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Securing Passwords with Bcrypt Hashing Function

Securing Passwords with Bcrypt Hashing Function

Apr 10, 2014
Passwords are the first line of defense against cyber criminals. It is the most vital secret of every activity we do over the internet and also a final check to get into any of your user account, whether it is your bank account, email account, shopping cart account or any other account you have. We all know storing passwords in clear text in your database is ridiculous. Many desktop applications and almost every web service including, blogs, forums eventually need to store a collection of user data and the passwords, that has to be stored using a hashing algorithm. Cryptographic hash algorithms MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512, SHA-3 are general purpose hash functions, designed to calculate a digest of huge amounts of data in as short a time as possible. Hashing is the greatest way for protecting passwords and considered to be pretty safe for ensuring the integrity of data or password. The benefit of hashing is that if someone steals the database with hashed passwords, they o
Apple Weakens iOS 10 Backup Encryption; Now Can Be Cracked 2,500 Times Faster

Apple Weakens iOS 10 Backup Encryption; Now Can Be Cracked 2,500 Times Faster

Sep 23, 2016
After the iPhone encryption battle between Apple and the FBI , Apple was inspired to work toward making an unhackable future iPhones by implementing stronger security measures even the company can't hack. Even at that point the company hired one of the key developers of Signal — one of the world's most secure, encrypted messaging apps — its core security team to achieve this goal. But it seems like Apple has taken something of a backward step. Apple deliberately weakens Backup Encryption For iOS 10 With the latest update of its iPhone operating system, it seems the company might have made a big blunder that directly affects its users' security and privacy. Apple has downgraded the hashing algorithm for iOS 10 from "PBKDF2 SHA-1 with 10,000 iterations" to "plain SHA256 with a single iteration," potentially allowing attackers to brute-force the password via a standard desktop computer processor. PBKDF2 stands for Password-Based Key Deri
Navigating the Threat Landscape: Understanding Exposure Management, Pentesting, Red Teaming and RBVM

Navigating the Threat Landscape: Understanding Exposure Management, Pentesting, Red Teaming and RBVM

Apr 29, 2024Exposure Management / Attack Surface
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,
Dropbox Hacked — More Than 68 Million Account Details Leaked Online

Dropbox Hacked — More Than 68 Million Account Details Leaked Online

Aug 31, 2016
Hackers have obtained credentials for more than 68 Million accounts for online cloud storage platform Dropbox from a known 2012 data breach. Dropbox has confirmed the breach and already notified its customers of a potential forced password resets, though the initial announcement failed to specify the exact number of affected users. However, in a selection of files obtained through sources in the database trading community and breach notification service Leakbase , Motherboard found around 5GB of files containing details on 68,680,741 accounts, which includes email addresses and hashed (and salted) passwords for Dropbox users. An unnamed Dropbox employee verified the legitimacy of the data. Out of 68 Million, almost 32 Million passwords are secured using the strong hashing function " BCrypt , " making difficult for hackers to obtain users' actual passwords, while the rest of the passwords are hashed with the SHA-1 hashing algorithm . These password hashes als
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This cheat sheet covers best practices with actionable items in Infrastructure security, code security, secrets management, access and authentication, and monitoring and response.
LastPass Admits to Severe Data Breach, Encrypted Password Vaults Stolen

LastPass Admits to Severe Data Breach, Encrypted Password Vaults Stolen

Dec 23, 2022 Password Management / Data Breach
The  August 2022 security breach  of LastPass may have been more severe than previously disclosed by the company. The popular password management service on Thursday revealed that malicious actors obtained a trove of personal information belonging to its customers that include their encrypted password vaults by using data siphoned from the earlier break-in. Among the data stolen are "basic customer account information and related metadata including company names, end-user names, billing addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, and the IP addresses from which customers were accessing the LastPass service," the company  said . The August 2022 incident, which  remains  a subject of an ongoing investigation, involved the miscreants accessing source code and proprietary technical information from its development environment via a single compromised employee account. LastPass said this permitted the unidentified attacker to obtain credentials and keys that were subseque
Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights Policy Hacked, Password was "DOG" ?

Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights Policy Hacked, Password was "DOG" ?

Oct 08, 2012
Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy website ( www.hks.harvard.edu/cchrp/ ) was hacked last week  and then silently fixed by the administrator without giving Reply/Credit to the Whitehat Hacker who reported the vulnerability. The Hack incident was performed in 3 Phases as described below: Phase 1: A Hacker , with nickname " FastFive" posted a few sql injection vulnerable Educational sites on a famous Hacking Forum last week which included the SQLi vulnerable link for the Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights Policy website, as you can see in the list in the above screenshot taken by me. Phase 2 : Almost 100's of Hackers have seen the post from " FastFive " and they got some juicy information for their next targets. One of them named, " Vansh " successfully exploit the Harvard's site and  extracted the database onto his computer. He Found the username and Password from the table and tried to login on the Admin access panel location
Five Steps to Mitigate the Risk of Credential Exposure

Five Steps to Mitigate the Risk of Credential Exposure

Sep 29, 2022
Every year, billions of credentials appear online, be it on the dark web, clear web, paste sites, or in data dumps shared by cybercriminals. These credentials are often used for account takeover attacks, exposing organizations to breaches, ransomware, and data theft.  While CISOs are aware of growing identity threats and have multiple tools in their arsenal to help reduce the potential risk, the reality is that existing methodologies have proven largely ineffective. According to the  2022 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report , over 60% of breaches involve compromised credentials.  Attackers use techniques such as social engineering, brute force, and purchasing leaked credentials on the dark web to compromise legitimate identities and gain unauthorized access to victim organizations' systems and resources.  Adversaries often leverage the fact that some passwords are shared among different users, making it easier to breach multiple accounts in the same organization. Some emp
Boost Your Personal Security With These Killer 2019 Black Friday and Cyber Monday Deals

Boost Your Personal Security With These Killer 2019 Black Friday and Cyber Monday Deals

Nov 22, 2019
If you're like most consumers, you're probably looking forward to the upcoming Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale events. Who wouldn't want to get all sorts of products and services at massive discounts? But while most consumers are typically eyeing personal gadgets and entertainment appliances, you may want to consider scoring deals on personal security software and devices. Everyone's exposed to both digital and real-world threats these days, so investing in capable security solutions is a must. These tools are often expensive, and you should take advantage of discounts and sales to boost your privacy and personal security. As such, we have compiled some of the best deals that can help you better protect yourself. Here are four of the best deals on personal security products and services that you shouldn't miss: PC Security: Reason Antivirus Despite today's growing number of hacking incidents, most users don't invest in their digital s
New Admin Takeover Vulnerability Exposed in Synology's DiskStation Manager

New Admin Takeover Vulnerability Exposed in Synology's DiskStation Manager

Oct 18, 2023 Vulnerability / Data Security
A medium-severity flaw has been discovered in Synology's DiskStation Manager ( DSM ) that could be exploited to decipher an administrator's password and remotely hijack the account. "Under some rare conditions, an attacker could leak enough information to restore the seed of the pseudorandom number generator (PRNG), reconstruct the admin password, and remotely take over the admin account," Claroty's Sharon Brizinov  said  in a Tuesday report. The flaw, assigned the identifier CVE-2023-2729, is rated 5.9 for severity on the CVSS scoring scale. The flaw was addressed by Synology as part of  updates  released in June 2023. The problem is rooted in the fact that the software uses a weak random number generator that relies on the JavaScript  Math.random() method  to programmatically construct the admin password for the network-attached storage (NAS) device. Referred to as insecure randomness, it  arises  when a function that can produce predictable values, or doe
Cloud computing best for password hacking !

Cloud computing best for password hacking !

