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

Do you or someone you know lives in Egypt and holds an account on Facebook, Twitter, or/and other social media platforms with more than 5000 followers? If yes, your account can be censored, suspended and is subject to prosecution for promoting or spreading the fake news through social media platforms. On July 16, the Egyptian parliament approved a new law that classifies a personal social media account, blog or website with more than 5,000 followers as media outlets, allowing the state to block social media accounts and penalize journalists for publishing fake news. Social media networks are no doubt a quick and powerful way to share information and ideas, but not everything shared on Facebook or Twitter is true. Fake news is all around us, and every country is finding its own new ways to tackle this issue. Over the past the year, fake news or misinformation has emerged as a primary issue on social media platforms, seeking to influence millions of people with wrong propaga...

A lot of new online services are cropping up every day, making our life a lot easier. But it is always harder for users to switch to another product or service, which they think is better because the process usually involves downloading everything from one service and then re-uploading it all again to another. Thanks to GDPR—stands for General Data Protection Regulation, a legal regulation by European Union that sets guidelines for the collection and processing of users' personal information by companies—many online services have started providing tools that allow their users to download their data in just one click. But that doesn't completely simplify and streamline the process of securely transferring your data around services. To make this easier for users, four big tech companies— Google , Facebook , Microsoft , and Twitter —have teamed up to launch a new open-source, service-to-service data portability platform, called the Data Transfer Project . What is Dat...

After protecting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for almost six years, Ecuador is now planning to withdraw its political asylum, probably next week, and eject him from its London embassy—eventually would turn him over to the British authorities. Lenín Moreno, the newly-elected President of Ecuador, has arrived in London this Friday to give a speech at Global Disability Summit on 24 July 2018. However, media reports suggest the actual purpose of the President's visit is to finalize a deal with UK government to withdraw its asylum protection of Assange. According to RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan and the Intercept 's Glenn Greenwald, multiple sources close to the Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry and the President's office have confirmed that Julian Assange will be handed over to Britain in the coming weeks or even days. Julian Assange, 47, has been living in Ecuador's London embassy since June 2012, when he was granted asylum by the Ecuador government after a B...

Microsoft's love for Linux continues… Microsoft has released its command-line shell and scripting language PowerShell Core for Linux operating system as a Snap package, making it easier for Linux users to install Microsoft PowerShell on their system. Yes, you heard me right. Microsoft has made PowerShell Core available to the Ubuntu Snap Store as a Snap application. PowerShell Core is a cross-platform version of Windows PowerShell that is already available for Windows, macOS, and Linux OS and has been designed for sysadmins who manage assets in hybrid clouds and heterogeneous environments. Snap is a universal Linux packaging system, built by Canonical for the Ubuntu operating system, which makes an application compatible for all major Linux distributions without requiring any modification. A Snap package is basically an application compressed together with its dependencies and also includes instructions on how to run and interact with other software on various Linu...

Singapore's largest healthcare group, SingHealth, has suffered a massive data breach that allowed hackers to snatch personal information on 1.5 million patients who visited SingHealth clinics between May 2015 and July 2018. SingHealth is the largest healthcare group in Singapore with 2 tertiary hospitals, 5 national specialty , and eight polyclinics. According to an advisory released by Singapore's Ministry of Health (MOH), along with the personal data, hackers also managed to stole 'information on the outpatient dispensed medicines' of about 160,000 patients, including Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, and few ministers. "On 4 July 2018, IHiS' database administrators detected unusual activity on one of SingHealth's IT databases. They acted immediately to halt the activity," MOH said. The stolen data includes the patient's name, address, gender, race, date of birth, and National Registration Identity Card (NRIC) numbers. Th...

Microsoft said it detected and helped the US government to block Russian hacking attempts against at least three congressional candidates this year, a Microsoft executive revealed speaking at the Aspen Security Forum today. Although the company refused to name the targets but said, the three candidates were "people who, because of their positions, might have been interesting targets from an espionage standpoint as well as an election disruption standpoint." According to the company, the Russian hackers targeted the candidates' staffers with phishing attacks, redirecting them to a fake Microsoft website, in an attempt to steal their credentials. "Earlier this year, we did discover that a fake Microsoft domain had been established as the landing page for phishing attacks," said Tom Burt, Microsoft's vice president for customer security. "And we saw metadata that suggested those phishing attacks were being directed at three candidates who are all sta...

Believe it or not, but any computer connected to the Internet is vulnerable to cyber attacks. With more money at risk and data breaches at a rise, more certified cybersecurity experts and professionals are needed by every corporate and organisation to prevent themselves from hackers and cyber thieves. That's why jobs in the cybersecurity field have gone up 80% over the past three years than any other IT-related job. So, this is the right time for you to consider a new career as a cybersecurity professional. Cybersecurity experts with industry-standard certification are coming from a wide range of backgrounds, who prepare themselves to protect computer systems and networks from viruses and hackers. But before getting started your career as a cybersecurity expert, it's important to understand basics of networks and how data moves from place to place, and for this, you are highly advised to gain some valuable cyber security certifications. Cybersecurity certification...