices running the 3LM administration extension are at risk for a complete compromise, whic...

Scammers have again targeted more than one billion active users of the popular social networking giant Facebook, to infect as many victims as possible. Not by serving fake post, neither by providing malicious video link, instead this time scammers have used a new way of tricking Facebook users into injecting or placing malicious JavaScript or client-side code into their web browsers. This malicious code could allow an attacker to gain access to victims' accounts, thereby using it for fraud, to send spams, and promoting further attacks by posting the scam on timeline to victims' friends. This technique is known as Self Cross-site Scripting or Self XSS. Self-XSS (Self Cross-Site Scripting) scam is a combination of social engineering and a browser vulnerability , basically designed to trick Facebook users' into providing access to their account. Once an attacker or scammer gets access to users' Facebook account, they can even post and comment on things on users' behalf. ...