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The huge cache of internal files recently leaked from the controversial Italian surveillance software company Hacking Team has now revealed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) purchased surveillance software from the company. The leaked documents contains more than 1 Million internal emails, including emails from FBI agent who wanted to unmask the identity of a user of Tor , the encrypted anonymizing network widely used by activists to keep their identities safe, but also used to host criminal activities. Unmasking Tor User In September last year, an FBI agent asked Hacking Team if the latest version of its Remote Control System (RCS), also known as Galileo - for which the company is famous for, would be capable to reveal the True IP address of a Tor user. The FBI agent only had the proxy IP address of the target, as according to FBI, the target may be using Tor Browser Bundle (TBB) or some other variant. So, the agent wanted to infect the target...

Hacking Team , the Italy-based spyware company that sells spying software to law enforcement agencies worldwide, says the company has always operated with the law and regulation in an ethical manner. However, there was only one Violation of Law in this entire event, and that is – " the massive cyber attack on the Hacking Team. " company stated. The recent hack on Hacking Team exposed nearly 500GB of massive internal documents including internal emails, hacking tools, zero-day exploits , surveillance tools, source code for Spyware and a spreadsheet listing every government client with date of purchase and amount paid. Hacking Team Hack and Media Reports: The attack on Hacking Team was really huge in every sense. The team finally shows its disappointment with media on its hacking incident saying, the company that helps government fight crimes is being treated as the culprits, and the criminals who attacked the company are not. " Had a media company ...

Are you sure the WhatsApp app you are using on your Android device is legitimate, even if it's working perfectly as intended? ...Or the JioTV, AppLock, HotStar, Flipkart, Opera Mini or Truecaller app—if you have installed any of these? I'm asking this because cybersecurity researchers just yesterday revealed eye-opening details about a widespread Android malware campaign wherein attackers silently replaced installed legitimate apps with their malicious versions on nearly 25 million mobile phones. Now the important question here is how they're doing it and why? According to researchers at Check Point, attackers are distributing a new kind of Android malware that disguises itself as innocent-looking photo editing, adult entertainment, or gaming apps and available through widely used third-party app stores. Dubbed Agent Smith , the malware takes advantage of multiple Android vulnerabilities, such as the  Janus flaw and the Man-in-the-Disk flaw , and injects malic...

As digging deeper and deeper into the huge Hacking Team data dump , security researchers are finding more and more source code, including an advanced Android Hacking Tool. Yes, this time researchers have found a source code to a new piece of weaponized android malware that had the capability to infect millions of Android devices even when users are running latest versions of the android mobile operating system. Trend Micro researchers found that the Italian spyware company was selling RCSAndroid (Remote Control System Android) , which they says, is one of the "most professionally developed and sophisticated" pieces of Android malware a.k.a Android hacking tool they have ever seen. RCSAndroid is a sophisticated, real-world surveillance and hacking tool that provides even unskilled hackers to deploy one of the world's more advanced surveillance suites for Google's mobile operating system Android. List of Creepy Features of Android Hacking Tool ...

Security researchers have discovered a new Mac malware allegedly developed by APT28 Russian cyber espionage group who is believed to be responsible for 2016 presidential election hacking scandal. A new variant of the X-Agent spyware is now targeting Apple macOS system that has previously been used in cyber attacks against Windows, iOS, Android, and Linux devices. The malware is designed to steal web browser passwords, take screenshots of the display, detect system configurations, execute files and exfiltrate iPhone backups stored on the computer. The X-Agent malware is tied to Russian hacking group known as APT28 — also known as Fancy Bear, Sofacy, Sednit, and Pawn Storm — that has been operating since at least 2007 and is allegedly linked to the Russian government. "Our past analysis of samples known to be linked to APT28 group shows a number of similarities between the Sofacy/APT28/Sednit Xagent component for Windows/Linux and the Mac OS binary that currently forms...

The alleged Russian hacker, who was arrested by the Czech police in Prague last October on suspicion of massive 2012 data breach at LinkedIn, can be extradited to either the United States or Russia, a Czech court ruled on Tuesday. Yevgeniy Aleksandrovich Nikulin , a 29-years-old Russian national, is accused of allegedly hacking not just LinkedIn , but also the online cloud storage platform Dropbox , and now-defunct social-networking company Formspring. However, he has repeatedly denied all accusations. Nikulin was arrested in Prague on October 5 by the Czech police after Interpol issued an international arrest warrant against him. Nikulin appeared at a court hearing held inside a high-security prison in Prague on Tuesday and emaciated after eight months in solitary confinement. The court ruling, pending appeals, left the final decision in the hands of Czech Justice Minister Robert Pelikan, who can approve extradition to one of the countries and block the other. The United ...

Last Week someone just hacked the infamous Hacking Team , The Italy-based cyber weapons manufacturer and leaked a huge trove of 400GB internal data , including: Emails Hacking tools Zero-day exploits Surveillance tools Source code for Spyware A spreadsheet listing every government client with date of purchase and amount paid Hacking Team is known for its advanced and sophisticated Remote Control System (RCS) spyware , also known as Galileo , which is loaded with lots of zero-day exploits and have ability to monitor the computers of its targets remotely. Today, Trend Micro security researchers found that the Hacking Team " uses a UEFI  (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface)  BIOS Rootkit to keep their Remote Control System (RCS) agent installed in their targets' systems ." That clearly means, even if the user reinstalls the Operating System, formats the hard disk, and even buys a new hard disk, the agents are implanted after Microsoft Windows is...

