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Cyber criminals are becoming more adept, innovative, and stealthy with each passing day. They are now adopting more clandestine techniques that come with limitless attack vectors and are harder to detect. Recently, cyber crooks managed to infiltrate the update mechanism for a popular server management software package and altered it to include an advanced backdoor, which lasts for at least 17 days until researchers discovered it. Dubbed ShadowPad , the secret backdoor gave attackers complete control over networks hidden behind legit cryptographically signed software sold by NetSarang —used by hundreds of banks, media firms, energy companies, and pharmaceutical firms, telecommunication providers, transportation and logistics and other industries—for 17 days starting last month. Important Note — If you are using any of the affected product (listed below), we highly recommend you stop using it until you update them. Hacker Injected Backdoor Through Software Update Mechanism

Incapsula announced this week that they're offering an intriguing Backdoor Protection feature for sites using their cloud-based website security and performance services. What's a Backdoor? A backdoor is a malicious function that enables hackers to remotely operate a site or server, even after whatever exploit they used for initial access has been patched. Installing a backdoor is often the first thing a hacker will do after gaining access to your site - so if you've been hacked before, there's a good chance you've already got one. Hackers love backdoors because they provide easy return access to the site. Once installed, backdoors can used to distribute spam and malware, launch distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, or to help steal valuable data like credit card numbers. Recently, Incapsula reported how during the ongoing DDoS attacks against United States banks, a backdoor was used to turn a compromised site into a unwilling foot-soldier in the hackers Zombie Bo

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What is a backdoor? By definition: "Backdoor is a feature or defect of a computer system that allows surreptitious unauthorized access to data, " either the backdoor is in encryption algorithm, a server or in an implementation, and doesn't matter whether it has previously been used or not. Yesterday, we published a story based on findings reported by security researcher Tobias Boelter that suggests WhatsApp has a backdoor that "could allow" an attacker, and of course the company itself, to intercept your encrypted communication. The story involving the world's largest secure messaging platform that has over a billion users worldwide went viral in few hours, attracting reactions from security experts, WhatsApp team, and Open Whisper Systems, who partnered with Facebook to implement end-to-end encryption in WhatsApp. Note: I would request readers to read complete article before reaching out for a conclusion. And also, suggestions and opinions are

Security researchers have discovered thousands of backdoored plugins and themes for the popular content management systems (CMS) that could be used by attackers to compromise web servers on a large scale. The Netherlands-based security firm Fox-IT has published a whitepaper revealing a new Backdoor named "CryptoPHP . " Security researchers have uncovered malicious plugins and themes for WordPress, Joomla and Drupal . However, there is a slight relief for Drupal users, as only themes are found to be infected from CryptoPHP backdoor. In order to victimize site administrators, miscreants makes use of a simple social engineering trick. They often lured site admins to download pirated versions of commercial CMS plugins and themes for free. Once downloaded, the malicious theme or plugin included backdoor installed on the admins' server. "By publishing pirated themes and plug-ins free for anyone to use instead of having to pay for them, the CryptoPHP actor is

Chinese smartphone manufacturers have been criticized many times for suspected backdoors in its products, the popular Chinese smartphone brands, Xiaomi and Star N9500 smartphones are the top examples. Now, the China's third-largest mobile and world's sixth-largest phone manufacturer 'Coolpad' , has joined the list. Millions of Android smartphones sold by Chinese smartphone maker Coolpad Group Ltd. may contain an extensive "backdoor" from its manufacturer that is being able to track users, push unwanted pop-up advertisements and install unauthorized apps onto users' phones without their knowledge, alleged a U.S. security firm. OVER 10 MILLION USERS AT RISK Researchers from Silicon Valley online security firm Palo Alto Networks discovered the backdoor, dubbed " CoolReaper ," pre-installed on two dozens of Coolpad Android handset models, including high-end devices, sold exclusively in China and Taiwan. The backdoor can let attacke

Important Update — Most Security Experts argued, " It's not a backdoor, rather it's a feature ," but none of them denied the fact that, if required, WhatsApp or a hacker can intercept your end-to-end encrypted chats. Read detailed explanation on arguments in my latest article. Most people believe that end-to-end encryption is the ultimate way to protect your secret communication from snooping, and it does, but it can be intercepted if not implemented correctly. After introducing " end-to-end encryption by default " last year, WhatsApp has become the world's largest secure messaging platform with over a billion users worldwide. But if you think your conversations are completely secure in a way that no one, not even Facebook, the company that owned WhatsApp, can intercept your messages then you are highly mistaken, just like most of us and it's not a new concept. Here's the kick: End-to-end encrypted messaging service, such as WhatsApp and Te

