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Cybersecurity researchers claim to have discovered a previously undocumented backdoor specifically designed for Microsoft SQL servers that could allow a remote attacker to control an already compromised system stealthily. Dubbed Skip-2.0 , the backdoor malware is a post-exploitation tool that runs in the memory and lets remote attackers connect to any account on the server running MSSQL version 11 and version 12 by using a "magic password." What's more? The malware manages to remain undetected on the victim's MSSQL Server by disabling the compromised machine's logging functions, event publishing, and audit mechanisms every time the "magic password" is used. With these capabilities, an attacker can stealthily copy, modify, or delete the content stored in a database, the impact of which varies from application to application integrated with targeted servers. "This could be used, for example, to manipulate in-game currencies for financial gai...

NordVPN, one of the most popular and widely used VPN services out there, yesterday disclosed details of a security incident that apparently compromised one of its thousands of servers based in Finland. Earlier this week, a security researcher on Twitter disclosed that "NordVPN was compromised at some point," alleging that unknown attackers stole private encryption keys used to protect VPN users traffic routed through the compromised server. In response to this, NordVPN published a blog post detailing about the security incident, and here we have summarized the whole incident for our readers to let you quickly understand what exactly happened, what's at stake, and what you should do next. Some of the information mentioned below also contains information The Hacker News obtained via an email interview with NordVPN. What has been compromised? — NordVPN has thousands of servers across the world hosted with third-party data centers. One such server hosted with a ...

Fair elections are the lifelines of democracy, but in recent years election hacking has become a hot topic worldwide. Whether it's American voting machines during the 2016 presidential election or India's EVMs during 2014 general elections, the integrity, transparency, and security of electronic voting machines remained questionable, leaving a wound in the minds of many that is difficult to heal. Many countries, including the largest democracy in the world i.e., India, believe the best way to ensure the security of EVMs is to make its technology opaque to bad actors, but in recent years a large section of the population is losing trust in any system that has been certified by a closed group of experts only. To make a balance between transparency and security, in May 2019, Microsoft released a free, open-source software development kit (SDK) called ElectionGuard that aims to enable end-to-end verification of voting. Microsoft's ElectionGuard SDK can be integra...

After enabling ' Site Isolation ' security feature in Chrome for desktops last year, Google has now finally introduced 'the extra line of defence' for Android smartphone users surfing the Internet over the Chrome web browser. In brief, Site Isolation is a security feature that adds an additional boundary between websites by ensuring that pages from different sites end up in different sandboxed processes in the browser. Since each site in the browser gets its own isolated process, in case of a browser flaw or Spectre like side-channel vulnerability, the feature makes it harder for attackers or malicious websites to access or steal cross-site data of your accounts on other websites. Site Isolation helps protect many types of sensitive data, including authentication cookies, stored passwords, network data, stored permissions, as well as cross-origin messaging that help sites securely pass messages across domains. The feature gained attention in January 2018, ...

The United States Department of Justice said today that they had arrested hundreds of criminals in a global crackdown after taking down the largest known child porn site on the dark web and tracing payments made in bitcoins. With an international coalition of law enforcement agencies, federal officials have arrested the administrator of the child sexual abuse site, 23-year-old Jong Woo Son of South Korea, along with 337 suspects who have been charged for allegedly using the site. The site in question is "Welcome to Video," which operated from June 2015 until March 2018 and hosted over 250,000 sexual exploitation videos of children, toddlers, and infants, which comprised of roughly over 8TB of data. According to a press release published by DoJ, the Welcome to Video site hosted more than 250,000 unique videos, and almost 45 percent of the videos contain new images that have not been previously known to exist. The operation also resulted in the rescue of at least 23...

Humankind had come a long way from the time when the Internet became mainstream. What started as a research project ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) funded by DARPA has grown exponentially and has single-handedly revolutionized human behavior. When WWW (world wide web) came into existence, it was meant to share information over the Internet, from there part through natural evolution and part through webonomics driving innovations, Internet & www has metamorphosized into the lifeblood of the world. It is hard to imagine now how the world functioned before the time of the Internet. It has touched each aspect of human life and is now critical for day to day existence. No business today can exist without an online presence. It is no more just a medium to share information, but world economics runs over the web nowadays. Organizations, governments, and people all depend on this. New warfares will not happen in the real world but would be fought over the cyber...

A decade-old botnet malware that currently controls over 450,000 computers worldwide has recently shifted its operations from infecting machines with ransomware or crypto miners to abusing them for sending out sextortion emails to millions of innocent people. Extortion by email is growing significantly, with a large number of users recently complaining about receiving sextortion emails that attempt to extort money from individuals by blackmailing them into exposing their sexual content. Though until now, it wasn't clear how scammers were sending such massive amounts of emails without getting blacklisted by the email providers, security researchers from CheckPoint finally found the missing block in this puzzle. In its latest report shared with The Hacker News prior to the release, Tel Aviv-based security firm CheckPoint reveals that a botnet, called Phorpiex , has recently been updated to include a spam bot designed to use compromised computers as proxies to send out over 3...