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Google today announced a new initiative—called Privacy Sandbox —in an attempt to develop a set of open standards that fundamentally enhances privacy on the web while continuing to support a free, open and democratic Internet through digital advertisements. A lot of websites on the Internet today, including The Hacker News, rely on online advertisements as their primary source of funding to operate and keep their professionally created content open and freely accessible to everyone. However, with the evolution of online advertising, the targeted advertisement technologies have become too much invasive because of involved intrusive practices and more prudent approaches to accurately curate users' personal information, thereby raising serious privacy concerns among Internet users. In its latest blog post , Google acknowledged that ad tracking is "now being used far beyond its original design intent," but also highlights that unplanned attempts to address privacy con...

In a move to protect its users based in Kazakhstan from government surveillance, Google, Apple and Mozilla finally today came forward and blocked Kazakhstan's government-issued root CA certificate within their respective web browsing software. Starting today, Chrome, Safari and Firefox users in Kazakhstan will see an error message stating that the " Qaznet Trust Network " certificate should not be trusted when attempting to access a website that responds with the government-issued certificate. As The Hacker News reported last month , all major Kazakh Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are forcing their customers into installing a government-issued root certificate on their devices in order to regain access to their Internet services. The root certificate in question, labeled as " trusted certificate " or "national security certificate," if installed, allows ISPs to intercept, monitor, and decrypt users' encrypted HTTPS and TLS connections, ...

Silence APT , a Russian-speaking cybercriminal group, known for targeting financial organizations primarily in former Soviet states and neighboring countries is now aggressively targeting banks in more than 30 countries across America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Active since at least September 2016, Silence APT group's most recent successful campaign was against Bangladesh-based Dutch-Bangla Bank, which lost over $3 million during a string of ATM cash withdrawals over a span of several days. According to a new report Singapore-based cybersecurity firm Group-IB shared with The Hacker News, the hacking group has significantly expanded their geography in recent months, increased the frequency of their attack campaigns, as well as enhanced its arsenal. The report also describes the evolution of the Silence hacking group from "young and highly motivated hackers" to one of the most sophisticated advanced persistent threat (APT) group that is now posing threats to bank...

Well, here we have great news for Facebook users, which is otherwise terrible for marketers and publishers whose businesses rely on Facebook advertisement for re-targeted conversations. Following the Cambridge Analytica scandal , Facebook has taken several privacy measures in the past one year with an aim to give its users more control over their data and transparency about how the social media giant and other apps on its platform use that data. Now in its new effort, Facebook has launched a new privacy feature that allows its users to control data that the social media platform receives from other apps and websites about their online activity. Dubbed " Off-Facebook Activity ," the feature was initially announced by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg last year as "Clear History," allowing users to clear the data that third-party websites and apps share with Facebook. "Off-Facebook Activity lets you see a summary of the apps and websites that send us infor...

A fully functional jailbreak has been released for the latest iOS 12.4 on the Internet, making it the first public jailbreak in a long time—thanks to Apple. Dubbed " unc0ver 3.5.0 ," the jailbreak works with the updated iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches by leveraging a vulnerability that Apple previously patched in iOS 12.3 but accidentally reintroduced in the latest iOS version 12.4. Jailbreaking an iPhone allows you to install apps and other functions that are usually not approved by Apple, but it also disables some system protections that Apple put in place to protect its users, opening you up to potential attacks. Usually, iPhone Jailbreaks are sold for millions of dollars by exploit brokers, but if you want to jailbreak your Apple device, you can do it for free. An anonymous researcher who goes by the online alias "Pwn20wnd" has released a free jailbreak for iOS 12.4 on GitHub that exploits a use-after-free vulnerability in iOS kernel responsibly repor...

Managing a WordPress website can sap a lot of your time and energy, which otherwise you'd spend on managing your business. If you're looking to cut down on the hours, you spend troubleshooting WordPress technical and security problems, better managing and monitoring your website and users, or your customers, you need a WordPress activity log plugin . This post explains how to use the WP Security Audit Log plugin to keep a WordPress security audit log (aka activity log). It also highlights five ways an activity log helps you better manage your website and users and improve its security. WordPress Security Audit Logs - Introduction and Benefits An activity log is a record of everything that happens on your WordPress website. This includes a record of plugins, themes, and WordPress core changes, users activity (such as content changes), site settings changes, break-in attempts, WooCommerce store, and product changes, and everything else that happens on your website. WordP...

Following the public disclosure of a critical zero-day vulnerability in Webmin last week, the project's maintainers today revealed that the flaw was not actually the result of a coding mistake made by the programmers. Instead, it was secretly planted by an unknown hacker who successfully managed to inject a backdoor at some point in its build infrastructure—that surprisingly persisted into various releases of Webmin (1.882 through 1.921) and eventually remained hidden for over a year. With over 3 million downloads per year, Webmin is one of the world's most popular open-source web-based applications for managing Unix-based systems, such as Linux, FreeBSD, or OpenBSD servers. Webmin offers a simple user interface (UI) to manage users and groups, databases, BIND, Apache, Postfix, Sendmail, QMail, backups, firewalls, monitoring and alerts, and much more. The story started when Turkish researcher Özkan Mustafa Akkuş publicly presented a zero-day remote code execution vul...