Buying popular plugins with a large user-base and using it for effortless malicious campaigns have become a new trend for bad actors. One such incident happened recently when the renowned developer BestWebSoft sold a popular Captcha WordPress plugin to an undisclosed buyer, who then modified the plugin to download and install a hidden backdoor. In a blog post published on Tuesday, WordFence security firm revealed why WordPress recently kicked a popular Captcha plugin with more than 300,000 active installations out of its official plugin store. While reviewing the source code of the Captcha plugin, WordFence folks found a severe backdoor that could allow the plugin author or attackers to remotely gain administrative access to WordPress websites without requiring any authentication. The plugin was configured to automatically pull an updated "backdoored" version from a remote URL — https[://]simplywordpress[dot]net/captcha/captcha_pro_update.php — after installati

Are millions of enterprise users, who rely on the next-generation firewalls for protection, actually protected from hackers? Probably Not. Just less than a month after an unauthorized backdoor found in Juniper Networks firewalls, an anonymous security researcher has discovered highly suspicious code in FortiOS firewalls from enterprise security vendor Fortinet. According to the leaked information, FortiOS operating system, deployed on Fortinet's FortiGate firewall networking equipment, includes an SSH backdoor that can be used to access its firewall equipment. Anyone can Access FortiOS SSH Backdoor Anyone with " Fortimanager_Access " username and a hashed version of the " FGTAbc11*xy+Qqz27 " password string, which is hard coded into the firewall, can login into Fortinet's FortiGate firewall networking equipment. However, according to the company's product details, this SSH user is created for challenge-and-response authenti

At the beginning of this year, we reported about the secret backdoor 'TCP 32764' discovered in several routers including, Linksys, Netgear, Cisco and Diamond that allowed an attacker to send commands to the vulnerable routers at TCP port 32764 from a command-line shell without being authenticated as the administrator. The Reverse-engineer from France Eloi Vanderbeken , who discovered this backdoor has found that although the flaw has been patched in the latest firmware release, but SerComm has added the same backdoor again in another way. To verify the released patch, recently he downloaded the patched firmware version 1.1.0.55 of Netgear DGN1000 and unpacked it using binwalk tool. He found that the file 'scfgmgr' which contains the backdoor is still present there with a new option " -l ", that limits it only for a local socket interprocess communication (Unix domain socket), or only for the processes running on the same device. On further investigation via reverse en

Those innocent-looking apps in your smartphone can secretly spy on your communications or could allow hackers to do so. Hard to believe, but it's true. Recently, Trustwave's SpiderLabs analysts discovered a hidden backdoor in Skype for Apple's macOS and Mac OS X operating systems that could be used to spy on users' communications without their knowledge. The backdoor actually resides in the desktop Application Programming Interface (API) that allows third-party plugins and apps to communicate with Microsoft-owned Skype — the popular video chat and messaging service. Appeared to have been around since at least 2010, the backdoor could allow any malicious third-party app to bypass authentication procedure and provide nearly complete access to Skype on Mac OS X. How an Attacker can Take Complete Control of Your Skype The malicious app could bypass authentication process if they "identified themselves as the program responsible for interfacing with th

Unlike specially crafted malware specifically developed to take advantage of Windows operating system platform, cyber attackers have started creating cross-platform malware for wider exploitation. Due to the rise in popularity of Mac OS X and other Windows desktop alternatives, hackers have begun designing cross-platform malware modularly for wide distribution. Cross-platform malware is loaded with specialized payloads and components, allowing it to run on multiple platforms. One such malware family has recently been discovered by researchers at Kaspersky Lab, which run on all the key operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. Stefan Ortloff, a researcher from Kaspersky Lab's Global Research and Analysis Team, first discovered the Linux and Windows variants of this family of cross-platform backdoor, dubbed Mokes , in January this year. Now, the researcher today confirmed the existence of an OS X variant of this malware family, explaining a technical breakd

