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Around 600 powerful devices specifically designed for mining bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have been stolen from Icelandic data centers in what has been dubbed the "Big Bitcoin Heist." To make a profit, so far criminals have hacked cryptocurrency exchanges , spread mining malware , and ransomware —and even kidnapped cryptocurrency investors for ransom and tried to rob a bitcoin exchange , but now the greed has reached another level. The powerful computers are estimated to be worth around $2 million, Associated Press reports , and are used to generate cryptocurrency that at the time of this writing are worth $11,500 each. The theft, which took place between late December and early January, is one of the biggest series of robberies Iceland has ever experienced, according to law enforcement. "This is grand theft on a scale unseen before," said Police Commissioner Olafur Helgi Kjartansson of the southwestern Reykjanes peninsula. There were four differe...

On Wednesday, February 28, 2018, GitHub's code hosting website hit with the largest-ever distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that peaked at record 1.35 Tbps. Interestingly, attackers did not use any botnet network, instead weaponized misconfigured Memcached servers to amplify the DDoS attack. Earlier this week we published a report detailing how attackers could abuse Memcached, popular open-source and easily deployable distributed caching system, to launch over 51,000 times powerful DDoS attack than its original strength. Dubbed Memcrashed , the amplification DDoS attack works by sending a forged request to the targeted Memcrashed server on port 11211 using a spoofed IP address that matches the victim's IP. A few bytes of the request sent to the vulnerable server trigger tens of thousands of times bigger response against the targeted IP address. "This attack was the largest attack seen to date by Akamai, more than twice the size of the September 2016...

Apple has finally agreed to open a new Chinese data center next month to comply with the country's latest controversial data protection law. Apple will now move the cryptographic keys of its Chinese iCloud users in data centers run by a state-owned company called Cloud Big Data Industrial Development Co, despite concerns from human rights activists. In 2017, China passed a Cybersecurity Law that requires "critical information infrastructure operators" to store Chinese users' data within the country's borders, which likely forced Apple to partner with the new Chinese data center. And the icing on the cake is that Chinese government already has legislation called National Security Law, passed in 2015, which gives police the authority to demand companies help them bypass encryption or other security tools to access personal data. This is the first time when Apple is going to store encryption keys required to unlock iCloud accounts of its users outside the...

Facebook Page admins are publicly displayed only if admins have chosen to feature their profiles. However, there are some situations where you might want to contact a Facebook page admin or want to find out who is the owner of a Facebook page. Egyptian security researcher Mohamed A. Baset has discovered a severe information disclosure vulnerability in Facebook that could have allowed anyone to expose Facebook page administrator profiles, which is otherwise not supposed to be public information. Baset claimed to have discovered the vulnerability in less than 3 minutes without any kind of testing or proof of concepts, or any other type of time-consuming processes. In a blog post , Baset said he found the vulnerability, which he described as a "logical error," after receiving an invitation to like a particular Facebook page on which he had previously liked a post. Facebook has introduced a feature for page admins wherein they can send Facebook invitations to users...

Cybercriminals have figured out a way to abuse widely-used Memcached servers to launch over 51,000 times powerful DDoS attacks than their original strength, which could result in knocking down of major websites and Internet infrastructure. In recent days, security researchers at Cloudflare , Arbor Networks , and Chinese security firm Qihoo 360 noticed that hackers are now abusing "Memcached" to amplify their DDoS attacks by an unprecedented factor of 51,200. Memcached is a popular open-source and easily deployable distributed caching system that allows objects to be stored in memory and has been designed to work with a large number of open connections. Memcached server runs over TCP or UDP port 11211. The Memcached application has been designed to speed up dynamic web applications by reducing stress on the database that helps administrators to increase performance and scale web applications. It's widely used by thousands of websites, including Facebook, Flickr,...

A hacker who was arrested and pleaded guilty last year—not because he hacked someone, but for creating and selling a remote access trojan that helped cyber criminals—has finally been sentenced to serve almost three years in prison. Taylor Huddleston, 26, of Hot Springs, Arkansas, pleaded guilty in July 2017 to one charge of aiding and abetting computer intrusions by building and intentionally selling a remote access trojan (RAT), called NanoCore , to hackers for $25. Huddleston was arrested in March, almost two months before the FBI raided his house in Hot Springs, Arkansas and left with his computers after 90 minutes, only to return eight weeks later with handcuffs. This case is a rare example of the US Department of Justice (DOJ) charging someone not for actively using malware to hack victims' computers, but for developing and selling it to other cybercriminals. Huddleston admitted to the court that he created his software knowing it would be used by other cybercrimi...