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Security researchers have discovered a way to target a huge number of Android and iOS apps that could allow them to remotely sign into any victim's mobile app account without any knowledge of the victim. A group of three researchers – Ronghai Yang, Wing Cheong Lau, and Tianyu Liu – from the Chinese University of Hong Kong has found [ PPT ] that most of the popular mobile apps that support single sign-on (SSO) service have insecurely implemented OAuth 2.0. OAuth 2.0 is an open standard for authorization that allows users to sign in for other third-party services by verifying existing identity of their Google, Facebook, or Chinese firm Sina accounts. This process enables users to sign-in to any service without providing additional usernames or passwords. How are app developers required to implement OAuth? (Right Way) When a user logs into a third party app via OAuth, the app checks with the ID provider, let's say, Facebook, that it has correct authentication details. I

Rogue Antivirus advertised on 200000 hacked Web pages The Websense has detected a new wave of mass-injections of a well-known rogue antivirus campaign, a new mass injection attack has infected over 200,000 Web pages, amounting to close to 30,000 unique Web hosts. The attack uses SQL injection techniques to insert a rogue script element. Users who land on one of the compromised pages get redirected through several domains and finally land on a scareware site. These sites mimic antivirus scans and tell visitors their computers are infected with malware in an attempt to convince them to download fake security programs. The programs display even more false warnings and ask users to pay for a license in order to clean their machines.  The page looks like a Windows Explorer window with a "Windows Security Alert" dialogue box in it. The fake antivirus then prompts visitors to download and run their "antivirus tool" to remove the supposedly found Trojans. The executab

It comes as no surprise that today's cyber threats are orders of magnitude more complex than those of the past. And the ever-evolving tactics that attackers use demand the adoption of better, more holistic and consolidated ways to meet this non-stop challenge. Security teams constantly look for ways to reduce risk while improving security posture, but many approaches offer piecemeal solutions – zeroing in on one particular element of the evolving threat landscape challenge – missing the forest for the trees.  In the last few years, Exposure Management has become known as a comprehensive way of reigning in the chaos, giving organizations a true fighting chance to reduce risk and improve posture. In this article I'll cover what Exposure Management is, how it stacks up against some alternative approaches and why building an Exposure Management program should be on  your 2024 to-do list. What is Exposure Management?  Exposure Management is the systematic identification, evaluation,

A proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit related to a remote code execution vulnerability affecting Windows Print Spooler and patched by Microsoft earlier this month was briefly published online before being taken down. Identified as  CVE-2021-1675 , the security issue could grant remote attackers full control of vulnerable systems.  Print Spooler  manages the printing process in Windows, including loading the appropriate printer drivers and scheduling the print job for printing, among others. Print Spooler flaws are concerning, not least because of the wide attack surface, but also owing to the fact that it runs at the highest privilege level and is capable of dynamically loading third-party binaries. The Windows maker addressed the vulnerability as part of its Patch Tuesday update on June 8, 2021. But almost two weeks later, Microsoft revised the flaw's impact from an elevation of privilege to remote code execution (RCE) as well as upgraded the severity level from Important to Crit

Australia's first national cyber security competition Announced Australia's first national cyber security competition, the 2012 Cyber Defence University Challenge, was launched today by broadband minister Senator Stephen Conroy. If you are an undergraduate with top cyber problem-solving skills then Australia's first national Cyber Defence University Challenge is probably for you. The Challenge runs for 24 hours on 3 to 4 April, and will test the cyber problem-solving skills of teams of Australian undergraduates in a virtual network environment.The ultimate prize, sponsored by Telstra, is travel and entry to the Black Hat 2012 Conference in Las Vegas in July 2012. Senator Conroy sxays the competition is a partnership between the federal government, universities and Telstra. " The Government is committed to working with industry to develop a safe and secure digital economy for Australians ," Senator Conroy said in a statement. " We are also committed to i

German security researcher Thomas Roth has found an innovative use for cloud computing: cracking wireless networks that rely on pre-shared key passphrases, such as those found in homes and smaller businesses. Roth has created a program that runs on Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) system. It uses the massive computing power of EC2 to run through 400,000 possible passwords per second, a staggering amount, hitherto unheard of outside supercomputing circles--and very likely made possible because EC2 now allows graphics processing units (GPUs) to be used for computational tasks. Among other things, these are particularly suited to password cracking tasks. In other words, this isn't a clever or elegant hack, and it doesn't rely on a flaw in wireless networking technology. Roth's software merely generates millions of passphrases, encrypts them, and sees if they allow access to the network. However, employing the theoretically infinite resources of cloud computing to

