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Well, there's some good news for Hackers and Bug hunters, though a terrible news for Apple! Exploit vendor Zerodium has tripled its bug bounty for an Apple's iOS 10 zero-day exploit, offering a maximum payout of $US1.5 Million. Yes, $1,500,000.00 Reward. That's more than seven times what Apple is offering (up to $200,000) for iOS zero-days via its private, invite-only bug bounty program. Zerodium, a startup by the infamous French-based company Vupen that buys and sells zero-day exploits to government agencies around the world, previously offered US$500,000 for remote iOS 9 jailbreaks, which was temporarily increased to $1 Million for a competition help by the company last year. The company paid out $1 million contest reward for the first three iOS 9 zero-days in November to an unnamed hacker group, then lowered the price again to $500,000. With the recent release of iOS 10, Zerodium has agreed to pay $1.5 Million to anyone who can pull off a remote jail

Fair elections are the lifelines of democracy, but in recent years election hacking has become a hot topic worldwide. Whether it's American voting machines during the 2016 presidential election or India's EVMs during 2014 general elections, the integrity, transparency, and security of electronic voting machines remained questionable, leaving a wound in the minds of many that is difficult to heal. Many countries, including the largest democracy in the world i.e., India, believe the best way to ensure the security of EVMs is to make its technology opaque to bad actors, but in recent years a large section of the population is losing trust in any system that has been certified by a closed group of experts only. To make a balance between transparency and security, in May 2019, Microsoft released a free, open-source software development kit (SDK) called ElectionGuard that aims to enable end-to-end verification of voting. Microsoft's ElectionGuard SDK can be integra

The  ransomware industry surged in 2023  as it saw an alarming 55.5% increase in victims worldwide, reaching a staggering 5,070.  But 2024 is starting off showing a very different picture.  While the numbers skyrocketed in Q4 2023 with 1309 cases, in Q1 2024, the ransomware industry was down to 1,048 cases. This is a 22% decrease in ransomware attacks compared to Q4 2023. Figure 1: Victims per quarter There could be several reasons for this significant drop.  Reason 1: The Law Enforcement Intervention Firstly, law enforcement has upped the ante in 2024 with actions against both LockBit and ALPHV. The LockBit Arrests In February, an international operation named "Operation Cronos" culminated in the arrest of at least three associates of the infamous LockBit ransomware syndicate in Poland and Ukraine.  Law enforcement from multiple countries collaborated to take down LockBit's infrastructure. This included seizing their dark web domains and gaining access to their backend sys

It seems like Tor Browser zero-day exploits are in high demand right now—so much so that someone is ready to pay ONE MILLION dollars. Zerodium—a company that specialises in acquiring and reselling zero-day exploits—just announced that it will pay up to USD 1,000,000 for working zero-day exploits for the popular Tor Browser on Tails Linux and Windows operating system. Tor browser users should take this news an early warning, especially who use Tails OS to protect their privacy. Zero-day exploit acquisition platform has also published some rules and payout details on its website, announcing that the payout for Tor exploits with no JavaScript has been kept double than those with JavaScript enabled. The company has also clearly mentioned that the exploit must leverage remote code execution vulnerability, the initial attack vector should be a web page and it should work against the latest version of Tor Browser. Moreover, the zero-day Tor exploit must work without requiring an

The " Hack the Pentagon " bug bounty program by the United States Department of Defense (DoD) has been successful with more than 100 vulnerabilities uncovered by white hat hackers in Pentagon infrastructure. In March, the Defense Department launched what it calls " the first cyber Bug Bounty Program in the history of the federal government, " inviting hackers to take up the challenge of finding bugs in its networks and public faced websites that are registered under DoD. Around 1,400 whitehat (ethical) hackers participated in the Hack the Pentagon program and were awarded up to $15,000 for disclosures of the most destructive vulnerabilities in DoDs networks, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said at a technology forum on Friday. "They are helping us to be more secure at a fraction of the cost," Carter said . "And in a way that enlists the brilliance of the white hatters, rather than waits to learn the lessons of the black hatters."

