Search results for black hat | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Back in june this year, Google announced an alpha Google Chrome extension called " End-to-End " for sending and receiving emails securely, in wake of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's revelations about the global surveillance conducted by the government law-enforcements. Finally, the company has announced that it made the source code for its End-to-End Chrome extension open source via GitHub . Google is developing a user-friendly tool for individuals to implement the tough encryption standard known as Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) in an attempt to fully encrypt people's Gmail messages that can't even be read by Google itself, nor anyone else other than the users exchanging the emails. PGP is an open source end-to-end encryption standard for almost 20 years, used to encrypt e-mail over the Internet providing cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication, which makes it very difficult to break. But implementing PGP is too complicated for m

Offline Windows Analysis and Data Extraction (OWADE) - Forensics tool to expose all your online activity Researchers " Elie Bursztein " from Stanford University in California have managed to bypass the encryption on a PC's hard drive to find out what websites a user has visited and whether they have any data stored in the cloud. " Commercial forensic software concentrates on extracting files from a disc, but that's not super-helpful in understanding online activity ," says Elie Bursztein, whose team developed the software. " We've built a tool that can reconstruct where the user has been online, and what identity they used. " The open-source software, Offline Windows Analysis and Data Extraction (OWADE), was launched at the Black Hat 2011 security conference and works with PCs running on the Windows operating system. OWADE is in alpha version and is only available by checking out the code directly as we update it very frequently. Note th

Recently, two European countries, France and Germany, have declared war against encryption with an objective to force major technology companies to built encryption backdoors in their secure messaging services. However, another neighborhood country, Netherlands, is proactively taking down cyber criminals, but do you know how? Dutch Police has seized two servers belonging to Virtual Private Network (VPN) provider Perfect Privacy , as part of an investigation, without even providing any reason for seizures. Switzerland-based VPN provider said they came to know about the servers seizure from I3D, the company that provides server hosting across Rotterdam. For those unfamiliar, Virtual Private Networks or VPNs are easy security and privacy tools that route your Internet traffic through a distant connection, protecting your browsing, hiding your location data and accessing restricted resources. VPNs have now become a great tool not just for large companies, but also for individual

SaaS applications are dominating the corporate landscape. Their increased use enables organizations to push the boundaries of technology and business. At the same time, these applications also pose a new security risk that security leaders need to address, since the existing security stack does not enable complete control or comprehensive monitoring of their usage. LayerX has recently released a new guide, " Let There Be Light: Eliminating the Risk of Shadow SaaS " for security and IT teams, which addresses this gap. The guide explains the challenges of shadow SaaS, i.e., the use of unauthorized SaaS apps for work purposes, and suggests practices and controls that can mitigate them. The guide also compares various security controls that attempt to address this risk (CASB, SASE, Secure Browser Extension) and explains how each one operates and its efficacy. Consequently, the guide is a must-read for all security leaders at modern organizations. Here are the main highlights:

An "aggressive" advanced persistent threat (APT) group known as SideWinder has been linked to over 1,000 new attacks since April 2020. "Some of the main characteristics of this threat actor that make it stand out among the others, are the sheer number, high frequency and persistence of their attacks and the large collection of encrypted and obfuscated malicious components used in their operations," cybersecurity firm Kaspersky  said  in a report that was presented at Black Hat Asia this month. SideWinder , also called Rattlesnake or T-APT-04, is said to have been active since at least 2012 with a  track record  of targeting military, defense, aviation, IT companies, and legal firms in Central Asian countries such as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Pakistan. Kaspersky's APT trends report for Q1 2022  published  late last month revealed that the threat actor is actively expanding the geography of its targets beyond its traditional victim profile to other

Once again USB has come up as a major threat to a vast number of users who use USB drives – including USB sticks and keyboards. Security researchers have released a bunch of hacking tools that can be used to convert USB drive into silent malware installer. This vulnerability has come about to be known as " BadUSB ", whose source code has been published by the researchers on the open source code hosting website Github , demanding manufacturers either to beef up protections for USB flash drive firmware and fix the problem or leave hundreds of millions of users vulnerable to the attack. The code released by researchers Adam Caudill and Brandon Wilson has capability to spread itself by hiding in the firmware meant to control the ways in which USB devices connect to computers. The hack utilizes the security flaw in the USB that allows an attacker to insert malicious code into their firmware. But Wait! What this means is that this critical vulnerability is now ava

