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Texas-based Encrypted Email Service ' Lavabit ' abruptly shut down for reasons linked to National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden .  The Feds want to Lavabit demanding access to Ed Snowden's email. Lavabit refused! Snowden was using the Lavabit service while holed-up in the Moscow airport. Lavabit was a dedicated email service that offered subscribers " the freedom of running your own email server without the hassle or expense ." Lavabit was launched in 2004 and most recently handled service for upwards of 60,000 individuals at a rate of around 200,000 emails a day. The owner of Lavabit announced  " I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people, or walk away from nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit, " letter posted on the Lavabit website . " This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a str...

Pakistan Army site (pakistanarmy.gov.pk) and Three Facebook pages hacked by an Indian hacker 'Godzilla '. Hacker told ' The Hacker News ' that, using a CMS vulnerability they got access into the Pakistan army website using credentials i.e. Username: mag_admin password: #$%modern! .  Then they left a malicious PDF magazine document in their content management system of magazine portal for the Pakistan army, which was later clicked by the Administrator and that installed a piece of malware on the administrator’s computer. " For security they have taken down the login page of content management but failed to remove my backdoor " hacker told The Hacker News. Using an infected system of the Administrator, he has also gained unauthorized access to three Pakistan Army Facebook pages. Pakistan Army Official Facebook Page ( www.facebook.com/OfficialPakArmy ) Pakistan Army Officers Club Facebook Page ( www.facebook.com/fb.paoc ) Pakistan Army Fan Facebook Page...

Password theft has been a growing problem within the security community. Researchers at Arbor Networks have uncovered a botnet called Fort Disco that was used to compromise more than 6000 websites based on popular CMSs such as WordPress , Joomla and Datalife Engine. The Fort Disco botnet is currently made up of nearly 25,000 Windows machines and receives a list of sites to attack from a central command and control server. The bots receive also a list of common username-password combinations, typically composed of default combinations with password options including admin or 123456. Arbor Networks security researcher Matthew Bing said the attack has several advanced features that make it next to impossible to fully track and they obtained precious info on the botnet exploiting a misconfiguration on the attackers’ side that made possible the analysis of logs on several of the six command and control servers discovered. “ We stumbled upon these detailed logs the attack...

OpenX, a leading provider of digital and mobile advertising technology has accordingly served backdoors that are injected into the Code and allows hackers to control over your Web server. German tech site the Heise notified Germany's computer emergency response team (CERT) this week about the OpenX Ad Server (2.8.10) backdoor, allowing an attacker to execute any PHP code via the "eval" function  and could have provided attackers full access to their web sites. The OpenX team has confirmed the breach  and OpenX senior application security engineer Nick Soracco said that two files in the binary distribution of 2.8.10 had been replaced with modified files that contained a remote code execution vulnerability . The attack code is written in PHP but is hidden in a JavaScript file that is part of a video player plugin ( vastServeVideoPlayer ) in the OpenX distribution. This vulnerability only applies to the free downloadable open source pro...

Microsoft has warned that a vulnerability in Windows Phone operating systems could allow hackers to access your login credentials. The vulnerability resides in a Wi-Fi authentication scheme known as PEAP-MS-CHAPv2, which Windows Phones use to access wireless networks protected by version 2 of the Wi-Fi Protected Access protocol. Cryptographic weaknesses in the technology can allow attackers to gain access to users encrypted domain credentials. These credentials could potentially give the attackers access to sensitive corporate networks. The bulletin, advisory 2876146 , says: To exploit this issue, an attacker controlled system could pose as a known Wi-Fi access point, causing the targeted device to automatically attempt to authenticate with the access point, and in turn allowing the attacker to intercept the victim's encrypted domain credentials. An attacker could then exploit cryptographic weaknesses in the PEAP-MS-CHAPv2 protocol to obtain the victim's d...

Do you own an HP printer? If so, it may be vulnerable to Hackers. Multiple HP LaserJet Pro Printers are printer vulnerable to hackers according to a new advisory posted by the vendor, dubbed as  CVE-2013-4807  (SSRT101181). Researcher ' Micha Sajdak ' of Securitum.pl have found a security hole HP LaserJet printers that allows a remote hacker to extract the admin password in plain text, among other information like WiFi settings including the WPS PIN . The main issue is with some of the networked HP LaserJet printers, having hidden URLs hardcoded in the firmware, which can be accessed without authentication. The vulnerability could be exploited remotely to gain unauthorized access to data. For example : http://IP_ADDRESS/dev/save_restore.xml Where the password seems to be encrypted, but the value contains a hex representation of the admin password in plain text, i.e. 0x746573746f7765 = testowe. Also, If a printer is WiF...

A notorious Chinese hacker collective known as APT1 or Comment Crew, possibly linked to the Chinese Army, have been caught red handed breaking into a fake United States water control system i.e. known as a Honeypot . Kyle Wilhoit, a researcher with security company Trend Micro has just revealed the details at BlackHat Conference on Wednesday.  Hackers hacked a water control system for a US municipality back in December last year, but it was merely a decoy set up by Kyle Wilhoit using a Word document hiding malicious software to gain full access.  The honeypots directly mimicked the ICS/Scada devices used in many critical infrastructure power and water plants. Cloud software was used to create realistic Web-based login and configuration screens for local water plants seemingly based in Ireland, Russia, Singapore, China, Japan, Australia, Brazil, and the U.S. Researchers have been tracked back to the APT1 Group, which security company Mandiant has claime...