Blue Coat systems has undertaken detailed research into the use of 'malnets' by criminals to help support their various attacks in order to uncover the best ways to take down these systems. Botnet infections are commonly spread though compromised websites seeded with malicious scripts and promoted via black hat SEO tactics such as link farms. These malware networks, or malnets, pose a growing threat, The company said the number of malnets now stands at more than 1,500, an increase of 300% in the past six months, and it expects they will be, "responsible for two-thirds of all malicious cyberattacks in 2012." According to Blue Coat, the largest known malnet is Shnakule, which has used up to 5,005 malicious hosts or servers at any given time, depending on the capabilities needed at any given moment by its operators. Blue Coat believes that Shnakule is controlled by a single gang, and it's been used to serve up just about every type of known attack, including &quo

SIM cards are among the most widely-deployed computing platforms with over 7 billion cards in active use. Cracking SIM cards has long been the Holy Grail of hackers because the tiny devices are located in phones and allow operators to identify and authenticate subscribers as they use networks. A German cryptographer Karsten Nohl, the founder of Security Research Labs claims to have found encryption and software flaws that could affect millions of SIM cards, and allows hackers to remotely gain control of and also clone certain mobile SIM cards. This is the first hack of its kind in a decade. Nohl will be presenting his findings at the Black Hat security conference this year. He and his team tested close to 1,000 SIM cards for vulnerabilities, exploited by simply sending a hidden SMS. According to him, Hackers could use compromised SIMs to commit financial crimes or engage in espionage. Once a hacker copies a SIM, it can be used to make calls and send text messages impersona

Researchers have disclosed a new type of attack that exploits misconfigurations in transport layer security (TLS) servers to redirect HTTPS traffic from a victim's web browser to a different TLS service endpoint located on another IP address to steal sensitive information. The attacks have been dubbed  ALPACA , short for "Application Layer Protocol Confusion - Analyzing and mitigating Cracks in tls Authentication," by a group of academics from Ruhr University Bochum, Münster University of Applied Sciences, and Paderborn University. "Attackers can redirect traffic from one subdomain to another, resulting in a valid TLS session," the study said. "This breaks the authentication of TLS and cross-protocol attacks may be possible where the behavior of one protocol service may compromise the other at the application layer." TLS  is a cryptographic protocol underpinning several application layer protocols like HTTPS, SMTP, IMAP, POP3, and FTP to secure com

Whenever an important event takes place, new opportunities for cyber criminals, especially for those who develop attacks based on social engineering, arise. Currently, the whole world has its eyes glued to TV screens watching the London 2012 Olympic Games. Anti-malware and anti-virus solutions provider Webroot has issued a warning that an app app called " London Olympics Widget ," which is described as an app that displays aggregated Olympic news coverage. In fact, it's really just harvesting the user's contact list and device ID while reading up on SMS messages too. The package name is 'com.games.London.Olympics.widget'. This app has a digital certificate claiming it was developed in New Delhi, India. For this scam, cybercriminals create websites that are very appealing; some even look very professional that they make it seem that you are close to having access to live programming. Researchers explain that the crooks rely on black hat SEO techniques to make sure t

A new research has identified four new variants of HTTP request smuggling attacks that work against various commercial off-the-shelf web servers and HTTP proxy servers. Amit Klein, VP of Security Research at SafeBreach who presented the findings today at the Black Hat security conference, said that the attacks highlight how web servers and HTTP proxy servers are still susceptible to HTTP request smuggling even after 15 years since they were first documented. What is HTTP Request Smuggling? HTTP request smuggling (or HTTP Desyncing) is a technique employed to interfere with the way a website processes sequences of HTTP requests that are received from one or more users. Vulnerabilities related to HTTP request smuggling typically arise when the front-end (a load balancer or proxy) and the back-end servers interpret the boundary of an HTTP request differently, thereby allowing a bad actor to send (or "smuggle") an ambiguous request that gets prepended to the next le

Google has released its latest monthly security update for Android devices, including a serious bug in some Broadcom Wi-Fi chipsets that affects millions of Android devices, as well as some iPhone models. Dubbed BroadPwn , the critical remote code execution vulnerability resides in Broadcom's BCM43xx family of WiFi chipsets, which can be triggered remotely without user interaction, allows a remote attacker to execute malicious code on targeted Android devices with kernel privileges. "The most severe vulnerability in this [runtime] section could enable a remote attacker using a specially crafted file to execute arbitrary code within the context of an unprivileged process," Google describes in the July 2017 Android Security Bulletin. The BroadPwn vulnerability ( CVE-2017-3544 ) has been discovered by Exodus Intelligence researcher Nitay Artenstein, who says the flawed Wi-Fi chipset also impacts Apple iOS devices. Since Artenstein will be presenting his finding at