Nov 20, 2010
On-demand cloud computing is a wonderful tool for companies that need some computing capacity for a short time, but don't want to invest in fixed capital for long term. For the same reasons, cloud computing can be very useful to hackers.  A lot of hacking activities involve cracking passwords , keys or other forms of brute force that are computationally expensive but highly parallelizable. For a hacker, there are two great sources for on-demand computing: botnets made of consumer PCs and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) from a service provider. Either one can deliver computing on-demand for the purpose of brute force computation. Botnets are unreliable, heterogeneous and will take longer to "provision." But they cost nothing to use and can scale to enormous size. Researchers have found botnets composed of hundreds of thousands of PCs. A commercial cloud computing offering will be faster to provision, have predictable performance and can be billed to
Facebook CEO Zuckerberg's Twitter, Pinterest accounts Hacked! And the Password was...

Facebook CEO Zuckerberg's Twitter, Pinterest accounts Hacked! And the Password was...

Jun 06, 2016
The man who runs the biggest social network and continuously implements new security measures to boost its billion users security, himself failed to follow basics of Internet security for his own online accounts. Yes, I'm talking about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg , who had his Twitter and Pinterest accounts compromised on Sunday. The hacker group from Saudi Arabia, dubbed OurMine , claimed responsibility for the hack and guess how the group did it? Thanks to the LinkedIn data breach ! The hackers tweeted that they found Zuck's account credentials in the recent LinkedIn data breach, from which they took his SHA1-hashed password string and then broke it and tried on several social media accounts. Also Read: Hacker Removed Zuckerberg's Facebook Cover Photo The group, which has more than 40,000 Twitter followers, then successfully broke into Zuck's Twitter ( @finkd ) and Pinterest profile and defaced its banners with its logo as well as tweeted out some offens
Crowd-Funding site Kickstarter Hacked! It's time to change your Password

Crowd-Funding site Kickstarter Hacked! It's time to change your Password

Feb 16, 2014
If you have an account at the popular crowd funding site Kickstarter , it's time to change your account's password. Kickstarter's CEO Yancey Strickle r says that the company has been hacked by an unknown hacker earlier this week. Kickstarter said in a blog post that no credit card information was stolen in Data Breach , but users' personal information has been compromised and they also haven't found evidence of unauthorized activities on accounts. Data accessed and stolen by hackers included usernames, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers and encrypted passwords of the users. Facebook usernames and logins were not compromised for those who use that log-in system to get on Kickstarter. According to a Kickstarter's team member, the older users' passwords were encrypted using salted SHA1  and newer users' passwords are encrypted with a stronger hashing algorithm called ' bcrypt '. Hackers could attempt to crack the encrypted pa
Oracle Database stealth password cracking vulnerability

Oracle Database stealth password cracking vulnerability

Sep 20, 2012
Oracle suffered with serious vulnerability in the authentication protocol used by some Oracle databases. This Flaw enable a remote attacker to brute-force a token provided by the server prior to authentication and determine a user's password. A researcher - Esteban Martinez Fayo, a researcher with AppSec tomorrow will demonstrate a proof-of-concept attack. Martinez Fayo and his team first reported the bugs to Oracle in May 2010. Oracle fixed it in mid-2011 via the 11.2.0.3 patch set, issuing a new version of the protocol. " But they never fixed the current version, so the current 11.1 and 11.2 versions are still vulnerable ," Martinez Fayo says, and Oracle has no plans to fix the flaws for version 11.1. The first step in the authentication process when a client contacts the database server is for the server to send a session key back to the client, along with a salt. The vulnerability enables an attacker to link a specific session key with a specific password hash. Th
Flaw in Microsoft Outlook Lets Hackers Easily Steal Your Windows Password

Flaw in Microsoft Outlook Lets Hackers Easily Steal Your Windows Password

Apr 12, 2018
A security researcher has disclosed details of an important vulnerability in Microsoft Outlook for which the company released an incomplete patch this month —almost 18 months after receiving the responsible disclosure report. The Microsoft Outlook vulnerability (CVE-2018-0950) could allow attackers to steal sensitive information, including users' Windows login credentials, just by convincing victims to preview an email with Microsoft Outlook, without requiring any additional user interaction. The vulnerability, discovered by Will Dormann of the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC), resides in the way Microsoft Outlook renders remotely-hosted OLE content when an RTF (Rich Text Format) email message is previewed and automatically initiates SMB connections. A remote attacker can exploit this vulnerability by sending an RTF email to a target victim, containing a remotely-hosted image file (OLE object), loading from the attacker-controlled SMB server. Since Microsoft Outlook a
Cracking WiFi Passwords By Hacking into Smart Kettles