Yahoo! has offered $24,000 to a security researcher for finding out and reporting three critical security vulnerabilities in its products including Yahoo! Stores and Yahoo!-hosted websites. While testing all the company's application, Mark Litchfield , a bug bounty hunter who often works with different companies, discovered three critical vulnerabilities in Yahoo!'s products. All the three vulnerabilities have now been fixed by Yahoo!. THREE CRITICAL SECURITY VULNERABILITIES The first and most critical vulnerability gives hackers full administrator access to Yahoo!'s e-commerce platform, Yahoo! Small Business , a portal that allows small business owners to create their own web stores through Yahoo! and sell merchandise. According to the researcher, the flaw in the service allowed him to fully administrator any Yahoo store and thereby gain access to customers' personally identifiable information, including names, email addresses, telephone numbers.

Offering cash rewards for vulnerability reports has become something of a norm when it comes to big tech companies these days.  Yahoo has changed its bug bounty policies following a deluge of negative feedback in the wake of the news that ethical hackers were rewarded with $12.50 in gift vouchers for security flaw discoveries. The company unveiled a new program to reward reporters who shed light on bugs and vulnerabilities classified as new, unique and/or high risk issues. Starting October 31, 2013, individuals and firms who report bugs will be rewarded with anything between $150-$15,000. " The amount will be determined by a clear system based on a set of defined elements that capture the severity of the issue ," Director of security, Ramses Martinez, announced . Yahoo denied that its new program was a response to the criticism, saying it was already working on a new bug bounty system before the furore. Martinez begins by labelling himself as the &q

With its latest announcement to increase bug bounty rewards for finding and reporting critical vulnerabilities in the Android operating system, Google yesterday set up a new challenging level for hackers that could let them win a bounty of up to $1.5 million. Starting today, Google will pay $1 million for a "full chain remote code execution exploit with persistence which compromises the Titan M secure element on Pixel devices," the tech giant said in a blog post published on Thursday. Moreover, if someone manages to achieve the same in the developer preview versions of Android, Google will pay an additional $500,000, making the total to $1.5 million—that's 7.5 times more than the previous top Android reward. Introduced within the Pixel 3 smartphones last year, Google's Titan M secure element is a dedicated security chip that sits alongside the main processor, primarily designed to protect devices against the boot-time attacks. In other words, Titan M chip

One week after launching a Bug bounty program by the Kim Dotcom 's new file-storage and sharing service MEGA claims to have fixed seven vulnerabilities. Although Mega hasn't shared how much money and to whom it paid out in the first week. But as promised, it is clear that MEGA paid out thousands of dollars in bug bounties during the first week of its security program. We found bug hunter yesterday (tweeted)- Mr.  Frans Rosén received 1000 Euros in the bug fixing challenge. This tweet was also Re-tweeted by Kim Dotcom later, that confirmed Frans's class III bugs reward. Congratulations @ fransrosen for XSS in #MEGA . Handsome EUR 1000 in Bug Bounty Program twitter.com/fransrosen/sta… — The Hacker News™ (@TheHackersNews) February 10, 2013 In a blog post, Mega explained how it classifies vulnerabilities and their impacts. Vulnerabilities were classified into VI classes, with I being the lowest risk and VI being the highest. Seven qualified bug details are as shown b

Mohamed Ramadan from Attack-Secure discovered a critical vulnerability in Etsy's iPhone application. Etsy is a social commerce website focused on handmade or vintage items as well as art and craft supplies. Any attacker on the same network can sniff traffic (including user password) invisibly without any warning from Etsy app. Its is very similar to the man in the middle attack reported in iPhone Instagram app a few days back. Bug Hunting ! Because Etsy having a Security Bug Bounty Program , so first Mohamed was trying to find a vulnerability in Etsy website , later he found that they have enough good security. Because Etsy mobile apps are eligible in bug bounty program, so next try was on Mobile apps. Mohamed finally  downloaded the latest version 2.2 and installed that on his iPhone 4S with iOS 6 and also on his ipad. Then he configured his Burp Suite proxy 1.5 to listen on all interfaces on port 8080 in invisible mode.  He disabled any firewall and con