Smart Phones, Smart TVs, Smart Refrigerators, even Smart Cars! When it comes to Smart devices, we simply provide them the master control of various tasks to make our life easy and more comfortable, unaware about its worst impact. At the starting of last month we reported that by using a $20 toolkit called CAN Hacking Tool (CHT) , hackers can hack your Smart Cars, giving entire control of your car to an attacker from windows and headlights to its steering and brakes. Now a new research carried out on the  Tesla Smart car  has proved that the hackers are able to remotely locate or unlock the Tesla Motors Inc. electric vehicles, just by cracking a six-character password using traditional hacking techniques. At the Black Hat Asia security conference in Singapore on Friday, Nitesh Dhanjani , a corporate security consultant and Tesla owner, said a recent study conducted by him on the Tesla Model S sedan pointed out several design flaws in its security system, and there wasn&

A new collection of eight process injection techniques, collectively dubbed  PoolParty , could be exploited to achieve code execution in Windows systems while evading endpoint detection and response (EDR) systems. SafeBreach researcher Alon Leviev  said  the methods are "capable of working across all processes without any limitations, making them more flexible than existing process injection techniques." The  findings  were first presented at the  Black Hat Europe 2023  conference last week. Process injection refers to an  evasion technique  used to run arbitrary code in a target process. A wide range of process injection techniques exists, such as dynamic link library (DLL) injection, portable executable injection, thread execution hijacking, process hollowing, and process doppelgänging. PoolParty is so named because it's rooted in a component called Windows user-mode thread pool, leveraging it to insert any type of work item into a target process on the system. I

A cybercrime enterprise known as  Lemon Group  is leveraging millions of pre-infected Android smartphones worldwide to carry out their malicious operations, posing significant supply chain risks. "The infection turns these devices into mobile proxies, tools for stealing and selling SMS messages, social media and online messaging accounts and monetization via advertisements and click fraud," cybersecurity firm Trend Micro  said . The activity encompasses no fewer than 8.9 million compromised Android devices, particularly budget phones, with the highest concentration of the infections discovered in the U.S., Mexico, Indonesia, Thailand, Russia, South Africa, India, Angola, the Philippines, and Argentina. The findings were  presented  by researchers Fyodor Yarochkin, Zhengyu Dong, Vladimir Kropotov, and Paul Pajares at the Black Hat Asia conference held in Singapore last week. Describing it as a  continuously evolving problem , the cybersecurity firm said the threat actors

Antivirus company Symantec has detected a malicious campaign in which hackers managed to deceive thousands of people allegedly signed by a paid proxy service. They expose that hundreds of thousands of users signing up for a cheap and supposedly legitimate proxy service have ended up downloading malware and being ensnared into a botnet. Three months ago, Symantec researchers started an investigation into a piece of malware called Backdoor.Proxybox that has been known since 2010, but has shown increasing activity recently. " The malware is Backdoor.Proxybox, and our investigation has revealed an entire black hat operation, giving us interesting information on the operation and size of this botnet, and leading us to information that may identify the actual malware author ," Symantec. The service - ProxyBox - supposedly provides access to its entire list of thousands of proxies for only $40 a month, which is obviously too cheap a price for the provider to break eve

With the rise in cyber-crimes, ethical hacking has become a powerful strategy in the fight against online threats. In general terms, ethical hackers are authorised to break into supposedly 'secure' computer systems without malicious intent, but with the aim of discovering vulnerabilities to bring about improved protection. Ethical Hackers are now kind of becoming the alchemists of the 21st century. More and more organisations are being targeted in cyber-attacks, and they must get to know their enemy if they are to protect vital networks. Meet the professional, ethical hacker. Despite this, the common belief among many at-risk companies is that 'to outwit a hacker, you need to hire one'. With so much at stake, even technology providers are turning to those with hacking skills to find the flaws in their products and fix them before the baddies can exploit them. Infamous Apple Hacker Turned Ethical; Hired by Facebook 23-year-old George 'GeoHot' Ho

High-tech Sniper Rifles can be remotely hacked to shoot the wrong target – Something really scary and unpredictable. Yes, Hackers can remotely gain access to the $13,000 TrackingPoint sniper rifles that run Linux and Android operating system and have Wi-Fi connections. So then they can either disable the gun or choose a wrong target. A married pair of security researchers have proved that anything connected to the Internet can ultimately be hacked, whether computer systems, cars or… GUNS . According to the duo, the Tracking Point's self-aiming rifle sights, better known as the ShotView targeting system, is vulnerable to WiFi-based attacks that could allow your enemy to redirect bullets to new targets of their choice. Hacking $13,000 Self-aiming Rifles to Shoot wrong target Runa Sandvik and her husband Michael Auger are planning to present their findings on exploiting two of the $13,000 self-aiming rifles at the Black Hat hacking conference . In the hack, the duo demonstrates