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Virtual Private Network (VPN) is one of the best solutions you can have to protect your privacy and data on the Internet, but you should be more vigilant while choosing a VPN service which truly respects your privacy. If you are using the popular VPN service Hotspot Shield for online anonymity and privacy, you may inadvertently be leaking your real IP address and other sensitive information. Developed by AnchorFree GmbH, Hotspot Shield is a VPN service available for free on Google Play Store and Apple Mac App Store with an estimated 500 million users around the world. The service promises to " secure all online activities ," hide users' IP addresses and their identities and protect them from tracking by transferring their internet and browsing traffic through its encrypted channel. However, an 'alleged' information disclosure vulnerability discovered in Hotspot Shield results in the exposure of users data, like the name of Wi-Fi network name (if conne...

Due to the recent surge in cryptocurrency prices, threat actors are increasingly targeting every platform, including IoT, Android, and Windows, with malware that leverages the CPU power of victims' devices to mine cryptocurrency. Just last month, Kaspersky researchers spotted fake antivirus and porn Android apps infected with malware that mines Monero cryptocurrency, launches DDoS attacks, and performs several other malicious tasks, causing the phone's battery to bulge out of its cover. Now, security researchers at Chinese IT security firm Qihoo 360 Netlab discovered a new piece of wormable Android malware, dubbed ADB.Miner , that scans wide-range of IP addresses to find vulnerable devices and infect them to mine digital cryptocurrency. According to the researchers, ADB.Miner is the first Android worm to reuse the scanning code programmed in Mirai —the infamous IoT botnet malware that knocked major Internet companies offline last year by launching massive DDoS attac...

A critical vulnerability discovered in the Chrome and Firefox browser extension of the grammar-checking software Grammarly inadvertently left all 22 million users' accounts, including their personal documents and records, vulnerable to remote hackers. According to Google Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy, who discovered the vulnerability on February 2, the Chrome and Firefox extension of Grammarly exposed authentication tokens to all websites that could be grabbed by remote attackers with just 4 lines of JavaScript code. In other words, any website a Grammarly user visits could steal his/her authentication tokens, which is enough to login into the user's account and access every "documents, history, logs, and all other data" without permission. "I'm calling this a high severity bug, because it seems like a pretty severe violation of user expectations," Ormandy said in a vulnerability report . "Users would not expect that visiting a we...

British citizen and hacker Lauri Love, who was accused of hacking into United States government websites, will not be extradited to stand trial in the U.S., the High Court of England and Wales ruled today. Love, 33, is facing a 99-year prison sentence in the United States for allegedly carrying out series of cyber attacks against the FBI, US Army, US Missile Defence Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and New York's Federal Reserve Bank between 2012 and 2013. The High Court ruled Monday that Love should be tried in U.K. after Lord Chief Justice Lord Burnett of Maldon and Justice Ouseley heard he suffered severe mental illness like Asperger syndrome, eczema, asthma, and depression, and may kill himself if extradited. At Westminster Magistrates' Court in London in late 2016, District Judge Nina Tempia ordered Love to be extradited to the U.S. to stand trial, although his lawyers appealed the decision, arguing that he should be tried for his al...

The growing popularity of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is generating curiosity—and concern—among security specialists. Crypto mining software has been found on user machines, often installed by botnets. Organizations need to understand the risks posed by this software and what actions, if any, should be taken. To better advise our readers, we reached out to the security researchers at Cato Networks. Cato provides a cloud-based SD-WAN that includes FireWall as a Service (FWaaS) . Its research team, Cato Research Labs, maintains the company's Cloud IPS, and today released a list of crypto mining pool addresses that you can use as a blacklist in your firewall. (To download the list, visit this page .) Cato Research Labs determined crypto mining represents a moderate threat to the organization. Immediate disruption of the organization infrastructure or loss of sensitive data is not likely to be a direct outcome of crypto mining. However, there are significant risks of i...

A simple yet serious application-level denial of service (DoS) vulnerability has been discovered in WordPress CMS platform that could allow anyone to take down most WordPress websites even with a single machine—without hitting with a massive amount of bandwidth, as required in network-level DDoS attacks to achieve the same. Since the company has denied patching the issue, the vulnerability ( CVE-2018-6389 ) remains unpatched and affects almost all versions of WordPress released in last nine years, including the latest stable release of WordPress (Version 4.9.2). Discovered by Israeli security researcher Barak Tawily , the vulnerability resides in the way " load-scripts.php ," a built-in script in WordPress CMS, processes user-defined requests. For those unaware, load-scripts.php file has only been designed for admin users to help a website improve performance and load page faster by combining (on the server end) multiple JavaScript files into a single request. Howe...