Search results for cyber criminals | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Any occasion that captures public attention – regardless of how sensitive – comes out to be an opportunity for spammers and hackers to snatch users' personal information and spread malware , and the tragedy of the crashed Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 is no exception. According to the U.S. intelligence officials, Malaysia Airline Flight MH17, a Boeing 777 aircraft carrying 283 passengers and 15 crew members, was struck by a ground-to-air missile. So far, it's unclear, whether the missile was launched by the Russian military or pro-Russian separatist rebels. Ukraine and the insurgents blamed each other. Spammers and cybercriminals are quick to take advantage of the tragedy and started spreading malware through the social media websites, abusing the mystery behind the crash of Malaysia Airline Flight MH17. Researchers at the anti-virus firm Trend Micro came across some suspicious tweets written in Indonesian language. The cybercriminals are using the trending #MH17 to lu

After hacking PCs, Cyber criminals have now begun targeting Smartphones with a special piece of malicious software that locks up the devices until the victims pay a ransom to get the keys to unlock the phone, called Ransomware .  Ransomware typically targets users' personal computers and has become a profitable way for cyber criminals to earn money. To deliver the Ransomware malwares to the mobile devices, cyber criminals have started creating malicious software programs that masquerade as antivirus apps or other play store apps, but instead of protecting your smart devices, they lock up your Smartphone until you pay a ransom to unlock it. RANSOMWARE - POLICE &  CRYPTOLOCKER As we reported earlier in news updates, security researchers disclosed various Police ransomware targeting users' personal computers. The ransomware software once installed, cyber criminals attempts to lock the victim's computer hard disk and files from a remote location. Usually

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo

Nation-state driven cyber attacks are routinely conducted on a global scale to defend national sovereignty and project national power. We are living in the cyber era, human conflict is involving also the fifth domain of warfare , the cyberspace . As never before disputes take place with blows of bits, militias of every government are developing cyber capabilities dedicating great effort for the establishment of cyber units . Network security company, FireEye, has released a report titled " World War C: Understanding Nation-State Motives Behind Today's Advanced Cyber Attacks " which describes the effort spent by governments in cyber warfare context, the document analyzes in detail the different approaches adopted by various countries in conducting nation-state driven cyber attacks . Security experts highlight the intensification of state-sponsored attacks for both cyber espionage and sabotage purpose, campaigns such as Moonlight Maze and Titan Rain or the destruc

MUMBAI: Cyber experts say there should be proper guidelines when the court grants bail to those arrested under the Information Technology (IT) Act and fast-track courts for cyber-related cases will help proper convictions. Procedures currently followed to grant bail in cyber cases are similar to those under the Indian Penal Code. "Most of the accused are techsavvy and know the loopholes in the legal system very well," acyber expert said. Despite efforts by the cops, Rizwan Alsulkar managed to file a bail plea and will be out soon. "The time granted by the court to investigate the case was very less. This is not the first time where an accused caught under the IT Act has gone scot-free . In tech-related cases, the cops should get proper time to collect evidence ," a police official said. He added a person can be sentenced to 2-3 years under the IT Act. "However, conviction rate is very poor across the country, hardly going above 10% in the last 10 years."

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

It's not a mystery, every nation is worried of the level of security of its infrastructure, the United States are among the most concerned governments due the high number of cyber-attack against its networks. US Government representative such us former States Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano warned in more than one occasion on the possible consequences of a cyber offensive and declared the necessity to improve the cyber capabilities of the country.  Senators are interested to evaluate the level of protection of nuclear stockpile of foreign governments against cyber attacks, question has been raised after that Pentagon's chief cyber officer admitted to ignore if countries such as Russia or China have adopted efficient countermeasures. Nelson and Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. will request to national intelligence an assessment about the ability of foreign states to safeguard networked

Before Ransomware, Click fraud was one of the popular and efficient ways for cybercriminals to make money and with the explosive growth in the size of the online threats it is still making its way on the Internet. " Click-Fraud " is the practice of deceptively clicking on search ads with the intention of either increasing third-party website revenues or exhausting an advertiser's budget. Besides the search results, we all have seen advertisements placed in the search engine's WebPage. If the visitor clicks the Ad, the advertiser has to pay a fee to the search engine. A problem that has arisen with pay-per-click is results in Click-Fraud. The term " fraud " is used because in either case, the advertiser is paying for a click without receiving any true value. Of course, the number of clicks has to be large enough in order to gain a considerable amount of money, and in order to do that an attacker can use an automated script or malicious program to simulate multiple clicks b

After the Mysterious Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 incident in March 2014 and the shooting of Malaysia Airline Flight MH17 by a ground-to-air missile in July 2014, yesterday AirAsia flight QZ 8501 with 162 people on board found missing by the time it flew from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore after losing contact with air traffic control due to weather, the airline company said Sunday. Since, cybercriminals are known to take advantage of every major incident and any occasion that captures public attention – regardless of how sensitive – comes out to be an opportunity for spammers and hackers to snatch users' personal information and spread malware, and the tragedy of the Missing AirAsia flight QZ 8501 is no exception. Cyber criminals are exploiting the disappearance of Indonesia AirAsia flight QZ 8501 by luring users to websites purporting to offer the latest news in order to steal their personal information. Our team has spotted some posts on social media