Bleeding Life 2 Exploit Pack Released Black Hat Academy releases Bleeding Life 2 exploit pack. This is an exploit pack that affects Windows-based web browsers via Adobe and Java. You can read all about it, and download it for yourself. Statistics are kept based on exploit, browser, and OS version. Exploits Adobe CVE-2008-2992 CVE-2010-1297 CVE-2010-2884 CVE-2010-0188 Java CVE-2010-0842 CVE-2010-3552 Signed Applet Features Advanced Statistical Information Stylish Progress Bars Full User-Friendly Admin Panel Referer Stats Secure Panel - Login/Logout Ability To Set and Save Passwords On Panel Ability To Allow Guest Access - Guest Can Only View Stats Page, Clicking and Other Pages Disabled. Ability To Add and/or Remove Exploits Used Ability To Add Scan4You Credentials For Built-In Scanner Use Ability To Filter Browsers Ability To Filter Operating Systems Attempt To Detect and Filter HTTP Proxies Ability To Blacklist by IP/Range Ability To Import Blacklist On Pan

The threat actors behind the black hat redirect malware campaign have scaled up their campaign to use more than 70 bogus domains mimicking URL shorteners and infect over 10,800 websites. "The main objective is still ad fraud by artificially increasing traffic to pages which contain the AdSense ID which contain Google ads for revenue generation," Sucuri researcher Ben Martin  said  in a report published last week. Details of the malicious activity were  first exposed  by the GoDaddy-owned company in November 2022. The campaign, which is said to have been active since September last year, is orchestrated to redirect visitors to compromised WordPress sites to fake Q&A portals. The goal, it appears, is to increase the authority of spammy sites in search engine results. "It's possible that these bad actors are simply trying to convince Google that real people from different IPs using different browsers are clicking on their search results," Sucuri noted at

The authors behind the resurfaced  ZLoader  malware have added a feature that was originally present in the Zeus banking trojan that it's based on, indicating that it's being actively developed. "The latest version, 2.4.1.0, introduces a feature to prevent execution on machines that differ from the original infection," Zscaler ThreatLabz researcher Santiago Vicente  said  in a technical report. "A similar anti-analysis feature was present in the leaked Zeus 2.X source code, but implemented differently." ZLoader, also called Terdot, DELoader, or Silent Night,  emerged  after a nearly two-year hiatus around September 2023 following its takedown in early 2022. A modular trojan with capabilities to load next-stage payloads, recent versions of the malware have added RSA encryption as well as updates to its domain generation algorithm (DGA). The latest sign of ZLoader's evolution comes in the form of an anti-analysis feature that restricts the binary'

Google has introduced a new security feature in Android 14 that allows IT administrators to disable support for 2G cellular networks in their managed device fleet. The search giant said it's introducing a second user setting to turn off support, at the model level, for  null-ciphered cellular connections . "The Android Security Model assumes that all networks are hostile to keep users safe from network packet injection, tampering, or eavesdropping on user traffic," Roger Piqueras Jover, Yomna Nasser, and Sudhi Herle  said . "Android does not rely on link-layer encryption to address this threat model. Instead, Android establishes that all network traffic should be end-to-end encrypted (E2EE)." 2G networks, in particular, employ weak encryption and lack mutual authentication,  rendering  them  susceptible  to over-the-air interception and traffic decryption attacks by impersonating a real 2G tower. The  threat posed by rogue cellular base stations  means th

A team of security researchers has discovered a new malware evasion technique that could help malware authors defeat most of the modern antivirus solutions and forensic tools. Dubbed Process Doppelgänging , the new fileless code injection technique takes advantage of a built-in Windows function and an undocumented implementation of Windows process loader. Ensilo security researchers Tal Liberman and Eugene Kogan, who discovered the Process Doppelgänging attack, presented their findings today at Black Hat 2017 Security conference held in London. Process Doppelgänging Works on All Windows Versions Apparently, Process Doppelgänging attack works on all modern versions of Microsoft Windows operating system, starting from Windows Vista to the latest version of Windows 10. Tal Liberman, the head of the research team at enSilo, told The Hacker New that this malware evasion technique is similar to Process Hollowing—a method first introduced years ago by attackers to defeat the m

How much does your privacy cost? It will soon be sold for half a Million US dollars. A controversial company specialises in acquiring and reselling zero-day exploits is ready to pay up to US$500,000 for working zero-day vulnerabilities targeting popular secure messenger applications, such as Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp. Zerodium announced a new pricing structure on Wednesday, paying out $500,000 for fully functional remote code execution (RCE) and local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerabilities in Signal, WhatsApp, iMessage, Viber, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, and Telegram. The payouts for all these secure messengers have been increased after tech companies introduced end-to-end encryption in their apps, making it more difficult for anyone to compromise their messaging platforms. The same payout is offered for remote code execution and local privilege escalation security flaws in default mobile email applications. Launched in 2015, Zerodium is a Washington, DC-based p

