Search results for Security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

It has been few weeks since the details of the Spectre, and Meltdown processor vulnerabilities came out in public and researchers have discovered more than 130 malware samples trying to exploit these chip flaws. Spectre and Meltdown are security vulnerabilities disclosed by security researchers earlier this month in many processors from Intel, ARM and AMD used in modern PCs, servers and smartphones, among other devices. These CPU vulnerabilities could enable attackers to bypass memory isolation mechanisms and access everything, including memory allocated for the kernel containing sensitive data like passwords, encryption keys and other private information. Researchers from independent antivirus testing firm AV-TEST detected at least 139 malware samples, as of today, which are related to these CPU vulnerabilities, as shown in the growth graph. You can find SHA256 hashes for all malware samples here. Meanwhile, cybersecurity firm Fortinet also tracked and analyzed many m

Britain's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) today hit British Airways with a record fine of £183 million for failing to protect the personal information of around half a million of its customers during last year's security breach . British Airways, who describes itself as "The World's Favorite Airline," disclosed a breach last year that exposed personal details and credit-card numbers of up to 380,000 customers and lasted for more than two weeks. At the time, the company confirmed that customers who booked flights on its official website (ba.com) and British Airways mobile app between August 21 and September 5 had had their details stolen by attackers. The cyberattack was later attributed to the infamous Magecart threat actor, one of the most notorious hacking groups specialized in stealing credit card details from poorly-secured websites, especially online eCommerce platforms. Magecart hackers have been known for using digital credit card ski

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo

The Palestinian hacker ' Khalil Shreateh ', who broke into the Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook Timeline  to expose a security lapse will be awarded nearly $12,000 but not from Facebook, it will come from an online crowdsourced campaign. The hacker initially used Facebook's whitehat disclosure program, a service that rewards bug hunters for reporting vulnerabilities, to inform the company about the issue. Facebook refused to pay him for finding the bug since he used it to post on Mark Zuckerberg's wall, because Facebook had ignored his earlier warnings. The exploit allows users to post to other Facebook user's timeline while they are not in friend list. Marc Maiffret, CTO of BeyondTrust, has kicked off a crowd-sourced funding to come up with a reward for Khalil Shreateh, and the results have already been impressive. ' Khalil Shreateh found a vulnerability in Facebook.com and, due to miscommunication , was not awarded a bounty for his work,'

Google researchers on Thursday disclosed that it found a watering hole attack in late August exploiting a now-patched zero-day in macOS operating system and targeting Hong Kong websites related to a media outlet and a prominent pro-democracy labor and political group to deliver a never-before-seen backdoor on compromised machines. "Based on our findings, we believe this threat actor to be a well-resourced group, likely state backed, with access to their own software engineering team based on the quality of the payload code," Google Threat Analysis Group (TAG) researcher Erye Hernandez  said  in a report. Tracked as CVE-2021-30869 (CVSS score: 7.8), the security shortcoming concerns a type confusion vulnerability affecting the XNU kernel component that could cause a malicious application to execute arbitrary code with the highest privileges. Apple originally addressed the issue for macOS Big Sur devices as part of a security update shipped on February 1, only to follow

Now that the annual Pwn2Own hacking contest is around the corner, both Google and Mozilla are busy patching flaws in their respective browsers to appear competent in the contest. Both internet giants have reportedly updated their browsers for the contest that is due to take place next week at the CanSecWest Applied Security Conference. Google patched 19 flaws in its Chrome and rated 17 of them as "high" whereas the other three as "Medium". Mozilla followed Google's step and introduced patches for 10 flaws in its Firefox. It classified eight of the security flaws as "critical" whereas it rated others as "Moderate" and "High" respectively. Google rewarded the researchers who fixed the bugs with an attractive sum, the highest being $1,000. The patching was carried out in different areas including an integer overflow during the process of textarea handling. Google's URL bar spoof was also updated. The major flaw that was updated by Firefox consists of a bug that if activated by a corrupt

MITRE has released its annual list of the Top 25 "most dangerous software weaknesses" for the year 2023. "These weaknesses lead to serious vulnerabilities in software," the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)  said . "An attacker can often exploit these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system, steal data, or prevent applications from working." The  list  is based on an  analysis  of public vulnerability data in the National Vulnerability Data ( NVD ) for root cause mappings to CWE weaknesses for the previous two years. A total of 43,996 CVE entries were examined and a score was attached to each of them based on prevalence and severity. Coming out top is Out-of-bounds Write, followed by Cross-site Scripting, SQL Injection, Use After Free, OS Command Injection, Improper Input Validation, Out-of-bounds Read, Path Traversal, Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF), and Unrestricted Upload of File with Dangerous Type. Out-of