Tor network offers users browse the Internet anonymously and is mostly used by activists, journalists to conceal their online activities from prying eyes. But it also has the Dark side, as Tor is also a Deep Web friendly tool that allows hackers and cyber criminals to carry out illicit activities by making themselves anonymous. Kaspersky security researcher reported that Tor network is currently being used to hide 900 botnet and other illegal hidden services, through its 5,500 plus nodes i.e. Server relays and 1,000 exit nodes i.e. Servers from which traffic emerges. These days, Cyber criminals are hosting malware's Command-and-control server on an anonymous Tor network to evade detection i.e., difficult to identify or eliminate. Illegal use of the Tor network boosted up after the launch of the most popular underground Drug Market - Silk road  that also offered arms and malware to their users against Bitcoin , one of the popular crypto currency . ChewBacca , a point-

Like many other security issues that now affect computer users, there is a growing threat known as phishing". Phishing attacks are perpetrated by criminals who send deceptive emails in order to lure someone into visiting a fraudulent web site or downloading malicious software, expressly for stealing sensitive information such as credit card numbers, account information, passwords, etc. Cyber criminals continue to evolve and refine their attack tactics to evade detection and use techniques that work. Spear phishing emails are on the rise because they work. We have notice many times that Spear Phishing Attacks are really Successful in order to compromise Enterprise Networks and Stealing Data. From last one month I was getting mails from an unknown spoofed email id regrading a paypal warning with subject " Your account has been limited until we hear from you ! " Guess what, even I am not using that email for my Paypal account, from here I just judge that it's

In March this year, we reported that the major card distributor companies, VISA and Mastercard are migrating to EMV chip cards , also known as PIN-and-Chip cards. Unlike traditional magnetic stripe payment cards, EMV chip cards generates a unique code for every transaction, making it nearly* impossible for criminals to use the card for counterfeit fraud. But Nothing is perfectly secure, even not the PIN-and-Chip based payment cards. All anti-cloning theories were already proven wrong, when a group of researchers found a way to hack the Credit and Debit cards based on the latest Chip-and-Pin technology. Back in 2012, we reported about a research paper entitled " Chip and Skim: cloning EMV cards with the pre-play attack " published ( old paper ) by team of researchers from the University of Cambridge, UK, who demonstrated that Chip and PIN payment card systems are also vulnerable to Card Cloning. The same team of researchers presented their EVM related research last Mond

NSS Labs issued the report titled " The Known Unknowns " to explain the dynamics behind the market of zero-day exploits. Last week I discussed about the necessity to define a model for " cyber conflict " to qualify the principal issues related to the use of cyber tools and cyber weapons in an Information Warfare context, today I decided to give more info to the readers on cyber arsenals of governments. Governments consider the use of cyber weapons as a coadiuvant to conventional weapons, these malicious application could be used for sabotage or for cyber espionage, they could be used to hit a specifically designed software (e.g. SCADA within a critical infrastructure ) or they could be used for large scale operations infecting thousand of machines exploiting zero-day in common application ( e.g. Java platform, Adobe software ). The zero-day flaw are the most important component for the design of an efficient cyber weapon, governments have recently created dedic

Have you given shed to Zombies in your house? No???? May be you have no idea about it. After Computers, Servers, Routers, Mobiles, Tablets…. Now its turn of your home appliances to be a weapon or a victim of cyber war. Recently Security Researchers from Proofpoint  found more than 100,000 Smart TVs, Refrigerator, and other smart household appliances compromised by hackers to send out 750,000 malicious spam emails. As the ' Internet of Things ' becoming smart and popular it became an easy weapon for cyber criminals to launch large scale of cyber attacks. " The attack that Proofpoint observed and profiled occurred between December 23, 2013 and January 6, 2014, and featured waves of malicious email, typically sent in bursts of 100,000, three times per day, targeting Enterprises and individuals worldwide." Previously, such attacks were only drafted theoretically by researchers, but this is the first such proven attack involved smart household appliances that are used as ' thingB

Smart Devices are growing at an exponential rate and so are the threats to them. After your Computers, Servers, Routers , Mobiles and Tablets, now hackers are targeting your Smart TVs, warns Eugene Kaspersky the co-founder and chief executive of Kaspersky Lab. As the increase in the manufactures of Smart TVs by different companies, it could be estimated that by 2016, over 100 million TVs are expected to be connected to the Internet and in the time it may rise as a profitable fruit for the malware authors and cyber criminals to exploit these devices. The 48 year-old Eugene Kaspersky , one of the world's top technology security experts, has thrown light on the future of Computer Security and warned that  Internet of Things (IoT) such as TVs, Refrigerators, Microwave or dishwashers will necessarily bring undesirable cyber threats to your home environment, because any device connected to the Internet is vulnerable and can be infected. " The threats will dive