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You may have heard of hilarious Nigerian scams. My all time favourite is this one: A Nigerian astronaut has been trapped in space for the past 25 years and needs $3 million to get back to Earth, Can you help? Moreover, Nigerians are also good at promising true love and happiness. But You know, Love hurts. Those looking for true love and happiness lost tens of millions of dollars over the Nigerian dating and romance scams. These criminals spend their whole day trolling the online dating sites for contact emails and then send off hundreds of thousands of fraudulent emails awaiting the victim's response. A US federal district court in Mississippi has sentenced such three Nigerian scammers to a collective 235 years in prison for their roles in a large-scale international fraud network that duped people out of tens of millions of dollars. The three Nigerian nationals were part of a 21-member gang of cyber criminals, of which six, including Ayelotan, Raheem, and Mewase,...

Researchers have discovered a new attack, dubbed 'Cloak and Dagger', that works against all versions of Android, up to version 7.1.2. Cloak and Dagger attack allows hackers to silently take full control of your device and steal private data, including keystrokes, chats, device PIN, online account passwords, OTP passcode, and contacts. What's interesting about Cloak and Dagger attack? The attack doesn't exploit any vulnerability in Android ecosystem; instead, it abuses a pair of legitimate app permissions that is being widely used in popular applications to access certain features on an Android device. Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology have discovered this attack, who successfully performed it on 20 people and none of them were able to detect any malicious activity. Cloak and Dagger attacks utilise two basic Android permissions: SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW ("draw on top") BIND_ACCESSIBILITY_SERVICE ("a11y") The first permissi...

Brace yourselves for a possible 'second wave' of massive global cyber attack, as SMB ( Server Message Block) was not the only network protocol whose zero-day exploits created by NSA were exposed in the Shadow Brokers dump last month. Although Microsoft released patches for SMB flaws for supported versions in March and unsupported versions immediately after the outbreak of the WannaCry ransomware, the company ignored to patch other three NSA hacking tools, dubbed " EnglishmanDentist ," " EsteemAudit ," and " ExplodingCan ." It has been almost two weeks since WannaCry ransomware began to spread, which infected nearly 300,000 computers in more than 150 countries within just 72 hours, though now it has been slowed down. For those unaware, WannaCry exploited a Windows zero-day SMB bug that allowed remote hackers to hijack PCs running on unpatched Windows OS and then spread itself to other unpatched systems using its wormable capability. ...

SaaS Adoption is Skyrocketing, Resilience Hasn't Kept Pace SaaS platforms have revolutionized how businesses operate. They simplify collaboration, accelerate deployment, and reduce the overhead of managing infrastructure. But with their rise comes a subtle, dangerous assumption: that the convenience of SaaS extends to resilience. It doesn't. These platforms weren't built with full-scale data protection in mind . Most follow a shared responsibility model — wherein the provider ensures uptime and application security, but the data inside is your responsibility. In a world of hybrid architectures, global teams, and relentless cyber threats, that responsibility is harder than ever to manage. Modern organizations are being stretched across: Hybrid and multi-cloud environments with decentralized data sprawl Complex integration layers between IaaS, SaaS, and legacy systems Expanding regulatory pressure with steeper penalties for noncompliance Escalating ransomware threats and inside...

A 7-year-old critical remote code execution vulnerability has been discovered in Samba networking software that could allow a remote attacker to take control of an affected Linux and Unix machines. Samba is open-source software (re-implementation of SMB networking protocol) that runs on the majority of operating systems available today, including Windows, Linux, UNIX, IBM System 390, and OpenVMS. Samba allows non-Windows operating systems, like GNU/Linux or Mac OS X, to share network shared folders, files, and printers with Windows operating system. The newly discovered remote code execution vulnerability ( CVE-2017-7494 ) affects all versions newer than Samba 3.5.0 that was released on March 1, 2010. "All versions of Samba from 3.5.0 onwards are vulnerable to a remote code execution vulnerability, allowing a malicious client to upload a shared library to a writable share, and then cause the server to load and execute it," Samba wrote in an advisory published Wed...

