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The Indian President Droupadi Murmu on Friday granted assent to the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill ( DPDPB ) after it was unanimously passed by both houses of the parliament last week, marking a significant step towards securing people's information. "The Bill provides for the processing of digital personal data in a manner that recognizes both the rights of the individuals to protect their personal data and the need to process such personal data for lawful purposes and for matters connected therewith or incidental thereto," the Indian government  said . The  long-awaited data protection law  comes months after the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) released a  draft version  of the bill in November 2022. It has been in the making for over five years, with a first draft released in July 2018. A year before, India's Supreme Court  upheld  privacy as a  fundamental right . The legislative framework, which applies ...

Hello my Princes of Peace, Warriors of the Revolution, Princesses of the cause, I want you to take two minutes and watch this video: This video is the epitome of the ignorance and arrogance of governments all over the world in response to our cyber war revolution. As you will see, the power people all gathered to warn themselves and the world of the “threat” of the hackers gangs of teenagers running wild on the internet hacking into governments and threatening our safety. EXCUSE ME?? Just who is threatening who here? The most important thing I want you to know is that this type of whining is happening all over the world, and how it is translating is into cybercrime laws and in the case of the United States, Executive Orders that give the government and law enforcement the right to suppress and deny your right to public information, the right to free speech and the right to protest against the corruption and destruction of government secrecy and shenanigans. Why do you think they ha...

Downfall in the monopoly of propriety software like Microsoft and Apple accelerated after the Snowden revelations of NSA spying, where technology giants like Microsoft, Google, Apple are sharing a bed with the NSA. The UK government is again planning to ditch Microsoft for Open Source and Free alternatives. Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude announced yesterday that they are move away from Microsoft Office, towards open source softwares like  OpenOffice & LibreOffice suites, in an effort to drive down costs and foster greater innovation. UK has spent about £200 million in the last three years for Microsoft’s ubiquitous software suite, but now this migration will save large revenue of the kingdom, according to The Guardian . The cabinet Office minister said, “ We know the best technology and digital ideas often come from small businesses, but too often in the past they were excluded from government work. In the civil service there was a sense that if you hir...

Fuck CISPA - Stop censoring Internet ! -  By:    Patti Galle, Executive Editor The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) H.R. 3532 is a new bill being introduced in Congress that is gunning to blast the ongoing cyber attacks that have occurred since internet users figured out the keyboard could be an effective weapon. If passed through Congress, the bill would allow the government access to personal correspondence of any person of their choosing. Once again, we are being fucked by those nosey neighbors in our government. You should be very mad and very afraid because CISPA is far worse than SOPA and PIPA in its effects on the internet. The wording of this bill is mumbo jumbo, vague and broad. Reading through the nonsense, basically the act would allow Congress to circumvent existing exemptions to online privacy laws, and would allow the monitoring and censorship of any user of the internet. Peeping Toms will be wetting their pants. The real kicker (in ...

A  growing number of threat actors  are using the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war as a lure in various phishing and malware campaigns, even as critical infrastructure entities continue to be heavily targeted. "Government-backed actors from China, Iran, North Korea and Russia, as well as various unattributed groups, have used various Ukraine war-related themes in an effort to get targets to open malicious emails or click malicious links," Google Threat Analysis Group's (TAG) Billy Leonard  said  in a report. "Financially motivated and criminal actors are also using current events as a means for targeting users," Leonard added. One notable threat actor is Curious Gorge, which TAG has attributed to China People's Liberation Army Strategic Support Force (PLA SSF) and has been observed striking government, military, logistics and manufacturing organizations in Ukraine, Russia and Central Asia. Attacks aimed at Russia have singled out several governmental entiti...

The Kerala Government has announced the launch of the Computer Emergency Response Team, Kerala ( CERT-K ) as the nodal agency for monitoring various cyber security related incidents in the State. Chief Minister Shri V S Achuthanandan formally announced the launch of operations today. The agency will function under the Department of Information Technology, Government of Kerala. It was in April 2010 that the Government set up CERT-K in line with the Indian CERT ( CERT-In ), the national nodal agency, to develop expertise in Government and Government Agencies in Kerala for handling cyber attacks and for preparing adequate sectoral contingency plans for handling crisis that may happen due to cyber attack or cyber terrorism. CERT-K will be the state Computer Emergency Response Team for Kerala, operating on behalf and in conjunction with CERT-In. CERT-K will coordinate security efforts and incident response for IT security problems as well as emerging telecom security problems on a stat...