If you don't know yet, Microsoft is offerings up to $100,000 in exchange for finding vulnerabilities and exploits in the upcoming Windows 8.1 Preview which is expected to launch on June 26, the same time as the Microsoft Build Developer Conference. Qualifying submissions with accompanying defensive ideas will also be eligible for a BlueHat Bonus worth up to $50,000. " These are super challenging to discover and they require a new technique ," says Mike Reavey, director of Microsoft's Security Response Center. Windows 8.1 is a major update to Microsoft's brand new operating system Windows 8, and given the serious bounty on offer, Microsoft clearly wants to leave nothing to chance as far as securing the operating system is concerned. " Learning about new exploitation techniques earlier helps Microsoft improve security by leaps, instead of capturing one vulnerability at a time as a traditional bug bounty alone would ," he said. Microsoft's senior s

Along with a dream to make Internet access available to everyone across the world, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is working to make the Internet a more secure place as well. Till now, a number of large technology companies have bug bounty programs to reward researchers and cyber enthusiast who contribute in the security of Internet by finding out security holes in software or web platforms, and the social networking giant Facebook is the latest one to do so. Facebook and Usenix have together implemented the Internet Defense Prize — an award recognizing superior quality research that combines a working prototype with great contributions to securing the Internet, Facebook announced Thursday at the annual USENIX Security Symposium in San Diego. Also, Facebook announced the first award under its Internet Defense Prize, and crowned a pair of German researchers for their paper , " Static Detection of Second-Order Vulnerabilities in Web Applications " — a seemingly viabl

1. Spotify Hacked! Change your Password ASAP If you are one of the millions of people around the world who love to listen to music on Spotify, you may need to change your password immediately. Has Spotify been hacked? The company says no, but some Spotify users have claimed their profiles were hijacked, and details were changed without knowledge, including passwords and email addresses, TC  reported . Spotify apparently suffered a security breach that leaked hundreds of Spotify accounts details, including emails, usernames, passwords and account type, which was published last week to the popular anonymous file sharing website Pastebin. Spotify is investigating the Pastebin leaks of Spotify user information. 2. Over 1 Million Android Apps Are Coming to Chrome OS Google is ready to integrate millions of Android applications onto its Chrome OS platform by bringing the entire Play Store to it. Redditor 'TheWiseYoda' first spotted a new option to "Enable And

OpenAI, the company behind the massively popular ChatGPT AI chatbot, has launched a  bug bounty program  in an attempt to ensure its systems are "safe and secure." To that end, it has partnered with the crowdsourced security platform  Bugcrowd  for independent researchers to report vulnerabilities discovered in its product in exchange for rewards ranging from "$200 for low-severity findings to up to $20,000 for exceptional discoveries." It's worth noting that the program does not cover  model safety or hallucination issues , wherein the chatbot is prompted to generate malicious code or other faulty outputs. The company noted that "addressing these issues often involves substantial research and a broader approach." Other prohibited categories are denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, brute-forcing OpenAI APIs, and demonstrations that aim to destroy data or gain unauthorized access to sensitive information beyond what's necessary to highlight the prob

In the past few days, Facebook refused to pay bounty to Khalil Shreateh , the security researcher who used the bug he discovered to post directly on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg 's Timeline after Facebook Security rejected his attempts to report it. Ehraz Ahmed, an independent Security Researcher claimed that he reported a critical vulnerability to the Facebook Security team, which allows the attacker to delete any account from Facebook. But Facebook refuses to Pay Bug Bounty , because he tested flaw once on his friend's account, " I reported this bug to Facebook, I'm really not happy with them. After waiting for such a long time for their reply, they denied it saying that you used this bug only works for test accounts, where as I used it for removing real accounts and now the vulnerability is also fixed after their email." he said on his blog . Video Demonstration of Exploit: Vulnerable  URL : https://www.facebook.com/ajax/whitehat/delete_

How to hack an Instagram account? The answer to this question is difficult to find, but a bug bounty hunter just did it without too many difficulties. Belgian bug bounty hunter Arne Swinnen discovered two vulnerabilities in image-sharing social network Instagram that allowed him to brute-force Instagram account passwords and take over user accounts with minimal efforts. Both brute-force attack issues were exploitable due to Instagram's weak password policies and its practice of using incremental user IDs. "This could have allowed an attacker to compromise many accounts without any user interaction, including high-profile ones," Swinnen wrote in a blog post describing details of both vulnerabilities. Brute-Force Attack Using Mobile Login API Swinnen discovered that an attacker could have performed brute force attack against any Instagram account via its Android authentication API URL, due to improper security implementations. According to his blog post , fo

