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I have an Android phone with a five different gmail accounts configured in it. But what if any one of them get compromised via phishing, malware or any other way? The Hacker would be able to access my Google account and obviously Google Play Store account too, which allows anyone to install any Android application remotely into my phone without my knowledge and confirmation… What if someone compromises large number of Google accounts and trigger mass installation of a spying or malware app remotely with just one click???? Yes, this was exactly what the National Security Agency (NSA) had done under its widely spread Global surveillance program. A new top-secret document obtained from the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA and its closest allies planned to hijack Google and Samsung app stores to infect smartphones with spyware. The operation was launched by the Network Tradecraft Advancement Team, including spy agents from each of the coun...

US become victim of Indian spy unit, Apple & RIM deny their role ! A recently leaked memo reveals that American and Canadian based company's Apple, Research in Motion and Nokia may have helped the government of India spy on U.S. agencies in order to receive larger shares of the overall Indian cell phone market. Last week, an Indian hacker crew successfully broke into a secured Indian military government network. The group, the Lords of Dharmaraja (who posted up outdated Norton security source code last week) posted documents that infer Apple, Nokia, and Research In Motion gave the Indian government backdoor access to their devices in exchange for mobile phone market rights. The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) has asked for an investigation after hackers posted. " We are aware of these reports and have contacted relevant authorities to investigate the matter ," said USCC spokesman Jonathan Weston on Monday. " We are unable to make furthe...

Smartphones, Smart TVs, Smart Watches, Cell Phone Towers, Messaging services… but now, What's Next? Smart Toys? Yes, probably. Tech expert is warning that 'Smart Toys' could now be used by the government intelligence agencies to spy on suspects. As part of the Investigatory Powers Bill , children's connected toys could be the next item to be used by the government in an effort to spy on people, claims Antony Walker, deputy CEO of technology trade association techUK. The Snooper's Charter – Government's Spy Eyes While speaking to the UK parliament's Commons Science and Technology Committee, Walker warned MPs of how the Draft Investigatory Powers Bill could be abused to turn any Internet-connected device into a snooping tool. The draft Investigatory Powers Bill (or the Snooper's Charter ) would make it the legal duty of Internet service providers (ISPs) to help and assist the British intelligence agencies in hacking into various connected devices if...

I am quite sure that you must be syncing your Smartphone with your Computers for transferring files and taking backup of your device. If you are using windows operating system and Android devices, then it's a bad news for you, because FireEye Security Researchers have identified a new piece of windows malware that can also infects your Android Devices. During an investigation of a targeted attack on a US based financial institution, researchers spotted a new version of Windows Remote Access Trojan (RAT) called ' Win-Spy Software Pro v16 ', a spying and monitoring tool.  WinSpy was embedded in macro documents to kick off a spam campaign via a spear phishing email. " The recent surge in Android-based RATs such as Dendroid and AndroRAT shows a spike in the interest of malicious actors to control mobile devices.  GimmeRAT  is another startling example of malicious actors venturing into the Android ecosystem ," security firm said. The Researchers dubbe...

Why US Aircrafts Drop Spy Devices in Syrian ? Last week Iranian engineer claim to hijack U.S. drone by hacking GPS system using GPS spoofing. On December 14, residents of a small town in northern Syria reported seeing unidentified aircraft circling overhead, and dropping several small items attached to mini-parachutes , which entered Syrian airspace through the Turkish border. The gadgets, pictured here, look suspiciously like surreptitious listening devices. Residents say the question is :  who dropped them, and why? The sources explained that the aircrafts that dropped the devices were American, not Turkish. They added that the aircrafts took off from Incirlik air base, southeast of Adana, which is 130 km away from the city of Afrin, mainly to belong to the Kurdish nationalists. " This action aims at eavesdropping on communications between the Syrian troops, locating their spots accurately and collecting any information about it in order to provide them to U...

