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Germany has been hit with the biggest hack in its history. A group of unknown hackers has leaked highly-sensitive personal data from more than 100 German politicians, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Brandenburg's prime minister Dietmar Woidke, along with some German artists, journalists, and YouTube celebrities. The leaked data that was published on a Twitter account ( @_0rbit ) and dated back to before October 2018 includes phone numbers, email addresses, private chats, bills, credit card information and photos of victims' IDs. Although it is yet unclear who perpetrated this mass hack and how they managed to perform it, the leaked data appears to be collected unauthorizedly by hacking into their smartphones. The hack targeted all of Germany's political parties currently represented in the federal parliament, including the CDU, CSU, SPD, FDP, Left party (Die Linke) and Greens, except for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). While Justice Minister...

I hope you had biggest, happiest and craziest New Year celebration, but now it's time to come back at work and immediately update your systems to patch new security flaws that could exploit your computer just by opening a PDF file. Adobe has issued an out-of-band security update to patch two critical vulnerabilities in the company's Acrobat and Reader for both the Windows and macOS operating systems. Though the San Jose, California-based software company did not give details about the vulnerabilities, it did classify the security flaws as critical since they allow privilege escalation and arbitrary code execution in the context of the current user. Both the vulnerabilities were reported to Adobe by security researchers--Abdul-Aziz Hariri and Sebastian Apelt—from Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI). Critical Adobe Acrobat and Reader Vulnerabilities The first vulnerability, reported by Apelt and identified as CVE-2018-16011, is a use-after-free bug that can lead...

A group of hackers has hijacked tens of thousands of Google's Chromecast streaming dongles, Google Home smart speakers and smart TVs with built-in Chromecast technology in recent weeks by exploiting a bug that's allegedly been ignored by Google for almost five years. The attackers, who go by Twitter handles @HackerGiraffe and @j3ws3r, managed to hijack Chromecasts' feeds and display a pop-up, spreading a security warning as well as controversial YouTube star PewDiePie propaganda. The hackers are the same ones who hijacked more than 50,000 internet-connected printers worldwide late last year by exploiting vulnerable printers to print out flyers asking everyone to subscribe to PewDiePie YouTube channel. This time, the hackers remotely scanned the internet for compatible devices, including Chromecasts, exposed to the internet through poorly configured routers that have Universal Plug and Play [UPnP] enabled by default. The hackers then exploited a design flaw in Chrome...

Google has finally patched a privacy vulnerability in its Chrome web browser for Android that exposes users' device model and firmware version, eventually enabling remote attackers to identify unpatched devices and exploit known vulnerabilities. The vulnerability, which has not yet given any CVE number, is an information disclosure bug that resides in the way the Google Chrome for Android generates 'User Agent' string containing the Android version number and build tag information, which includes device name and its firmware build. This information is also sent to applications using WebView and Chrome Tabs APIs, which can be used to track users and fingerprint devices on which they are running. For example: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 5.1.1; Nexus 6 Build/LYZ28K ) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/46.0.2490.34 Mobile Safari/537.36 Yakov Shafranovich, a contributor at Nightwatch Cybersecurity firm, initially reported this issue to Google three years a...

Kickass Torrents (KAT cr) was once a hugely popular online portal, renowned for its vast archive of movies, music, TV shows, and other media. It was a treasure trove for those seeking rare content and for users looking to share their creations. However, Kickass Torrents faced significant opposition. The movie and music industries saw the site as a threat to their revenue, accusing it of promoting copyright infringement. Despite this, the Kickass Torrents team continued to advocate for its users, claiming they were providing a valuable service. The Downfall and Resurgence of Kickass Torrents Eventually, legal action caught up with Kickass Torrents. In July 2017, U.S. authorities shut down the site after its owner, Artem Vaulin, was charged with allowing the distribution of copyrighted material. Following the shutdown, a group of loyal contributors founded the Katcr.co forum, aiming to restore the popular torrent site to its former glory. Many wondered if this was the end for Kicka...

The FBI just saved the Christmas. The U.S. Justice Department announced earlier today that the FBI has seized domains of 15 "DDoS-for-hire" websites and charged three individuals running some of these services. DDoS-for-hire , or "Booter" or "Stresser," services rent out access to a network of infected devices, which then can be used by anyone, even the least tech-savvy individual, to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against any website and disrupt its access. In recent years, multiple hacking groups ruined Christmas Day for millions of gamers by taking down PlayStation, Xbox networks and other gaming servers using massive DDoS attacks. "Booter services such as those named in this action allegedly cause attacks on a wide array of victims in the United States and abroad, including financial institutions, universities, internet service providers, government systems, and various gaming platforms," the DoJ said. ...