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Security researchers have developed a more practical and feasible attack technique against the RC4 cryptographic algorithm that is still widely used to encrypt communications on the Internet. Despite being very old, RC4 (Rivest Cipher 4) is still the most widely used cryptographic cipher implemented in many popular protocols, including: SSL (Secure Socket Layer) TLS (Transport Layer Security) WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) Microsoft’s RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) BitTorrent and many more However, weaknesses in the algorithm have been found over the years, indicating that the RC4 needs to be wiped from the Internet. But, yet about 50% of all TLS traffic is currently protected using the RC4 encryption algorithm. Now, the situation got even worse, when two Belgian security researchers demonstrated a more practical attack against RC4, allowing an attacker to subsequently expose encrypted information in a much shorter amount of time t...

Researchers have disclosed significant security weaknesses in popular antivirus software applications that could be abused to deactivate their protections and take control of allow-listed applications to perform nefarious operations on behalf of the malware to defeat anti-ransomware defenses. The twin attacks,  detailed  by academics from the University of Luxembourg and the University of London, are aimed at circumventing the protected folder feature offered by antivirus programs to encrypt files (aka "Cut-and-Mouse") and disabling their real-time protection by simulating mouse "click" events (aka "Ghost Control"). "Antivirus software providers always offer high levels of security, and they are an essential element in the everyday struggle against criminals,"  said  Prof. Gabriele Lenzini, chief scientist at the Interdisciplinary Center for Security, Reliability, and Trust at the University of Luxembourg. "But they are competing with cri...

A new deadly security vulnerability has been discovered in OpenSSL that affects more than 11 Million modern websites and e-mail services protected by an ancient, long deprecated transport layer security protocol, Secure Sockets Layer (SSLv2). Dubbed DROWN , the highly critical security hole in OpenSSL was disclosed today as a low-cost attack that could decrypt your sensitive, secure HTTPS communications, including passwords and credit card details… ...and that too in a matter of hours or in some cases almost immediately, a team of 15 security researchers from various universities and the infosec community warned Tuesday. Here’s what the security researchers said: "We've been able to execute the attack against OpenSSL versions that are vulnerable to CVE-2016-0703 in under a minute using a single PC. Even for servers that do not have these particular bugs, the general variant of the attack, which works against any SSLv2 server, can be conducted in under 8 hour...

Yes, you only need a single laptop with a decent internet connection, rather a massive botnet, to launch overwhelming denial of service (DoS) attacks in order to bring down major Internet servers and modern-day firewalls. Researchers at TDC Security Operations Center have discovered a new attack technique that lone attackers with limited resources (in this case, a laptop and at least 15Mbps of bandwidth) can use to knock large servers offline. Dubbed a BlackNurse attack or the low-rate " Ping of Death " attack, the technique can be used to launch several low-volume DoS attacks by sending specially formed Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) packets, or 'pings' that overwhelm the processors on server protected by firewalls from Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, among others. ICMP is a protocol used by routers and other networking devices to send and receive error messages. According to a technical report [ PDF ] published this week, the BlackNurse attack is mo...

Do you think your wireless network is secure because you're using WPA2 encryption? If yes, think again! Security researchers have discovered several key management vulnerabilities in the core of Wi-Fi Protected Access II (WPA2) protocol that could allow an attacker to hack into your Wi-Fi network and eavesdrop on the Internet communications. WPA2 is a 13-year-old WiFi authentication scheme widely used to secure WiFi connections, but the standard has been compromised, impacting almost all Wi-Fi devices—including in our homes and businesses, along with the networking companies that build them. Dubbed KRACK — Key Reinstallation Attack —the proof-of-concept attack demonstrated by a team of researchers works against all modern protected Wi-Fi networks and can be abused to steal sensitive information like credit card numbers, passwords, chat messages, emails, and photos. Since the weaknesses reside in the Wi-Fi standard itself, and not in the implementations or any individua...

A group of academics from KU Leuven and the University of Birmingham has demonstrated a new vulnerability called Battering RAM to bypass the latest defenses on Intel and AMD cloud processors. "We built a simple, $50 interposer that sits quietly in the memory path, behaving transparently during startup and passing all trust checks," researchers Jesse De Meulemeester, David Oswald, Ingrid Verbauwhede, and Jo Van Bulck said on a website publicizing the findings. "Later, with just a flip of a switch, our interposer turns malicious and silently redirects protected addresses to attacker-controlled locations, allowing corruption or replay of encrypted memory." Battering RAM compromises Intel's Software Guard Extensions ( SGX ) and AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization with Secure Nested Paging ( SEV-SNP ) hardware security features, which ensure that customer data remains encrypted in memory and protected during use. It affects all systems using DDR4 memory...

Minecraft, with over 500 million registered users and 166 million monthly players, faces significant risks from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, threatening server functionality, player experience, and the game’s reputation. Despite the prevalence of DDoS attacks on the game, the majority of incidents go unreported, leaving a gap in awareness and protection. This article explains what happens to a Minecraft server during a DDoS attack and how to protect against such attacks. For an in-depth version of the article,  check out this white paper . When Creepers Breach: What Happens When an Attack Is Successful When a Minecraft server is hit with a DDoS attack, players may have problems with logging in to servers, loading worlds, navigating biomes, using tools, and chatting. They can also experience general lags, disconnections, timeouts, or server crashes. These in-game disruptions can ruin the gaming experience for players while causing financial and reputational losse...

DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks are making headlines almost every day.  2021 saw a 434%  upsurge in DDoS attacks, 5.5 times higher than 2020.  Q3 2021 saw a 24%  increase in the number of DDoS attacks in comparison to Q3 2020.  Advanced DDoS attacks that are typically targeted, known as smart attacks, rose by 31% in the same period. Further,  73% of DDoS attacks  in Q3 2021 were multi-vector attacks that combined multiple techniques to attack the targeted systems. The largest percentage of DDoS targets (40.8%) was in the US Banks, and financial institutions were the biggest DDoS and DoS attack targets in the past couple of years.  Does this mean businesses and organizations that aren’t in the banking and financial services sector are safe from  DDoS attacks ? Most definitely not! Every business is a potential DDoS target. Read on to know why and what measures to take to keep your business effectively protected.  Common D...

A team of cybersecurity researchers demonstrated a novel yet another technique to hijack Intel SGX, a hardware-isolated trusted space on modern Intel CPUs that encrypts extremely sensitive data to shield it from attackers even when a system gets compromised. Dubbed Plundervolt and tracked as CVE-2019-11157, the attack relies on the fact that modern processors allow frequency and voltage to be adjusted when needed, which, according to researchers, can be modified in a controlled way to induce errors in the memory by flipping bits. Bit flip is a phenomenon widely known for the Rowhammer attack wherein attackers hijack vulnerable memory cells by changing their value from 1 to a 0, or vice versa—all by tweaking the electrical charge of neighboring memory cells. However, since the Software Guard Extensions (SGX) enclave memory is encrypted, the Plundervolt attack leverages the same idea of flipping bits by injecting faults in the CPU before they are written to the memory. Plundervo...

🔥 Breaking — It has been close to just one year since the launch of next-generation Wi-Fi security standard WPA3 and researchers have unveiled several serious vulnerabilities in the wireless security protocol that could allow attackers to recover the password of the Wi-Fi network. WPA, or Wi-Fi Protected Access, is a standard designed to authenticate wireless devices using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) protocol and is intended to prevent hackers from eavesdropping on your wireless data. The Wi-Fi Protected Access III (WPA3) protocol was launched in an attempt to address technical shortcomings of the WPA2 protocol from the ground, which has long been considered to be insecure and found vulnerable to KRACK (Key Reinstallation Attack). Though WPA3 relies on a more secure handshake, known as Dragonfly , that aims to protect Wi-Fi networks against offline dictionary attacks, security researchers Mathy Vanhoef and Eyal Ronen found weaknesses in the early implementa...

Ukraine's biggest telecom operator Kyivstar has  become  the victim of a " powerful hacker attack ,” disrupting customer access to mobile and internet services. "The cyberattack on Ukraine's #Kyivstar telecoms operator has impacted all regions of the country with high impact to the capital, metrics show, with knock-on impacts reported to air raid alert network and banking sector as work continues to restore connectivity," NetBlocks  said  in a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter). Kyivstar, which is owned by Dutch-domiciled multinational telecommunication services company VEON,  serves  nearly 25 million mobile subscribers and more than 1 million home internet customers. The company said the attack was "a result of" the war with Russia and that it has notified law enforcement and special state services. While Kyivstar is working to restore the services, the internet watchdog noted that the telco is largely offline. That said, Kyivstar has yet ...

You might be surprised to know that your security cameras, Internet-connected toasters and refrigerators may have inadvertently participated in the massive cyber attack that broke a large portion of the Internet on Friday. That's due to massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against Dyn, a major domain name system (DNS) provider that many sites and services use as their upstream DNS provider for turning IP addresses into human-readable websites. The result we all know: Twitter, GitHub, Amazon, Netflix, Pinterest, Etsy, Reddit, PayPal, and AirBnb, were among hundreds of sites and services that were rendered inaccessible to Millions of people worldwide for several hours. Why and How the Deadliest DDoS Attack Happened It was reported that the Mirai bots were used in the massive DDoS attacks against DynDNS, but they "were separate and distinct" bots from those used to execute record-breaking DDoS attack against French Internet service and hosting...

Attackers are using many types of attacks to compromise business-critical data. These can include zero-day attacks, supply chain attacks, and others. However, one of the most common ways that hackers get into your environment is by compromising passwords. The password spraying attack is a special kind of password attack that can prove effective in compromising your environment. Let's look closer at the password spraying attack and how organizations can prevent it. Beware of compromised credentials Are compromised credentials dangerous to your environment? Yes! Compromised credentials allow an attacker to "walk in the front door" of your environment with legitimate credentials. They assume all the rights and permissions to systems, data, and resources the compromised account can access. The compromise of a privileged account is even worse. Privileged accounts are accounts that have high levels of access, such as an administrator user account. These types of accounts r...