In the most surprising manner, the Chinese government said it arrested criminal hackers behind the massive cyber attack on US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) earlier this year, dismissing its involvement. Three months back, we reported that China arrested a handful of hackers within its borders who were suspected of allegedly stealing commercial secrets from US companies. The arrests took place shortly before China President Xi Jinping visited the United States in September 2015 when both heads of states agreed that neither side will participate in commercial espionage against one another. China: Cyber Criminals Hacked OPM, Not Government Spies Now, those suspected hackers have turned out to be the ones in connection with the OPM hack that resulted in the theft of personal details of more than 21 Million United States federal employees, including 5.6 Million federal employees' fingerprints . Citing an " investigation ", the Chinese governme...

Cybersecurity teams from Microsoft on Saturday disclosed they identified evidence of a new destructive malware operation dubbed " WhisperGate " targeting government, non-profit, and information technology entities in Ukraine amid brewing geopolitical tensions between the country and Russia. "The malware is disguised as ransomware but, if activated by the attacker, would render the infected computer system inoperable," Tom Burt, corporate vice president of customer security and trust at Microsoft, said , adding the intrusions were aimed at government agencies that provide critical executive branch or emergency response functions. Also among those affected by the malware is an IT firm that "manages websites for public and private sector clients, including government agencies whose websites were recently defaced ," Burt noted. The computing giant, which first detected the malware on January 13, attributed the attacks to an emerging threat cluster codenam...

Japanese most popular word processing software ' Ichitaro ' and Multiple Products are vulnerable to a zero day Remote Code Execution Flaw Vulnerability, allowing the execution of arbitrary code to compromise a user's system. According to assigned CVE-2013-5990 ,  malicious attacker is able to gain system access and execute arbitrary code with the privileges of a local user. The vulnerability is caused due to an unspecified error when handling certain document files. " We confirm the existence of vulnerabilities in some of our products. " company blog says. In a blog post, Antivirus Firm Symantec confirmed that in September 2013, they have discovered attacks in the wild attempting to exploit this vulnerability during, detected as  Trojan.Mdropper , which is a variant of  Backdoor.Vidgrab . Researchers mentioned that  Backdoor.Vidgrab variant was used as a payload for a watering hole attack exploiting the Microsoft Internet Explorer Memor...

In 2010 the Indian authorities threatened to shut down BlackBerry's infrastructure unless it agreed to comply with lawful access requirements providing the government a way to intercept messages in order to prevent terrorist attacks. The long time dispute between the Indian government and BlackBerry over monitoring, tracking and interception is now resolved. Blackberry is ready to provide the Indian authorities with a way to lawful intercept consumers' messages sent and received on its platform including mails and peripherals, chats and browsing history on BlackBerry devices. But BlackBerry Enterprise Server has been left out of the interception solution which means corporate emails won't be under scrutiny. According to an internal document of the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), nine out of 10 telecom networks offering Blackberry services were in the process of making it possible for authorities to carry out intercepts. Blackberry train 5 ...

Chinese Government taking strong step against Cyber Crime The Chinese government is working with domestic Internet search engines like Baidu Inc and Sohu.com and financial institutions to prevent phishing attacks on unsuspecting Chinese web users. The Chinese government has announced that it will work together with 10 Chinese search engines. The user IDs, passwords and email addresses of more than 6 million accounts registered on CSDN, a site for programmers were leaked as we reported last week . The popular social-networking site Tianya was also hit by hackers last week. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said on Wednesday it would investigate the hacking incidents. In the U.S. data theft and hacking have become very common over the last few years. Recently, hacker group Anonymous hacked into the servers of security firm Stratfor and stole credit card and other personal details on thousands of users of the site and its services. The U.S. isn't alone in f...

