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Do you know — 1 Gram of DNA Can Store 1,000,000,000 Terabyte of Data for 1000+ Years? Even in March this year, a team of researchers successfully stored digital data — an entire operating system, a movie, an Amazon gift card, a study and a computer virus — in the strands of DNA. But what if someone stores a malicious program into the DNA, just like an infected USB storage, to hijack the computer that reads it. A team of researchers from the University of Washington in Seattle have demonstrated the first successful DNA-based exploit of a computer system that executes the malicious code written into the synthesised DNA strands while reading it. To carry out the hack, the researchers created biological malware and encoded it in a short stretch of DNA, which allowed them to gain "full control" of a computer that tried to process the genetic data when read by a DNA sequencing machine. The DNA-based hack becomes possible due to lack of security in multiple DNA proces...

An anti-malware detection service provider and premium security firm has been accused of leaking terabytes of confidential data from several Fortune 1000 companies, including customer credentials, financial records, network intelligence and other sensitive data. However, in response to the accusations, the security firm confirmed that they are not pulling sensitive files from its customers; instead, it's up to companies—who are accidentally (but explicitly) sharing their sensitive data to leverage an optional cloud-based anti-malware service. On Wednesday, Information security firm DirectDefense published a blog post, claiming that they found a major issue with endpoint detection and response (EDR) solution offered by US-based company Carbon Black, alleging that the company is leaking hundreds of thousands of sensitive files from its customers. Carbon Black is a leading incident response and threat hunting company that offers security products to nearly thirty of the larg...

Car Hacking is a hot topic, though it's not new for researchers to hack cars. Previously they had demonstrated how to hijack a car remotely , how to disable car's crucial functions like airbags, and even how to steal cars . But the latest car hacking trick doesn't require any extra ordinary skills to accomplished. All it takes is a simple sticker onto a sign board to confuse any self-driving car and cause accident. Isn't this so dangerous? A team of researchers from the University of Washington demonstrated how anyone could print stickers off at home and put them on a few road signs to convince "most" autonomous cars into misidentifying road signs and cause accidents. According to the researchers, image recognition system used by most autonomous cars fails to read road sign boards if they are altered by placing stickers or posters over part or the whole road sign board. In a research paper , titled " Robust Physical-World Attacks on Machine...

Over the past few years, massive data breaches have become more frequent and so common that pretty much every week we heard about some organisation being hacked or hacker dumping tens of millions of users records. But even after this wide range of data breach incidents, many organisations fail to grasp the importance of data protection, leaving its users' sensitive data vulnerable to hackers and cyber criminals. Not now! At least for organisations in Britain, as the UK government has committed to updating and strengthening its data protection laws through a new Data Protection Bill. The British government has warned businesses that if they fail to take measures to protect themselves adequately from cyber attacks, they could face fines of up to £17 Million (more than $22 Million), or 4% of their global turnover—whichever amount is higher. However, the financial penalties would be a last resort, and will not be applied to those organisations taking proper security measures...

Here we go again… As part of its August Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has today released a large batch of 48 security updates for all supported versions Windows systems and other products. The latest security update addresses a range of vulnerabilities including 25 critical, 21 important and 2 moderate in severity. These vulnerabilities impact various versions of Microsoft's Windows operating systems, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft SharePoint, the Windows Subsystem for Linux, Adobe Flash Player, Windows Hyper-V and Microsoft SQL Server. CVE-2017-8620: Windows Search Remote Code Execution Vulnerability The most interesting and critical vulnerability of this month is Windows Search Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2017-8620), affects all versions of Windows 7 and Windows 10, which could be used as a wormable attack like the one used in WannaCry ransomware , as it utilises the SMBv1 connection. An attacker could remotely exploit the vulnerability thro...

The hacking group that recently hacked HBO has just dropped its second trove of documents, including a month emails of one of the company's executives, and a detailed script of the upcoming fifth episode of "Game of Thrones" Season 7, set to be aired on August 13. The latest release is the second leak from the hackers who claimed to have obtained around 1.5 terabytes of information from HBO, following the release of upcoming episodes of "Ballers" and "Room 104," and a script of the fourth episode of "Game of Thrones." With the release of another half-gigabyte sample of its stolen HBO data, the hacking group has finally demanded a ransom worth millions of dollars from the entertainment giant in order to prevent further leaks. The latest HBO data dump includes company's several internal documents, including emails, employment agreements, financial balance sheets, and marketing-strategy PDFs, along with the script of the yet-to-ai...