Just the way you swipe your smartphone screen is enough for your smartphone to identify you. Yes, it's a Fact, not Fiction! The United States National Security Agency (NSA) has a new technology that can identify you from the way your finger swipe strokes and text on a smartphone screen, according to officials with Lockheed Martin who helped design the technology. John Mears , a senior fellow for Lockheed IT and Security Solutions, told NextGov that Lockheed Martin has been working with the agency to create a " secure gesture authentication as a technique for using smartphones, " and " they are actually able to use it. " Mandrake – New Smartphone-Swipe Recognition Technology This new smartphone-swipe recognition technology, dubbed " Mandrake ," remotely analyses the curve, unique speed and acceleration of a person's finger strokes across their device's touchscreen. " Nobody else has the same strokes, " Mears ex

Google on Monday shipped security updates to address a high-severity zero-day vulnerability in its Chrome web browser that it said is being exploited in the wild. The shortcoming, tracked as  CVE-2022-2294 , relates to a heap overflow flaw in the  WebRTC  component that provides real-time audio and video communication capabilities in browsers without the need to install plugins or download native apps. Heap buffer overflows, also referred to as heap overrun or heap smashing, occur when data is overwritten in the  heap area of the memory , leading to arbitrary code execution or a denial-of-service (DoS) condition. "Heap-based overflows can be used to overwrite function pointers that may be living in memory, pointing it to the attacker's code," MITRE  explains . "When the consequence is arbitrary code execution, this can often be used to subvert any other security service." Credited with reporting the flaw on July 1, 2022, is Jan Vojtesek from the Avast Thre

Cybercriminals, including state-sponsored hackers, have started actively exploiting a newly discovered Microsoft Office vulnerability that Microsoft does not consider as a security issue and has already denied to patch it. Last month, we reported how hackers could leverage a built-in feature of Microsoft Office feature, called Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE), to perform code execution on the targeted device without requiring Macros enabled or memory corruption. DDE protocol is one of the several methods that Microsoft uses to allow two running applications to share the same data. The protocol is being used by thousands of apps, including MS Excel, MS Word, Quattro Pro, and Visual Basic for one-time data transfers and for continuous exchanges for sending updates to one another. Soon after the details of DDE attack went public , several reports emerged about various widespread attack campaigns abusing this technique in the wild to target several organisations with malware. Now,

The maintainers of OpenSSH have released OpenSSH 9.2 to address a number of security bugs, including a memory safety vulnerability in the OpenSSH server (sshd). Tracked as  CVE-2023-25136 , the shortcoming has been classified as a pre-authentication double free vulnerability that was introduced in version 9.1. "This is not believed to be exploitable, and it occurs in the unprivileged pre-auth process that is subject to chroot(2) and is further sandboxed on most major platforms," OpenSSH disclosed in its  release notes  on February 2, 2023. Credited with  reporting  the flaw to OpenSSH in July 2022 is security researcher Mantas Mikulenas. OpenSSH is the open source implementation of the secure shell ( SSH ) protocol that offers a suite of services for encrypted communications over an unsecured network in a client-server architecture. "The exposure occurs in the chunk of memory freed twice, the 'options.kex_algorithms,'" Saeed Abbasi, manager of vulnera

If you own a Samsung Galaxy Phone – S6, S6 Edge or Note 4 , in particular – there are chances that a skilled hacker could remotely intercept your voice calls to listen in and even record all your voice conversations. Two security researchers, Daniel Komaromy of San Francisco and Nico Golde of Berlin, have demonstrated exactly the same during a security conference in Tokyo. The duo demonstrated a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack on an out-of-the-box and most updated Samsung handset that allowed them to intercept voice calls by connecting the device to fake cellular base stations. The issue actually resides in the Samsung's baseband chip , which comes in Samsung handsets, that handles voice calls but is not directly accessible to the end user. How to Intercept Voice Calls? The researchers set up a bogus OpenBTS base station that nearby Samsung devices, including the latest Samsung S6 and S6 Edge , think is a legitimate cellular tower. Once connected to

The popular SSH client program PuTTY has released the latest version of its software that includes security patches for 8 high-severity security vulnerabilities. PuTTY is one of the most popular and widely used open-source client-side programs that allows users to remotely access computers over SSH, Telnet, and Rlogin network protocols. Almost 20 months after releasing the last version of its software, the developers of PuTTY earlier this week released the latest version 0.71 for Windows and Unix operating systems. According to an advisory available on its website, all previous versions of the PuTTY software have been found vulnerable to multiple security vulnerabilities that could allow a malicious server or a compromised server to hijack client's system in different ways. Here below I have listed all 8 vulnerabilities with brief information that PuTTY 0.71 has patched: 1) Authentication Prompt Spoofing — Since PuTTY doesn't have a way to indicate whether a piec

