Search results for government | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

While the Indian people continue to struggle for Net Neutrality, a new problem surrounded them with the release of the latest policy for ' National Encryption Policy ' by the Indian Government. If you delete your WhatsApp Messages or Emails that you receive or send before 90 days, it might be a crime and you can End-up In Jail. If the new National Encryption Policy implements that come up with weird suggestions — one should not delete WhatsApp conversation, Gmail or any email for 90 days, it would be an Internet Disaster. With the aim to 'provide confidentiality of information' and ensure 'protection of sensitive or proprietary information', the draft policy, proposed by an so-called ' expert panel ' from the Department of Electronics and Information Technology ( DeitY ) , requires: Access to your Private Data The government wants to have access to all your encrypted information including your personal emails, text and voice messages, and data stored in a privat

The Transparent Tribe threat actor has been linked to a new campaign aimed at Indian government organizations with trojanized versions of a two-factor authentication solution called Kavach . "This group abuses Google advertisements for the purpose of malvertising to distribute backdoored versions of Kavach multi-authentication (MFA) applications," Zscaler ThreatLabz researcher Sudeep Singh  said  in a Thursday analysis. The cybersecurity company said the advanced persistent threat group has also conducted low-volume credential harvesting attacks in which rogue websites masquerading as official Indian government portals were set up to lure unwitting users into entering their passwords. Transparent Tribe, also known by the monikers APT36, Operation C-Major, and Mythic Leopard, is a suspected Pakistan  adversarial collective  that has a  history  of striking Indian and Afghanistan entities. The latest attack chain is not the first time the threat actor has set its sights o

In today's digital world, where connectivity is rules all, endpoints serve as the gateway to a business's digital kingdom. And because of this, endpoints are one of hackers' favorite targets.  According to the IDC,  70% of successful breaches start at the endpoint . Unprotected endpoints provide vulnerable entry points to launch devastating cyberattacks. With IT teams needing to protect more endpoints—and more kinds of endpoints—than ever before, that perimeter has become more challenging to defend. You need to improve your endpoint security, but where do you start? That's where this guide comes in.  We've curated the top 10 must-know endpoint security tips that every IT and security professional should have in their arsenal. From identifying entry points to implementing EDR solutions, we'll dive into the insights you need to defend your endpoints with confidence.  1. Know Thy Endpoints: Identifying and Understanding Your Entry Points Understanding your network's

The Indian Government is planning to ban the use of US based email services like Gmail for official communications to increase the security of confidential government information. The recent disconcerting reports that that India was being spied upon by American intelligence agencies has opened an all new chapter in the cyber security space. As leaked by former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, that NSA involved in widespread spying and surveillance activities across the globe. The Government plans to send a formal notification to about 500,000 employees across the country, asking them to stick to the official email service provided by India's National Informatics Centre, Time of India Reported. The fact that several government officers in top positions use their Gmail IDs for official communications i.e. Several senior government officials in India, including ministers of state for communications & IT Milind Deora and Kruparani Killi, have t

The National Security Agency , part of the U.S. military reportedly has a direct line into the systems of some of the world's biggest Web and tech companies, i.e Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Skype. The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM , 6-year-old program which allows officials to collect real-time information and as well as stored material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, according to reports in the Washington Post . Project PRISM may be the first of its kind and also  GCHQ , Britain's equivalent of the NSA, also has been secretly gathering intelligence from the same internet companies through an operation set up by the NSA. Later confirmed by the White House and members of Congress as saying that the government routinely seeks information in its fight to thwart domestic and international terrorism. Other services that are reportedly part of PRISM include PalTalk, Skype, and AOL.

The Russian government is offering almost 4 million ruble which is approximately equal to $111,000 to the one who can devise a reliable technology to decrypt data sent over the Tor , an encrypted anonymizing network used by online users in order to hide their activities from law enforcement, government censors, and others. The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) issued a notice on its official procurement website, originally posted on July 11, under the title " шифр «ТОР (Флот)» " ;which translates as " cipher 'TOR' (Navy) " an open call for Tor-cracking proposals whose winner will be chosen by August 20. The MIA specifically wants researchers to " study the possibility of obtaining technical information about users and users' equipment on the Tor anonymous network, " according to a translated version of the Russian government's proposal. Only Russian nationals and companies are allowed to take part in the competition " in o

Cybersecurity researchers today disclosed a new supply-chain attack targeting the Vietnam Government Certification Authority (VGCA) that compromised the agency's digital signature toolkit to install a backdoor on victim systems. Uncovered by Slovak internet security company ESET early this month, the "SignSight" attack involved modifying software installers hosted on the CA's  website  ("ca.gov.vn") to insert a spyware tool called  PhantomNet  or Smanager. According to ESET's telemetry, the breach happened from at least July 23 to August 16, 2020, with the  two installers  in question — "gca01-client-v2-x32-8.3.msi" and "gca01-client-v2-x64-8.3.msi" for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows systems — tampered to include the backdoor. "The compromise of a certification authority website is a good opportunity for APT groups, since visitors are likely to have a high level of trust in a state organization responsible for digital signatures

SOPA in US and Censorship in India : A cocktail to destroy Internet Freedom ! As US senators mull over the SOPA(Stopping Online Piracy Act) and PIPA(Protecting Intellectual Property Act) bills, the world stands witness to a historic moment. Almost all big IT companies like Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Mozilla, Godaddy, etc are speaking in one unanimous voice against SOPA and Internet Censorship. The draconian provisions of SOPA/PIPA are bound to create the deathbed of internet freedom and free speech, and if a careful reading of the proposed legislation is done, one realizes that it is likely to have the same impact on India. In the disguise of protecting copyrights and stopping piracy its completely clear that the US government is trying to assert its control over the free flow of information on internet which is some time uncomfortable to them. Giving power to Attorney General to direct search engines like Google to filter particular search results, or asking an ISP to manipulat

Soon in December this year, India's new surveillance program - Centralized Monitoring System (CMS) will be able to analyze all telecommunications and Internet communications in India by the government and its agencies.  This means that everything we say or text over the phone, write, post or browse over the Internet will be centrally monitored by Indian authorities. Law enforcement and government agencies intercept, monitor, and analyze communications in order to uncover leads and build the evidence needed to neutralize terrorism and crime. Few days back, BlackBerry has given the necessary permissions for the Indian government to intercept messages sent from BlackBerry devices . According to latest reports - Verint Systems , Israel's cyber intelligence solutions provider , are soon to get a contract from the Indian government to track encrypted communication services such as Gmail, Yahoo . mail, BlackBerry services, Skype and so on. " Verint's leade

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 to personal data coll

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 hired a

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 our asses) is

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 Memory