A researcher has demonstrated how easy it is to steal high-end drones, commonly deployed by government agencies and police forces, from 2 kilometres away with the help of less than $40 worth of hardware . The attack was developed by IBM security researcher Nils Rodday, who recently presented his findings at Black Hat Asia 2016. Hacking the $28,463 Drone with Less than $40 of Hardware Rodday explained how security vulnerabilities in a drone's radio connection could leverage an attacker ( with some basic knowledge of radio communications ) to hijack the US$28,463 quadcopters with less than $40 of hardware. Rodday discovered ( PPT ) two security flaws in the tested drone that gave him the ability to hack the device in seconds. First, the connection between drone's controller module, known as telemetry box, and a user's tablet uses extremely vulnerable ' WEP ' ( Wired-Equivalent Privacy ) encryption – a protocol long known to be 'crackable in sec

The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface ( UEFI ) code from various independent firmware/BIOS vendors (IBVs) has been found vulnerable to potential attacks through high-impact flaws in image parsing libraries embedded into the firmware. The shortcomings, collectively labeled  LogoFAIL  by Binarly, "can be used by threat actors to deliver a malicious payload and bypass Secure Boot, Intel Boot Guard, and other security technologies by design." Furthermore, they can be weaponized to bypass security solutions and deliver persistent malware to compromised systems during the boot phase by injecting a malicious logo image file into the  EFI system partition . While the issues are not silicon-specific, meaning they impact both x86 and ARM-based devices, they are also UEFI and IBV-specific. The vulnerabilities comprise a heap-based buffer overflow flaw and an out-of-bounds read, details of which are expected to be made public later this week at the  Black Hat Europe conference .

Recent disclosures by whistleblower Edward Snowden claiming that internet traffic is being intercepted and used by the Americans in their war on terror, force to re-think about the user's privacy and online anonymity. It has been relatively common knowledge for years that wherever we go on the web, we leave clear tracks, so it shouldn't really have come as much of a surprise to discover this has been going on. The best thing you can do to stay anonymous online is to hide your IP address . If someone knows your IP address, it is the easiest way to trace your online activity back to you and they can easily determine the geographic location of the server that hosts that address and get a rough idea of where you're located. TOR is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. Browsing with TOR is a lot like simultaneously using hundreds of different proxies that are randomized periodically.

Today at Black Hat 2014 hacking conference, Yahoo! Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos announced that the company will start giving its consumers the option of end-to-end encryption in its Mail service by next year. Google showed off a PGP-based encryption plugin for Gmail back in June. The Purple-hued company will offer encryption via a modified version of the same End-to-End browser plug-in that Google uses for PGP in Gmail, Alex Stamos told the audience at his talk titled Building Safe Systems at Scale - Lessons from Six Months at Yahoo. The PGP plugin will be native in mobile apps allowing Gmail and Yahoo mail to easily exchange encrypted email. Infact, the email providers themselves won't be able to decrypt messages exchanged between its users. Only senders and recipients will be able to read the messages. In short, it means that Yahoo email users can reportedly send safe and secure messages between Yahoo users and also Gmail adherents without fear, wh

Multiple security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in AudioCodes desk phones and Zoom's Zero Touch Provisioning ( ZTP ) that could be potentially exploited by a malicious attacker to conduct remote attacks. "An external attacker who leverages the vulnerabilities discovered in AudioCodes Ltd.'s desk phones and Zoom's Zero Touch Provisioning feature can gain full remote control of the devices," SySS security researcher Moritz Abrell  said  in an analysis published Friday. The unfettered access could then be weaponized to eavesdrop on rooms or phone calls, pivot through the devices and attack corporate networks, and even build a botnet of infected devices. The research was  presented  at the Black Hat USA security conference earlier this week. The problems are rooted in Zoom's ZTP, which allows IT administrators to configure VoIP devices in a centralized manner such that it makes it easy for organizations to monitor, troubleshoot and update the devices as

A systematic analysis of attacks against Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS) servers has revealed as many as 14 malware families, 10 of them newly documented, indicating that the Windows-based web server software continues to be a hotbed for  natively developed malware  for close to eight years. The findings were presented today by ESET malware researcher Zuzana Hromcova at the  Black Hat USA security conference . "The various kinds of native IIS malware identified are server-side malware and the two things it can do best is, first, see and intercept all communications to the server, and second, affect how the requests are processed," Hromcova told in an interview with The Hacker News. "Their motivations range from cybercrime to espionage, and a technique called SEO fraud." Government institutions in three Southeast Asian countries, a major telecommunications company in Cambodia, and a research institution in Vietnam, as well as dozens of private