Last week, Apple finally announced a bug bounty program for researchers and white hat hackers to find and get paid for reporting details of zero-day vulnerabilities in its software and devices. The company offers the biggest payout of $200,000, which is 10 times the maximum reward that Google offers and double the highest bounty paid by Microsoft. But now Apple is going to face competition from a blackhat company named, Exodus Intelligence. Exodus Intelligence is offering more than double Apple's maximum payout for zero-day vulnerabilities affecting the newest versions of iOS. The company is willing to pay more than $500,000 for zero-day vulnerabilities and exploits affecting iOS 9.3 and above. Although Exodus labeled itself as ' Research Sponsorship Program ,' the company actually makes money by buying and selling zero-day vulnerabilities and exploits. On Wednesday, Exodus launched its new bonus structure for the acquisition of details and exploits for zero-day vu

Guess What? Someone just downloaded Twitter's Vine complete source code. Vine is a short-form video sharing service where people can share 6-second-long looping video clips. Twitter acquired the service in October 2012. Indian Bug bounty hunter Avinash discovered a loophole in Vine that allowed him to download a Docker image containing complete source code of Vine without any hassle. Launched in June 2014, Docker is a new open-source container technology that makes it possible to get more apps running on the same old servers and also very easy to package and ship programs. Nowadays, companies are adopting Docker at a remarkable rate. However, the Docker images used by the Vine, which was supposed to be private, but actually was available publically online. While searching for the vulnerabilities in Vine, Avinash used Censys.io – an all new Hacker's Search Engine similar to Shodan – that daily scans the whole Internet for all the vulnerable devices. Using Censys, Avina

Vulnerability coordination and bug bounty platform HackerOne on Friday disclosed that a former employee at the firm improperly accessed security reports submitted to it for personal gain. "The person anonymously disclosed this vulnerability information outside the HackerOne platform with the goal of claiming additional bounties," it  said . "In under 24 hours, we worked quickly to contain the incident by identifying the then-employee and cutting off access to data." The employee, who had access to HackerOne systems between April 4 and June 23, 2022, for triaging vulnerability disclosures associated with different customer programs, has since been terminated by the San Francisco-headquartered company as of June 30. Calling the incident as a "clear violation" of its values, culture, policies, and employment contracts, HackerOne said it was alerted to the breach on June 22 by an unnamed customer, which asked it to "investigate a suspicious vulnerabi

The Annual Pwn2Own Hacking Competition  2015 held in Vancouver is over and participants from all over the world nabbed $557,500 in bug bounties for 21 critical bugs in top four web browsers as well as Windows OS, Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash. During the second and final day of this year's hacking contest, the latest version of all the four major browsers including Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari, were compromised by the two security researchers. Sponsored by HP's Zero Day Initiative program, the Pwn2Own Hacking Competition ran two days at a security conference in Vancouver, Canada. The final highlights for Pwn2Own 2015 are quite impressive: 5 bugs in the Windows operating system 4 bugs in Internet Explorer 11 3 bugs in Mozilla Firefox 3 bugs in Adobe Reader 3 bugs in Adobe Flash 2 bugs in Apple Safari 1 bug in Google Chrome $557,500 USD bounty paid out to researchers The star of the show was South Korean secur

Remember when it took only 13 characters to crash Chrome browser instantly? This time, it takes 16-character simple URL string of text to crash Google Chrome instantly. Yes, you can crash the latest version of Chrome browser with just a simple tiny URL. To do this, all you need to do is follow one of these tricks: Type a 16-character link and hit enter Click on a 16-character link Just put your cursor on a 16-character link Yes, that's right. You don't even have to open or click the malformed link to cause the crash, putting the cursor on the link is enough to crash your Chrome. All the tricks mentioned above will either kill that particular Chrome tab or kill the whole Chrome browser. The issue was discovered by security researcher Andris Atteka , who explained in his blog post that just by adding a NULL char in the URL string could crash Chrome instantly. Atteka was able to crash the browser with a 26 character long string, which is given b