CIA Chief : We will Spy on You Through Your TV According to the Central Intelligence Agency, the organization says spies won't have to plant bugs in homes, businesses or other places where they want to spy because of coming advances in computer and Internet technology. The CIA claims that when you download a Netflix film or listen to web radio, they will know exactly what you are doing. Spies will no longer have to plant bugs in your home, the rise of 'connected' gadgets controlled by apps will mean that people 'bug' their own homes, says CIA director David Petraeus. The CIA says it is very possible the agency and others will be able to "read" these and other gadgets from outside the places they want to monitor via the Internet and perhaps even with radio waves outside your home. Once upon a time, spies had to place a bug in your chandelier to hear your conversation. With the rise of the smart home, you'd be sending tagged, geolocated data that a spy...

Duqu malware was created to spy on Iran's nuclear program A Report by Kaspersky Lab Expert, Ryan Naraine says that the DUQU malware was created to spy on Iran's nuclear program. IrCERT (Iran's Computer Emergency Response Team) Duqu is an upgraded version of "Stars".  Back in April this year, The Iranian government says it is being targeted by a new piece of malware aimed at its federal computers. Also its confirm that some of the targets of Duqu were hit on April 21, using the same method involving CVE-2011-3402, a kernel level exploit in win32k.sys via embedded True Type Font (TTF) file. In both cases a malware similar to Stuxnet found in systems and stealing information. Do you think these relate to each other ? If we are to believe these reports, then it means that Duqu was created in order to spy on Iran's nuclear program. Another interesting part of information is that more than 10 nations have supplied intelligence suggesting Iran ...

Have you ever used Shodan search engine? A publicly available service crawls the Internet looking for connected devices and list their open ports, services running, system information etc. Shodan search engine is majorly used by Hackers, developers, students and anyone else with a sense of curiosity to find Internet-facing vulnerable systems with open ports and insecure mechanisms for authentication and authorization i.e. Servers, Internet-Connected Cameras, Traffic Lights, And SCADA Systems. According to latest revelation from the whistleblower Edward Snowden , British spy agency GCHQ – counterpart of NSA – apparently uses their own port scanning service to target internet-connected systems in at least 27 countries, in an attempt to potentially exploit them. In top-secret documents published by Heise on Friday, the Port-scan is a part of the "Hacienda" program which scans for open ports on all public-facing servers to find out vulnerable applications running on the...

If you are using WhatsApp to chit-chat with your friends or relatives, then you should be careful about sharing your location with them using WhatsApp 'Location Share' feature. No doubt, WhatsApp communication between your phone and company's server is now encrypted with SSL, which means whatever you are sharing with your friends, is secured from the man-in-the-middle attacks . But the extremely popular instant messaging service for Smartphones that delivers more than 1 billion messages per day has another serious security issue. According to Researchers at UNH Cyber Forensics Research & Education Group , WhatsApp location sharing service could expose your location to hackers or Spy Agencies. While sharing the location on WhatsApp users need to first locate themselves on Google Map within the app window, as shown:  Once selected, WhatsApp fetches the location and thumbnail (an image) from the Google Map service to share it as the message icon, but unfortunatel...

Julian Assange interview on Spy Files " Give me liberty or give me death " is a statement made famous by Patrick Henry but could easily have been stated by the new patriot of justice, Julian Assange. Julian Assange is a journalist and activist best known as the founder and public face of WikiLeaks, the Internet based publisher making headlines around the world by releasing secret or suppressed information revealing government and corporate misconduct.Assange and WikiLeaks have, in the words of 60 Minutes " Rattled the worlds of journalism, diplomacy, and national security. " In December 2011, WikiLeaks released the documents from a database containing hundreds of documents from contractors in what WikiLeaks calls the "mass surveillance industry." or " Spy Files ". 1.) According to Spy Files released by WikiLeaks, intelligence agencies, military forces and police authorities "silently... and secretly intercepted calls and had taken over computers without the help ...