Security researchers have revealed the existence of an advanced persistent threat that has been making the rounds since April 2011.  Backdoor.Hikit  is a dangerous backdoor Trojan that will damage infected system and files. Usually, Backdoor. Hikit will open backdoor to allow remote attackers to connect to the infected system and carry out harmful activities, such as stealing information or destroying files and programs. It is really stubborn those antiviruses often fail to delete it for good, for it runs secretly and automatically when Windows boots without your knowledge or consent and can disguise it as fake system files or processes. Besides, many other threats, such as adware, redirecting virus, Trojan variants from family, such as Trojan Horse Generic 27.PN, BackDoor.Hupigon5.CJMY, Trojan.Zeroaccess.C, Trojan:win64/Sirefef.E and so on, which is really a threat to system and data security. According to experts from security firm Symantec , it all starts with the unknown dropper

Till now we have seen a series of different malware targeting Windows operating system and not Mac, thanks to Apple in way it safeguard its devices' security. But with time, cyber criminals and malware authors have found ways to exploit Mac as well. GROUP BEHIND THE MAC VERSION OF BACKDOOR Researchers have unmasked a group of cyber criminals that has recently started using a new variant of XSLCmd backdoor program to target Mac OS X systems. This Mac version of backdoor shares a significant portion of its code with the Windows version of the same backdoor that has been around since at least 2009. According to FireEye researchers, the group, dubbed as GREF , is already infamous for its past cyber espionage attacks against the US Defense Industrial Base (DIB), companies from the electronics and engineering sectors worldwide, foundations and other NGO's as well. " We track this threat group as "GREF" due to their propensity to use a variety of Google references in th

The North Korea-linked  ScarCruft  group has been attributed to a previously undocumented backdoor called Dolphin that the threat actor has used against targets located in its southern counterpart. "The backdoor [...] has a wide range of spying capabilities, including monitoring drives and portable devices and exfiltrating files of interest, keylogging and taking screenshots, and stealing credentials from browsers," ESET researcher Filip Jurčacko  said  in a new report published today. Dolphin is said to be selectively deployed, with the malware using cloud services like Google Drive for data exfiltration as well as command-and-control. The Slovak cybersecurity company said it found the implant deployed as a final-stage payload as part of a watering hole attack in early 2021 directed against a South Korean digital newspaper. The campaign, first uncovered by  Kaspersky  and  Volexity  last year,  entailed  the weaponization of two Internet Explorer flaws ( CVE-2020-1380

How to Hack an Android device? It is possibly one of the most frequently asked questions on the Internet. Although it's not pretty simple to hack Android devices and gadgets, sometimes you just get lucky to find a backdoor access. Thanks to Allwinner, a Chinese ARM system-on-a-chip maker, which has recently been caught shipping a version of Linux Kernel with an incredibly simple and easy-to-use built-in backdoor. Chinese fabless semiconductor company Allwinner is a leading supplier of application processors that are used in many low-cost Android tablets, ARM-based PCs, set-top boxes, and other electronic devices worldwide. Simple Backdoor Exploit to Hack Android Devices All you need to do to gain root access of an affected Android device is… Send the text " rootmydevice " to any undocumented debugging process. The local privileges escalation  backdoor code for debugging ARM-powered Android devices managed to make its way in shipped firmware after fir

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

In the escalating battle between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Apple over iPhone encryption, former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden and Google chief executive Sundar Pichai just sided with Apple's refusal to unlock iPhone . Yesterday, Apple CEO Tim Cook refused to comply with a federal court order to help the FBI unlock an iPhone owned by one of the terrorists in the mass shootings in San Bernardino , California, in December. Here's What the FBI is Demanding: The federal officials have asked Apple to make a less secure version of its iOS that can be used by the officials to brute force the 4-6 digits passcode on the dead shooter's iPhone without getting the device's data self-destructed. Cook called the court order a "chilling" demand that "would undermine the very freedoms and liberty our government is meant to protect." He argued that to help the FBI unlock the iPhone would basically

A newly discovered zombie network that exclusively targets Apple computers running Mac OS X across the globe has compromised roughly 17,000 machines so far, giving hackers backdoor access to infected computers, researchers at Russian antivirus firm Dr.Web warned. According to a survey of traffic conducted in September by researchers at Dr. Web, over 17,000 Macs globally are part of the Mac.BackDoor.iWorm botnet , which creates a backdoor on machines running OS X. Researchers say almost a quarter of iWorm botnet are located in the US. The most interesting thing to notice about this botnet is that it uses a special method of spreading via a search service of Reddit posts to a Minecraft server list subreddit to collect the IP addresses for its command and control (CnC) network. The user who had posted that subreddit data has now been shut down though the malware creators are likely to form another server list. " It is worth mentioning that in order to acquire a control server add