Search results for data hashing | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Data security is reinventing itself. As new data security posture management solutions come to market, organizations are increasingly recognizing the opportunity to provide evidence-based security that proves how their data is being protected. But what exactly is data security posture, and how do you manage it?  Data security posture management  (DSPM) became mainstream following the publication of Gartner® Cool Vendors™ in Data Security—Secure and Accelerate Advanced Use Cases. In that  report , Gartner1 seems to have kicked off the popular use of the data security posture management term and massive investment in this space by every VC. Since that report, Gartner has identified at least 16 DSPM vendors, including Symmetry Systems. What is Data Security Posture? There certainly is a lot being marketed and published about data security posture management solutions themselves, but we first wanted to dig into what is data security posture?  Symmetry Systems define...

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...

While passwords remain the first line of defense for protecting user accounts against unauthorized access, the methods for creating strong passwords and protecting them are continually evolving. For example, NIST password recommendations are now prioritizing password length over complexity. Hashing, however, remains a non-negotiable. Even long secure passphrases should be hashed to prevent them from being completely exposed in the event of a data breach – and never stored in plaintext. This article examines how today's cyber attackers attempt to crack hashed passwords, explores common hashing algorithms and their limitations, and discusses measures you can take to protect your hashed passwords, regardless of which algorithm you are using. Modern password cracking techniques Malicious actors have an array of tools and methods at their disposal for cracking hashed passwords. Some of the more widely used methods include brute force attacks, password dictionary attacks, hybrid attacks...

There is no doubt that data breaches are on the rise. Hardly a day goes without headlines about any significant data breach. According to the latest ' Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2016 ' report published by UK government, two-thirds of the biggest firm in the UK have experienced at least a cyber attacks or data breaches within the past 12 months. Here's today, I am writing about top 4 data breaches reported in last 24 hours, threatened your data privacy and online security. 1. Kiddicare Hacked! 794,000 Accounts Leaked Kiddicare has admitted that the company has suffered a data breach, which led to the theft of sensitive data belonging to 794,000 users, including phone numbers and residential addresses. Kiddicare, company that sells child toys and accessories across the United Kingdom, became aware of the data breach after its customers started receiving suspicious text messages – most likely part of a phishing campaign – that attempted to pilfer them to click on a li...

A massive data breach at the popular online role-playing game 'Town of Salem' has reportedly impacted more than 7.6 million players, the game owner BlankMediaGames (BMG) confirmed Wednesday on its online forum. With the user base of more than 8 million players, Town of Salem is a browser-based game that enables gamers (which range from 7 to 15 users) to play a version of the famous secret role game Town, Mafia, or Neutrals. The data breach was first discovered and disclosed on December 28 when a copy of the compromised Town of Salem database was anonymously sent to DeHashed, a hacked database search engine. Over 7.6 Million Users Accounts Compromised The database included evidence of the server compromise and access to the complete gamer database which contained 7,633,234 unique email addresses (most-represented of the email providers being Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo.com). After analyzing the complete database, DeHashed disclosed that the compromised data contained...

Passwords are rarely appreciated until a security breach occurs; suffice to say, the importance of a strong password becomes clear only when faced with the consequences of a weak one. However, most end users are unaware of just how vulnerable their passwords are to the most common password-cracking methods. The following are the three common techniques for cracking passwords and how to defend against them. Brute force attack Brute force attacks are straightforward yet highly effective techniques for cracking passwords. These attacks involve malicious actors using automated tools to systematically try every possible password combination through repeated login attempts. While such tools have existed for years, the advent of affordable computing power and storage has made them even more efficient today, especially when weak passwords are used. How it works When it comes to brute force attacks, malicious actors employ a range of tactics—from simple brute force attacks that test ev...

Only after a few days of Uber admitting last year's data breach of 57 million customers , the popular image sharing site disclosed that it had suffered a major data breach in 2014 that compromised email addresses and passwords of 1.7 million user accounts. In a blog post published on Friday, Imgur claimed that the company had been notified of a three-year-old data breach on November 23 when a security researcher emailed the company after being sent the stolen data. Imgur Chief Operating Officer (COO) then alerted the company's founder and the Vice President of Engineering to the issue before began working to validate that the data belonged to Imgur users. After completing the data validation, the company confirmed Friday morning that the 2014 data breach impacted approximately 1.7 million Imgur user accounts (a small fraction of its 150 million user base) and that the compromised information included only email addresses and passwords. Since Imgur has never asked fo...