China is very strict about censorship, which is why the country has become very paranoid when it comes to adopting foreign technologies. The country banned Microsoft's Windows operating system on government computers in 2014 amid concerns about security and US surveillance. Even in the wake of that, China had been pushing its custom version of Windows XP and its forked version of Ubuntu Linux . To deal with this issue and target the world's largest market, Microsoft's CEO for the Greater China region last year confirmed that the company was working on a Chinese version of Windows 10 that included "more management and security controls" and less bloatware. Now, Microsoft has just announced a new version of its Windows 10, which is now ready for Chinese government agencies to use. In its event in Shanghai on Tuesday, Microsoft announced Windows 10 China Government Edition specifically designed for the Chinese government.The OS is based on Windows 1...

Samsung recently launched its new flagship smartphones, the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus, with both Facial and IRIS Recognition features, making it easier for users to unlock their smartphone and signing into websites. We already knew that the Galaxy S8's facial unlock feature could be easily fooled with just a simple photograph of the device owner, but now hackers have also discovered a simple way to bypass the iris-based authentication, which Samsung wants you to think is unbeatable. All it took for German hacking group Chaos Computer Club (CCC) to break the Galaxy S8's iris-recognition system was nothing but a camera, a printer, and a contact lens. The white hat hacking group also published a video showing how to defeat Samsung's iris scanner. Video Demonstration — Bypassing Iris Scanner The process was very simple. The CCC group simply used the night mode setting on a Sony digital camera to capture a medium range photo of their subject. Since the iris...

Do you watch movies with subtitles? Just last night, I wanted to watch a French movie, so I searched for English subtitles and downloaded it to my computer. Though that film was excellent, this morning a new research from Checkpoint scared me. I was unaware that a little subtitle file could hand over full control of my computer to hackers, while I was enjoying the movie. Yes, you heard that right. A team of researchers at Check Point has discovered vulnerabilities in four of the most popular media player applications, which can be exploited by hackers to hijack " any type of device via vulnerabilities; whether it is a PC, a smart TV, or a mobile device " with malicious codes inserted into the subtitle files. " We have now discovered malicious subtitles could be created and delivered to millions of devices automatically, bypassing security software and giving the attacker full control of the infected device and the data it holds, " he added. These ...

The Russian Interior Ministry announced on Monday the arrest of 20 individuals from a major cybercriminal gang that had stolen nearly $900,000 from bank accounts after infecting over one million Android smartphones with a mobile Trojan called "CronBot." Russian Interior Ministry representative Rina Wolf said the arrests were part of a joint effort with Russian IT security firm Group-IB that assisted the massive investigation. The collaboration resulted in the arrest of 16 members of the Cron group in November 2016, while the last active members were apprehended in April 2017, all living in the Russian regions of Ivanovo, Moscow, Rostov, Chelyabinsk, and Yaroslavl and the Republic of Mari El. Targeted Over 1 Million Phones — How They Did It? Group-IB first learned of the Cron malware gang in March 2015, when the criminal gang was distributing the Cron Bot malware disguised as Viber and Google Play apps. The Cron malware gang abused the popularity of SMS-banking ...

After the discovery of a critical vulnerability that could have allowed hackers to view private Yahoo Mail images, Yahoo retired the image-processing library ImageMagick. ImageMagick is an open-source image processing library that lets users resize, scale, crop, watermarking and tweak images. The tool is supported by PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl, C++, and many other programming languages. This popular image-processing library made headline last year with the discovery of the then-zero-day vulnerability, dubbed ImageTragick , which allowed hackers to execute malicious code on a Web server by uploading a maliciously-crafted image. Now, just last week, security researcher Chris Evans demonstrated an 18-byte exploit to the public that could be used to cause Yahoo servers to leak other users' private Yahoo! Mail image attachments. 'Yahoobleed' Bug Leaks Images From Server Memory The exploit abuses a security vulnerability in the ImageMagick library, which Evans dubbed...