Cracking WiFi Passwords By Hacking into Smart Kettles

Oct 21, 2015
Hackers have come after your phone, your computer, and your car . Now hackers are coming after your home refrigerators, Smart TVs , and eventually KETTLES . Yes, your kettle turns out good for more than just heating up water or making coffee for you– they are potentially a good way for hackers to breach your wireless network. Also Read:   How to Weaponize your Cat to Hack Neighbours' Wi-Fi Passwords . Ken Munro, a security researcher at PenTest Partners, has managed to hack into an insecure iKettle , which was proclaimed " the world's first WiFi kettle " by its developers, and stolen a home's Wi-Fi password. Besides boiling water, the iKettle can connect to a user's home WiFi network. It also comes inbuilt with an Android and iOS app that allows the user to switch on the kettle and boil the water from other location. However, the biggest security flaw resides in the Android iKettle app that keeps the kettle's password as the defa
For Better Privacy & Security, Change these iOS 9 Settings Immediately

For Better Privacy & Security, Change these iOS 9 Settings Immediately

Sep 17, 2015
iOS 9 is out, and it's time to update your iPhone or iPad to the latest version of Apple's mobile operating system. The new iOS is better, faster, and more efficient than its predecessors, with a number of new features and improvements including enhanced multitasking for iPad, Proactive Assistant Siri, new Low Power mode, Transit directions in Maps and many more. You need to download iOS 9 right away. But, after installing it on your iOS device, you should immediately change these security settings to protect your privacy. Besides various new features, iOS 9 also comes with a handful of security and privacy improvements. So, before doing anything like loading new apps, customizing your phone, or syncing your data, you need to check these settings – and if necessary, changed. 1. Locking the Door Boost iOS 9 Security by Setting a Longer 6-digit Passcode When you set up an iOS device, you are asked to create a passcode to encrypt your entire iPho
Zoom Bug Allowed Snoopers Crack Private Meeting Passwords in Minutes

Zoom Bug Allowed Snoopers Crack Private Meeting Passwords in Minutes

Jul 30, 2020
Popular video conferencing app Zoom recently fixed a new security flaw that could have allowed potential attackers to crack the numeric passcode used to secure private meetings on the platform and snoop on participants. Zoom meetings are by default protected by a six-digit numeric password, but according to Tom Anthony, VP Product at SearchPilot who identified the issue , the lack of rate limiting enabled "an attacker to attempt all 1 million passwords in a matter of minutes and gain access to other people's private (password protected) Zoom meetings." It's worth noting that Zoom began requiring a passcode for all meetings back in April as a preventive measure to combat Zoom-bombing attacks, which refers to the act of disrupting and hijacking Zoom meetings uninvited to share obscene and racist content. Anthony reported the security issue to the company on April 1, 2020, along with a Python-based proof-of-concept script, a week after which Zoom patched the flaw
How to Crack Android Full Disk Encryption on Qualcomm Devices

How to Crack Android Full Disk Encryption on Qualcomm Devices

Jul 01, 2016
The heated battle between Apple and the FBI provoked a lot of talk about Encryption – the technology that has been used to keep all your bits and bytes as safe as possible. We can not say a lot about Apple's users, but Android users are at severe risk when it comes to encryption of their personal and sensitive data. Android's full-disk encryption can be cracked much more easily than expected with brute force attack and some patience, affecting potentially hundreds of millions of mobile devices. And the worst part: There may not be a full fix available for current Android handsets in the market. Google started implementing Full Disk Encryption on Android by default with Android 5.0 Lollipop. Full disk encryption (FDE) can prevent both hackers and even powerful law enforcement agencies from gaining unauthorized access to device's data. Android's disk encryption, in short, is the process of encoding all user's data on an Android device before ever wri
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