The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Source for Cybersecurity News — Index Page

If you receive a mail masquerading as a company's invoice and containing a Microsoft Word file, think twice before clicking on it. Doing so could cripple your system and could lead to a catastrophic destruction. Hackers are believed to be carrying out social engineering hoaxes by adopting eye-catching subjects in the spam emails and compromised websites to lure the victims into installing a deadly ransomware, dubbed " Locky ," into their systems. So if you find .locky extension files on your network shares, Congratulations! You are infected and left with just two solutions: Rebuild your PC from scratch or Pay the ransom. Locky ransomware is spreading at the rate of 4000 new infections per hour , which means approximately 100,000 new infections per day . Microsoft MACROS are Back It is hard to digest the fact that, in this 2016, even a single MS Word document could compromise your system by enabling ' Macros .' This is where the poin...

If you are using a SimpliSafe wireless home alarm system to improve your home security smartly, just throw it up and buy a new one. It is useless. The so-called 'Smart' Technology, which is designed to make your Home Safer, is actually opening your house doors for hackers. The latest in this field is SimpliSafe Alarm . SimpliSafe wireless home alarm systems – used by more than 300,000 customers in the United States – are Hell Easy to Hack , allowing an attacker to easily gain full access to the alarm and disable the security system, facilitating unauthorized intrusions and thefts. …and the most interesting reality is: You Can Not Patch it! As the Internet of Things (IoT) is growing at a great pace, it continues to widen the attack surface at the same time. Just last month, a similar hack was discovered in Ring – a Smart doorbell that connects to the user's home WiFi network – that allowed researchers to hack WiFi password of the home user. How ...

Ransomware has seriously turned on to a noxious game of Hackers to get paid effortlessly. Once again the heat was felt by the Los Angeles-based Presbyterian Medical Center when a group of hackers had sealed all its sensitive files and demanded $17,000 USD to regain the access to those compromised data. The devastation of the compromised files can be pitched as: Compromised emails Lockout Electronic Medical Record System [EMR] Encrypted patient data Unable to carry CT Scans of the admitted patients Ferried risky patients to nearby hospitals ...and much more unexplained outcomes. The hospital had confirmed that the Ransomware malware had hit its core heart a week before, potentially affecting the situation to grow much worse. Hospital End up Paying $17,000 As the situation was grown out of wild, the hospital paid 40 Bitcoins (Roughly US $17,000) to the Ransomware Criminals to resume their medical operations after gaining the decryption keys. "T...

In the escalating battle between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Apple over iPhone encryption, former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden and Google chief executive Sundar Pichai just sided with Apple's refusal to unlock iPhone . Yesterday, Apple CEO Tim Cook refused to comply with a federal court order to help the FBI unlock an iPhone owned by one of the terrorists in the mass shootings in San Bernardino , California, in December. Here's What the FBI is Demanding: The federal officials have asked Apple to make a less secure version of its iOS that can be used by the officials to brute force the 4-6 digits passcode on the dead shooter's iPhone without getting the device's data self-destructed. Cook called the court order a "chilling" demand that "would undermine the very freedoms and liberty our government is meant to protect." He argued that to help the FBI unlock the iPhone would basically ...

Hijacking an online account is not a complicated procedure, not at least in 2016. Today, Instagram confirmed that the company is in the process to roll out two-factor authentication for its 400 Million users. It is impossible to make your online accounts hack-proof, but you can make them less vulnerable. Then what you can do to protect yourselves from hackers? Several companies provide more enhanced steps like Encrypted Channel Services, Security Questions, Strict Password Policy and so on. But, what would you do if a hacker had somehow managed to access your accounts’ passwords? Since the online accounts do not have an intelligent agent inbuilt to verify whether the person is the legit driver of the account; beyond a username and password match. Hence the concept of Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) born out! Jumbos like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon have already blended the 2FA feature with their services to tackle account hijacking. 2-F...

So what do you expect from an Artificially intelligent program run by the government intelligence agency? Possibly killing innocent people. The real-life SKYNET , the fictional malevolent artificial intelligence in the Terminator movies, run by the US National Security Agency (NSA) is a surveillance program that uses cell phone metadata to track the GPS location and call activities of suspected terrorists, who may be shot by a Hellfire missile. Now, a new analysis of previously published NSA documents leaked by former NSA staffer Edward Snowden suggests that many of those people killed based on metadata may have been innocent. Last year, the leaked documents detailing the NSA's SKYNET programme published by The Intercept showed that NSA had used a machine learning algorithm on the cellular network metadata of 55 Million people in Pakistan to rate each citizen's likelihood of being a terrorist. You need to know that the US drone bombing campaigns in Pa...

The Tech Giant Apple has come into an entangled situation which could be a potential security threat for Apple users in near future: Help the FBI Unlock an iPhone . The US Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym has ordered Apple to provide a reasonable technical assistance in solving a critical case of Syed Farook ; who with his wife Tashfeen Malik planned a coordinated "2015 San Bernardino attack" that killed 14 people injured 22. As part of the investigation, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had seized the Farook's iPhone 5C that would be considered as an insufficient evidence until and unless the iPhone gets unlocked by any means. Previously, Apple had made several crystal clear statements about its Encryption Policy , stating that even the company is not able to decrypt any phone data as the private key lies at the user's end. A similar problem encountered three years back with Lavabit, who was forced to shut down its services soon after when F...