Users are still dealing with the Yahoo's massive data breach that exposed over 1 Billion Yahoo accounts and there's another shocking news about the company that, I bet, will blow your mind. Yahoo might have provided your personal data to United States intelligence agency when required. Yahoo reportedly built a custom software programmed to secretly scan all of its users' emails for specific information provided by US intelligence officials, according to a report by Reuters . The tool was built in 2015 after company complied with a secret court order to scan hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail account at the behest of either the NSA or the FBI, according to the report that cites three separate sources who are familiar with the matter. According to some experts, this is the first time when an American Internet company has agreed to such an extensive demand by a spy agency's demand by searching all incoming emails, examining stored emails or scanning a small number...

Security researchers at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have worked for almost a decade to target security keys used to encrypt data stored on Apple devices in order to break the system. Citing the top-secret documents obtained from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, The Intercept blog reported that among an attempt to crack encryption keys implanted into Apple's mobile processor, the researchers working for CIA had created a dummy version of Xcode . CIA's WEAPON TO HACK APPLE DEVICES Xcode is an Apple's application development tool used by the company to create the vast majority of iOS apps. However using the compromised development software, CIA, NSA or other spies agencies were potentially allowed to inject surveillance backdoor into programs distributed on Apple's App Store. In addition, the custom version of Xcode could also be used to spy on users, steal passwords, account information, intercept communications, and disable core security features of...

The use of mobile devices in government environments concerns the secret service of any states, cyber espionage more often exploits the mobile platforms. Mobile devices are reason of great concern for governments, they have a great computational capability, huge memories to store our personal data, GPS to follow our movements and are equipped with a camera and microphone to increase our experience in mobility. The advent of monitoring apps like Mobistealth has already brought the possibility of using the aforementioned features to keep tabs on a target device irrespective of the geographic distance to light. However, it has also raised red flags over the possibility of exploitation of such features by attackers for cyber espionage . The problem is well known to governments that are adopting necessary countermeasures especially following the recent revelations about the U.S. Surveillance program . The UK Government has decided to ban iPads from the Cabinet over foreign e...

If you own Apple's MacBook, you should cover up it's webcam, because there's a possibility someone could be watching you. Like most webcams, the MacBook also has a tiny green light lets you know that the webcam is active, but it's possible for malware to disable this important privacy feature on older Mac computers ( models released before 2008 ). Matthew Brocker and Stephen Checkoway , students from Johns Hopkins University created a proof-of-concept app called " iSeeYou " that confirmed that MacBook iSight webcams can spy on their users without the warning light being activated. A young man recently pleaded guilty in court to extortion after he performed a remote hack on Miss Teen USA's webcam to secretly collect nude photos. It was revealed through court papers that the FBI has the ability to do the same thing with a variety of current laptops including Apple products. To make it possible, they created a modified version of the iSight firmware and t...

If your smartphones, tablets, smart refrigerators, smart TVs and other smart devices are smart enough to make your life easier, their smart behavior could also be leveraged by hackers to steal data, invade your privacy or spy on you, if not secured properly. One such experiment has recently been performed by a team of student hackers, demonstrating a new attack method to turn smart devices into spying tools that could track your every move, including inferring sexual activity. Dubbed CovertBand , the attack has been developed by four researchers at the University of Washington's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, and is so powerful that it can record what a person is doing through a wall. The CovertBand tracking system makes use of the built-in microphones and speakers—found in smartphones, laptops, tablets, smart assistant and other smart devices—as a receiver to pick up reflected sound waves, tracking the movements of anyone near the audio sourc...

A team of hackers at the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency, allegedly used a Windows hacking tool against its targets to gain persistent remote access. As part of its Vault 7 leaks , WikiLeaks today revealed details about a new implant developed by the CIA, dubbed AngelFire , to target computers running Windows operating system. AngelFire framework implants a persistent backdoor on the target Windows computers by modifying their partition boot sector. AngelFire framework consists five following components: 1. Solartime — it modifies the partition boot sector to load and execute the Wolfcreek (kernel code) every time the system boots up. 2. Wolfcreek — a self-loading driver (kernel code that Solartime executes) that loads other drivers and user-mode applications 3. Keystone — a component that utilizes DLL injection technique to execute the malicious user applications directly into system memory without dropping them into the file system. 4. BadMFS — a covert ...