Over a month ago, The Hacker News reported about the Dropbox Hack , where hackers had managed to steal more than 68 Million Dropbox accounts in a data breach that was initially disclosed by the online cloud storage platform in 2012. Although the initial announcement failed to reveal the true scale of the data breach, it was in late August when the breach notification service LeakBase obtained files containing details on over 68 million accounts, which contains email addresses and hashed passwords for Dropbox users. Last month, a hacker was selling this Dropbox data dump on a Dark Web marketplace known as TheRealDeal for around $1200 . However, Motherboard recently discovered that a researcher has just uploaded the full dump of hacked Dropbox database online. Download DropBox Data Dump Here: Thomas White, known online as The Cthulhu, uploaded Monday the full Dropbox data dump onto his website in a move, as he claims, to help security researchers examine the data breach. ...

Another Day, Another Data Breach! If you love to listen to music online and have an account on Last.fm website, your account details may have compromised in a data breach that leaked more than 43 Million user personal data online. Last.fm was hacked in March of 2012 and three months after the breach, London-based music streaming service admitted to the incident and issued a warning, encouraging its users to change their passwords. But now it turns out that the Last.fm data breach was massive, and four years later the stolen data have surfaced in the public. The copy of the hacked database obtained by the data breach indexing website LeakedSource contained 43,570,999 user records that were originally stolen from Last.fm on March 22, 2012, according to timestamps in the database. The leaked records include usernames, hashed passwords, email addresses, the date when a user signed up to the website, and ad-related data. Wait! Have you visited The Hacker News early this wee...

At its developer conference held earlier this week in New York, the MongoDB team announced the latest version of its database management software that includes a variety of advanced features, including Field Level Encryption, Distributed Transactions, and Wildcard Indexes. The newly introduced Field Level Encryption (FLE), which will be available in the upcoming MongoDB 4.2 release, is an end-to-end encryption feature that encrypts and decrypts sensitive users' data on the client-side, preventing hackers from accessing plaintext data even if the database instance left exposed online or the server itself gets compromised. Almost every website, app, and service on the Internet today usually encrypt (particularly "hashing") only users' passwords before storing them into the databases, but unfortunately left other sensitive information unencrypted, including users' online activity data and their personal information. Moreover, even if there is an encryption...

If you ever ordered food from Zomato, You should be Worried! India's largest online restaurant guide Zomato confirmed today that the company has suffered a data breach and that accounts details of millions of its users have been stolen from its database. In a blog post published today, the company said about 17 Million of its 120 Million user accounts from its database were stolen. What type of information? The stolen account information includes user email addresses as well as hashed passwords. Zomato claims that since the passwords are encrypted, it cannot be decrypted by the attackers, so the "sanctity of your password is intact." It seems Zomato is downplaying the threat or unaware of the fact that these days hackers are using cloud computing, which enables them to decrypt even a 15-18 character passwords within a few hours. So there's no guarantee your passwords will not eventually get cracked. Update: As shown in the above screenshot taken ...

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) had published a document on Jan 2011 that the SHA-1 algorithm will be risky and should be disallowed after year 2013, but it was recently noticed by Netcraft experts that NIST.gov website itself were using 2014 dated SSL certificate with SHA-1 hashes. " From January 1, 2011 through December 31, 2013, the use of SHA-1 is deprecated for digital signature generation. The user must accept risk when SHA-1 is used, particularly when approaching the December 31, 2013 upper limit. SHA-1 shall not be used for digital signature generation after December 31, 2013. " NIST in the document. Digital signatures facilitate the safe exchange of electronic documents by providing a way to test both the authenticity and the integrity of information exchanged digitally. Authenticity means when you sign data with a digital signature, someone else can verify the signature, and can confirm that the data originated from you and was not...

You can tell the story of the current state of stolen credential-based attacks in three numbers: Stolen credentials were the #1 attacker action in 2023/24, and the breach vector for 80% of web app attacks . (Source: Verizon). Cybersecurity budgets grew again in 2024, with organizations now spending almost $1,100 per user (Source: Forrester).  Stolen credentials on criminal forums cost as little as $10 (Source: Verizon). Something doesn't add up. So, what's going on? In this article, we'll cover: What's contributing to the huge rise in account compromises linked to stolen creds and why existing approaches aren't working.  The world of murky intelligence on stolen credentials, and how to cut through the noise to find the true positives. Recommendations for security teams to stop attackers from using stolen creds to achieve account takeover. Stolen credential-based attacks are on the rise There's clear evidence that identity attacks are now the #1 cyber threat f...