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

Google, the FBI, ad-fraud fighting company WhiteOps and a collection of cyber security companies worked together to shut down one of the largest and most sophisticated digital ad-fraud schemes that infected over 1.7 million computers to generate fake clicks used to defraud online advertisers for years and made tens of millions of dollars in revenue. Dubbed 3ve (pronounced "Eve"), the online ad-fraud campaign is believed to have been active since at least 2014, but its fraudulent activity grew last year, turning it into a large-scale business and earning their operators more than $30 million in profit. Meanwhile, the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) also unsealed Tuesday a 13-count indictment against 8 people from Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine who allegedly ran this massive online advertising scheme. The 3ve botnet scheme deployed different tactics, such as creating their own botnets, creating fake versions of both websites and visitors, selling fraudulent...

British and Dutch data protection regulators Tuesday hit the ride-sharing company Uber with a total fine of $1,170,892 (~ 1.1 million) for failing to protect its customers' personal information during a 2016 cyber attack involving millions of users. Late last year, Uber unveiled that the company had suffered a massive data breach in October 2016, exposing names, email addresses and phone numbers of 57 million Uber riders and drivers along with driving license numbers of around 600,000 drivers. Besides this, it was also reported that instead of disclosing the breach at the time, the company paid $100,000 in ransom to the two hackers with access to the stolen data in exchange for keeping the incident secret and deleting the information. Today Britain's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) fined Uber 385,000 pounds ($491,102), while the Dutch Data Protection Authority (Dutch DPA) levied a 600,000 euro ($679,790) penalty on Uber for failing to protect the personal informatio...

Cheetah Mobile —a prominent Chinese app company, known for its popular utility apps like Clean Master and Battery Doctor—and one of its subsidiary Kika Tech have allegedly been caught up in an Android ad fraud scheme that stole millions of dollars from advertisers. According to app analytics firm Kochava , 7 Android apps developed by Cheetah Mobile and 1 from Kika Tech with a total 2 billion downloads on Google Play Store have been accused of falsely claiming the credits for driving the installation of new apps in order to claim a fee or bounty. Many mobile application developers generate revenue by promoting and recommending the installation of other apps inside their apps for a fee or a bounty that typically ranges from $0.50 to $3.00. To know which advertisement recommended the app and should get the credit, the newly installed app does a "lookback" immediately after it is opened for the first time to see from where the last click was originated and attribute the ...

A widely used third-party NodeJS module with nearly 2 million downloads a week was compromised after one of its open-source contributor gone rogue, who infected it with a malicious code that was programmed to steal funds stored in Bitcoin wallet apps. The Node.js library in question is "Event-Stream," a toolkit that makes it easy for developers to create and work with streams, a collection of data in Node.js — just like arrays or strings. The malicious code detected earlier this week was added to Event-Stream version 3.3.6, published on September 9 via NPM repository , and had since been downloaded by nearly 8 million application programmers. Event-Stream module for Node.js was originally created by Dominic Tarr, who maintained the Event-Stream library for a long time, but handed over the development and maintenance of the project several months ago to an unknown programmer, called "right9ctrl." Apparently, right9ctrl gained Dominic's trust by making...

Looking for how to hack WiFi password OR WiFi hacking software? Well, a security researcher has revealed a new WiFi hacking technique that makes it easier for hackers to crack WiFi passwords of most modern routers. Discovered by the lead developer of the popular password-cracking tool Hashcat, Jens 'Atom' Steube, the new WiFi hack works explicitly against WPA/WPA2 wireless network protocols with Pairwise Master Key Identifier (PMKID)-based roaming features enabled. The attack to compromise the WPA/WPA2 enabled WiFi networks was accidentally discovered by Steube while he was analyzing the newly-launched WPA3 security standard . This new WiFi hacking method could potentially allow attackers to recover the Pre-shared Key (PSK) login passwords, allowing them to hack into your Wi-Fi network and eavesdrop on the Internet communications. How to Hack WiFi Password Using PMKID According to the researcher, the previously known WiFi hacking methods require attackers to wai...

The United States Postal Service has patched a critical security vulnerability that exposed the data of more than 60 million customers to anyone who has an account at the USPS.com website. The U.S.P.S. is an independent agency of the American federal government responsible for providing postal service in the United States and is one of the few government agencies explicitly authorized by the United States Constitution. The vulnerability is tied to an authentication weakness in an application programming interface (API) for the USPS "Informed Visibility" program designed to help business customers track mail in real-time. 60 Million USPS Users' Data Exposed According to the cybersecurity researcher, who has not disclosed his identity, the API was programmed to accept any number of "wildcard" search parameters, enabling anyone logged in to usps.com to query the system for account details belonging to any other user. In other words, the attacker could...

Earlier this week Dropbox team unveiled details of three critical vulnerabilities in Apple macOS operating system, which altogether could allow a remote attacker to execute malicious code on a targeted Mac computer just by convincing a victim into visiting a malicious web page. The reported vulnerabilities were originally discovered by Syndis , a cybersecurity firm hired by Dropbox to conduct simulated penetration testing attacks as Red Team on the company's IT infrastructure, including Apple software used by Dropbox . The vulnerabilities were discovered and disclosed to Apple security team in February this year, which were then patched by Apple just over one month later with the release of its  March security updates . DropBox applauded Apple for its quick response to its bug report. According to DropBox, the vulnerabilities discovered by Syndis didn't just affect its macOS fleet, but also affected all Safari users running the latest version of the web browser and op...