Silence APT , a Russian-speaking cybercriminal group, known for targeting financial organizations primarily in former Soviet states and neighboring countries is now aggressively targeting banks in more than 30 countries across America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Active since at least September 2016, Silence APT group's most recent successful campaign was against Bangladesh-based Dutch-Bangla Bank, which lost over $3 million during a string of ATM cash withdrawals over a span of several days. According to a new report Singapore-based cybersecurity firm Group-IB shared with The Hacker News, the hacking group has significantly expanded their geography in recent months, increased the frequency of their attack campaigns, as well as enhanced its arsenal. The report also describes the evolution of the Silence hacking group from "young and highly motivated hackers" to one of the most sophisticated advanced persistent threat (APT) group that is now posing threats to bank...

As Japan gears up for the upcoming 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo for the next year, the country needs to brace itself for sophisticated cyberattacks, especially from state-sponsored hackers. Microsoft has issued a short notice, warning about a new wave of highly targeted cyberattacks by a group of Russian state-sponsored hackers attempting to hack over a dozen anti-doping authorities and sporting organizations around the world. The attacks are originating from the 'Strontium' Russian hacking group, widely known as Fancy Bear or APT28, and are believed to be linked to the upcoming 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. The Fancy Bear hacking group, also known as APT28, Sofacy, X-agent , Sednit , Sandworm , and Pawn Storm, is believed to be linked to Russian military intelligence agency GRU and has been in operation since at least 2007. Over these past three decades, the group has been credited to many high profile hacking incidents, like hacking the US presidential elections...

If you are a hacker, you might have enjoyed the NSA's private zero-day exploits , malware and hacking tools that were leaked last month. But the question is: How these hacking tools ended up into the hands of hackers? It has been found that the NSA itself was not directly hacked, but a former NSA employee carelessly left those hacking tools on a remote server three years ago after an operation and a group of Russian hackers found them, sources close to the investigation told Reuters . The leaked hacking tools, which enable hackers to exploit vulnerabilities in systems from big vendors like Cisco Systems, Juniper, and Fortinet, were dumped publicly online by the group calling itself " The Shadow Brokers ." NSA officials have also admitted to the FBI that their careless employee acknowledged the error shortly afterward, and hence the agency was aware of its operative's mistake from last three years. But instead of warning the affected companies that their c...

Yesterday WikiLeaks published thousands of documents revealing top CIA hacking secrets , including the agency's ability to break into iPhones, Android phones, smart TVs, and Microsoft, Mac and Linux operating systems. It dubbed the first release as Vault 7 . Vault 7 is just the first part of leak series “ Year Zero ” that WikiLeaks will be releasing in coming days. Vault 7 is all about a covert global hacking operation being run by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). According to the whistleblower organization, the CIA did not inform the companies about the security issues of their products; instead held on to security bugs in software and devices, including iPhones, Android phones, and Samsung TVs, that millions of people around the world rely on. One leaked document suggested that the CIA was even looking for tools to remotely control smart cars and trucks, allowing the agency to cause "accidents" which would effectively be "nearly undetectable assas...

Phishing is still one of the widely used strategies by cybercriminals and espionage groups to gain an initial foothold on the targeted systems. Though hacking someone with phishing attacks was easy a decade ago, the evolution of threat detection technologies and cyber awareness among people has slowed down the success of phishing and social engineering attacks over the years. Since phishing is more sort of a one-time opportunity for hackers before their victims suspect it and likely won't fall for the same trick again, sophisticated hacking groups have started putting a lot of effort, time and research to design well-crafted phishing campaigns. In one such latest campaign discovered by cybersecurity researchers at Check Point, a Chinese hacking group, known as Rancor , has been found conducting very targeted and extensive attacks against Southeast Asian government entities from December 2018 to June 2019. What's interesting about this ongoing 7-month long campaign is...

The Iranian threat actor tracked as APT34 has been linked to a new phishing attack that leads to the deployment of a variant of a backdoor called  SideTwist . “APT34 has a high level of attack technology, can design different intrusion methods for different types of targets, and has supply chain attack capability,” NSFOCUS Security Labs  said  in a report published last week. APT34, also known by the names Cobalt Gypsy, Hazel Sandstorm (formerly Europium), Helix Kitten, and OilRig, has a  track record  of targeting telecommunications, government, defense, oil and financial services verticals in the Middle East since at least 2014 via spear-phishing lures that culminate in the deployment of various backdoors. One of the key traits of the hacking outfit is its ability to create new and updated tools to minimize the odds of detection and gain a foothold on compromised hosts for extended periods of time. SideTwist was  first documented  as used by AP...

Microsoft has released patches to fix 67 security flaws , including one zero-day bug in Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) that it said has come under active exploitation in the wild. Of the 67 vulnerabilities, 11 are rated Critical and 56 are rated Important in severity. This includes 26 remote code execution flaws, 17 information disclosure flaws, and 14 privilege escalation flaws. The patches are in addition to 13 shortcomings addressed by the company in its Chromium-based Edge browser since the release of last month's Patch Tuesday update . The vulnerability that has been weaponized in real-world attacks concerns a remote code execution in WebDAV ( CVE-2025-33053 , CVSS score: 8.8) that can be triggered by deceiving users into clicking on a specially crafted URL. The tech giant credited Check Point researchers Alexandra Gofman and David Driker for discovering and reporting the bug. It's worth mentioning that CVE-2025-33053 is the first zero-day vulnerab...