One of the ' The Hacker News ' reader inform us today about porn content on some Indian Government websites. After analyzing such websites, we came across more than 30 sub domains belongs to ' entegramam.gov.in ' . Where ' entegramam' means "My village" and all sub domains of this website are names of the different cities of Kerala state. The websites are in Malayalam language and most of the sites are powered by Joomla and Drupal (older vulnerable versions) with discussion forums on them. On our further analyze we found that time stamp of the Porn articles posted on forum dated back to " 2012/08/30 16:00 ".  That means, Government websites hosting Child Porn content from last four months and authorities or  the moderators of the website are not aware about the issue. On a simple Google search, one can found all such pages : site:gov.in "nude"  for further reports and analyzing. Google also giving notification...

Last week we noticed a rise in cyber attacks particularly - website Defacement attacks on many governments and organizations of different countries by the hackers around the world. Targeted countries include Singapore, Mexico, Philippines, Australia, Egypt, United States, Syria and many more. Out of all these targets, most controversial were Philippines and Australia, hacked by Activist group Anonymous. Last Sunday, Anonymous hackers from Indonesia defaced hundreds of websites belonging to the Australian Government , saying the action was in response to reports of spying by Australia. The websites, defaced with a message reading " Stop Spying on Indonesia ". We have shared the list of all targeted website on a pastebin note . In a separate incident, Anonymous hackers defaced more than 38 Philippine Government websites, and called on the public to support an anti-corruption protest “ Million Mask March ” at the Batasang Pambansa on Novem...

Yahoo! has broke its silence and explained why it handed over its users’ data to United States federal officials, thereby promising to expose those court documents which ordered the snooping. The US government threatened Internet giant with a $250,000 fine per day several years ago if it failed to comply with National Security Agency ’s notorious PRISM Surveillance program, according to unclassified court documents released by Yahoo! on Thursday. " The released documents underscore how we had to fight every step of the way to challenge the US Government’s surveillance efforts ," the company's general counsel Ron Bell said on Yahoo's Tumblr page . " At one point, the US Government threatened the imposition of $250,000 in fines per day if we refused to comply. " The documents released by Yahoo! shed new lights on the NSA’s secret surveillance program PRISM, which was previously leaked from the agency’s confidential documents provided by Global su...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered five distinct activity clusters linked to a persistent threat actor known as Blind Eagle between May 2024 and July 2025. These attacks, observed by Recorded Future Insikt Group, targeted various victims, but primarily within the Colombian government across local, municipal, and federal levels. The threat intelligence firm is tracking the activity under the name TAG-144. "Although the clusters share similar tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) such as leveraging open-source and cracked remote access trojans (RATs), dynamic domain providers, and legitimate internet services (LIS) for staging, they differ significantly in infrastructure, malware deployment, and other operational methods," the Mastercard-owned company said . Blind Eagle has a history of targeting organizations in South America since at least 2018, with the attacks reflecting both cyber espionage and financially driven motivations. This is evidenced in their ...

We came across so many revelations of sensitive government and corporate data on the Internet these days, but what's the accuracy of that information leaked by unknown actors? Security researchers have discovered new evidence of one such sophisticated global espionage and disinformation campaign with suspected ties to the Russian government that's been aimed to discredit enemies of the state. Although there is no definitive proof of Russian government's involvement in the campaign, there is "overlap" with previously reported cyber espionage activities tied to a Russia-backed hacking group well known as APT28 . APT28 — also known as Fancy Bear, Sofacy, Sednit, and Pawn Storm — is the same group which was responsible for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) breach. The group has been operating since at least 2007 and has alleged tied to the Russian government. A new report, titled Tainted Leaks , published this week by the Citizen Lab at the Univers...

From today, every phone call you make, every text message you send and every email you write will compulsorily be tracked by the government agencies under a new metadata retention scheme. Yes, you heard right. If you are a citizen of Australia with a mobile phone and an Internet connection, your digital activity will be recorded. As the government's new data retention law comes into effect, the Australian telecommunications companies will now keep large amounts of your telecommunications metadata for two years. The law has allegedly been implemented to protect the country against organized terrorist and criminals, like every government agencies including the United States' intelligence agency NSA and British intelligence agency GCHQ claim. But… This new scheme vastly expands the retention of personal data, which has triggered a debate among Australians as it is a major invasion of privacy . WHAT IS BEING COLLECTED? Until today, data retention by ...