The  PlugX  remote access trojan has been observed masquerading as an open source Windows debugger tool called x64dbg in an attempt to circumvent security protections and gain control of a target system. "This file is a legitimate open-source debugger tool for Windows that is generally used to examine kernel-mode and user-mode code, crash dumps, or CPU registers," Trend Micro researchers Buddy Tancio, Jed Valderama, and Catherine Loveria  said  in a report published last week. PlugX, also known as  Korplug , is a post-exploitation  modular implant , which, among other things, is known for its multiple functionalities such as data exfiltration and its ability to use the compromised machine for nefarious purposes. Although first documented a decade ago in 2012, early samples of the malware date as far as February 2008, according to a  Trend Micro report  at the time. Over the years, PlugX has been used by threat actors with a Chinese nexus as well as cybercrime groups. On

Utah State computer systems are experiencing a massive cyber attack on up to 300 Million Hacking attempts per day due to National Security Agency's (NSA) data center in the state. Yes, 300,000,000 hacking attempts in a day! According to the statistical survey, it is evident that the computer systems in the US State of Utah began to experience the hacking attack a few years back, precisely, soon after the NSA revelations by global surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden. It is a less-known fact that the NSA has built its new data center near the city of Bluffdale, Utah. However, a couple of years back, when Snowden revealed the presence of the data center, the attacks have constantly been going on. The PRISM spying program by Big Brothers at NSA might have shifted the attention of hackers for the retaliation against mass-surveillance and flared up this heightened cyber attacks against the spying agency. According to Utah Commissioner of public safety, Keith S

Hyatt Hotels Corporation is notifying its customers that credit card numbers and other sensitive information may have been stolen after it found malware on the computers that process customer payments. "We recently identified malware on computers that operate the payment processing systems for Hyatt-managed locations," the company announced on Wednesday. "As soon as we discovered the activity, we launched an investigation and engaged leading third-party cyber security experts." What type of information? The company didn't confirm whether the attackers succeeded in stealing payment card numbers, neither it say how long its network was infected or how many hotel chains were affected in the malware attack. But as the payment processing system was infected with credit-card-stealing malware, there is a possibility that hackers may have stolen credit card numbers and other sensitive information. What happened? Hyatt spokeswoman Stephanie Sheppard

For as long as corporate IT has been in existence, users have been required to change their passwords periodically. In fact, the need for scheduled password changes may be one of the most long-standing of all IT best practices. Recently, however, things have started to change. Microsoft has reversed course on the best practices that it has had in place for decades and  no longer recommends that organizations require users to change passwords periodically . Organizations are being forced to consider, perhaps for the first time, whether or not requiring periodic password changes is a good idea. Microsoft password reset recommendations According to Microsoft, requiring users to change their passwords frequently does more harm than good.  Humans are notoriously resistant to change. When a user is forced to change their password, they will often come up with a new password that is based on their previous password. A user might, for example, append a number to the end of their password

If you have followed the startling revelations about the scope of the US government's surveillance efforts, you may have thought you were reading about the end of privacy, and about the Enemies of the Internet. " My computer was arrested before I was ." a perceptive comment by an internet activist who had been arrested by means of online surveillance.  Online surveillance is a growing danger for journalists, bloggers, citizen-journalists and human rights defenders. Over the last few years, law enforcement agencies have been pushing for unprecedented powers of surveillance and access to your private online communications. This week the PRISM surveillance scandal has consumed the Internet as the implications of massive scale U.S. Government spying begin to sink in. The US National Security Organization (NSA) is almost certainly one of (if not the) most technologically sophisticated, well-funded and secretive organizations in the world. The Prism initiative was launched by Na

Bangladesh is not the only bank that had become victim to the cyber heist . In fact, it appears to be just a part of the widespread cyber attack on global banking and financial sector by hackers who target the backbone of the world financial system, SWIFT. Yes, the global banking messaging system that thousands of banks and companies around the world use to transfer Billions of dollars in transfers each day is under attack. A third case involving SWIFT has emerged in which cyber criminals have stolen about $12 million from an Ecuadorian bank that contained numerous similarities of later attacks against Bangladesh's central bank that lost $81 Million in the cyber heist . The attack on Banco del Austro (BDA) in Ecuador occurred in January 2015 and, revealed via a lawsuit filed by BDA against Wells Fargo, a San Francisco-based bank on Jan. 28, Reuters reported. Here's how cyber criminals target banks: Uses malware to circumvent local security systems of a bank. Gains acces