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Security researchers revealed that series of " Watering Hole " has been conducted exploiting a IE8 zero-day vulnerability to target U.S. Government experts working on nuclear weapons research. The news is not surprising but it is very concerning, the principal targets of the attacks are various groups of research such as the components of U.S. Department of Labor and the U.S. Department of Energy, the news has been confirmed by principal security firms and by Microsoft corporate. The flaw has been used in a series of "watering hole" attacks, let’s remind that "Watering Hole" is a technique of attack realized compromising legitimate websites using a “ drive-by ” exploit. The attackers restrict their audience to a individuals interested to specific content proposed by targeted website, in this way when the victim visits the page a backdoor Trojan is installed on his computer. The website compromised to exploit the IE8 zero-day is the Dep...

The official website of a prominent Israel-based, Middle East foreign policy-focused think tank, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) , has been compromised and abused by attackers to distribute malware . The Israeli think tank website JCPA – an independent research institute focusing on Israeli security, regional diplomacy and international law – was serving the Sweet Orange exploit kit via drive-by downloads to push malware onto the computers of the website's visitors by exploiting software vulnerabilities, researchers from security firm Cyphort reported on Friday. The Sweet Orange is one of the most recently released web malware exploitation kits, available for sale at selected invite-only cyber crime friendly communities and has been around for quite some time. However, Sweet Orange has also disappeared but in October 2013, shortly after the arrest of Paunch, the author of BlackHole , experts observed a major increase in the use of Sweet Orange. The ...

The official website of the popular cross-platform JavaScript library jQuery (jquery.com) has been compromised and redirecting its visitors to a third-party website hosting the RIG exploit kit , in order to distribute information-stealing malware. JQuery is a free and open source JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML. It is used to build AJAX applications and other dynamic content easily. The popular JavaScript library is used by 30 percent of websites, including 70 percent of the top 10,000 most visited websites. James Pleger , Director of Research at Risk management software company RiskIQ , reported yesterday that the attack against jQuery.com web servers launched for a short period of time on the afternoon of September 18th. So, the users who visited the website on September 18th may have infected their system with data-stealing malware by redirecting users to the website hosting RIG. Pleger urged those who visited the site durin...

Humankind had come a long way from the time when the Internet became mainstream. What started as a research project ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) funded by DARPA has grown exponentially and has single-handedly revolutionized human behavior. When WWW (world wide web) came into existence, it was meant to share information over the Internet, from there part through natural evolution and part through webonomics driving innovations, Internet & www has metamorphosized into the lifeblood of the world. It is hard to imagine now how the world functioned before the time of the Internet. It has touched each aspect of human life and is now critical for day to day existence. No business today can exist without an online presence. It is no more just a medium to share information, but world economics runs over the web nowadays. Organizations, governments, and people all depend on this. New warfares will not happen in the real world but would be fought over the cyber...

Exploit kits are one of the dangerous cyber crime tool, where The Phoenix Exploit Kit is a good example of exploit packs used to exploit vulnerable software on the computers of unsuspecting Internet users. The Phoenix Exploit Kit is available for a base price of $2,200 in underground market by its malware author or developer.  Like other exploit kits , Phoenix also developed to exploit browser-based  vulnerabilities in outdated and insecure versions of browser plugins like Java, and Adobe Flash and Reader. Developer of Phoenix is known by nickname AlexUdakov on several forums. According to new investigation report published by  krebsonsecurity , AlexUdakov was also member of a forum called Darkode , whose administrator accounts were compromised few weeks before and that the intruders were able to gain access to private communications of the administrators.  Intruders was able to view full profiles and database of Dar...

A New York-based online ad network company AppNexus, that provides a platform specializing in real-time online advertising, has again been spotted as the origin of a recent "malvertising" campaign that makes use of the Angler Exploit Kit to redirect visitors to malicious websites hosting the Asprox malware. AppNexus servers process 16 billion ad buys per day, making it the biggest reach on the open web after Google. Back in May, AppNexus was serving malicious ads targeting Microsoft’s Silverlight platform. The world’s largest Internet Video Subscription service Netflix runs on Silverlight, and because of its popularity, hackers have been loading exploit kits with Silverlight. As part of this campaign, users of several high-profile websites including Java.com, Deviantart.com, TMZ.com, Photobucket.com, IBTimes.com, eBay.ie, Kapaza.be and TVgids.nl , last week were redirected to websites serving malicious advertisements that infected visitors by installing botnet ma...

Hackers have been found exploiting a pair of critical security vulnerabilities in one of the popular social media sharing plugins to take control over WordPress websites that are still running a vulnerable version of the plugin. The vulnerable plugin in question is Social Warfare which is a popular and widely deployed WordPress plugin with more than 900,000 downloads. It is used to add social share buttons to a WordPress website or blog. Late last month, maintainers of Social Warfare for WordPress released an updated version 3.5.3 of their plugin to patch two security vulnerabilities—stored cross-site scripting (XSS) and remote code execution (RCE)—both tracked by a single identifier, i.e., CVE-2019-9978 . Hackers can exploit these vulnerabilities to run arbitrary PHP code and take complete control over websites and servers without authentication, and then use the compromised sites to perform digital coin mining or host malicious exploit code. However, the same day when Soc...

If for some reason your WordPress-based website has not yet been automatically updated to the latest version 5.1.1, it's highly recommended to immediately upgrade it before hackers could take advantage of a newly disclosed vulnerability to hack your website. Simon Scannell, a researcher at RIPS Technologies GmbH, who previously reported multiple critical vulnerabilities in WordPress, has once again discovered a new flaw in the content management software (CMS) that could potentially lead to remote code execution attacks. The flaw stems from a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) issue in the Wordpress' comment section, one of its core components that comes enabled by default and affects all WordPress installations prior to version 5.1.1. Unlike most of the previous attacks documented against WordPress, this new exploit allows even an "unauthenticated, remote attacker" to compromise and gain remote code execution on the vulnerable WordPress websites. "...

The eBay owned popular digital payment and money transfer service, PayPal has been found to be vulnerable to a critical web application vulnerability that could allow an attacker to take control over users' PayPal account with just a click , affecting more than 156 millions PayPal users. An Egyptian security researcher, Yasser H. Ali has discovered  three critical vulnerabilities in PayPal website including CSRF , Auth token bypass and Resetting the security question, which could be used by cybercriminals in the targeted attacks. Cross-Site Request Forgery ( CSRF or XSRF) is a method of attacking a website in which an attacker need to convince the victim to click on a specially crafted HTML exploit page that will make a request to the vulnerable website on their behalf. Mr.Yasser demonstrated the vulnerability step-by-step in the Proof-of-Concept (PoC) video using a single exploit that combines all the three vulnerabilities. According to the demo, using ...

The RIG exploit kit (EK) touched an all-time high successful exploitation rate of nearly 30% in 2022, new findings reveal. "RIG EK is a financially-motivated program that has been active since 2014," Swiss cybersecurity company PRODAFT  said  in an exhaustive report shared with The Hacker News. "Although it has yet to substantially change its exploits in its more recent activity, the type and version of the malware they distribute constantly change. The frequency of updating samples ranges from weekly to daily updates." Exploit kits are programs used to distribute malware to large numbers of victims by taking advantage of known security flaws in commonly-used software such as web browsers. The fact that  RIG EK  runs as a service model means threat actors can financially compensate the RIG EK administrator for installing malware of their choice on victim machines. The RIG EK operators primarily employ malvertising to ensure a high infection rate and large-scale...

The  three zero-day flaws  addressed by Apple on September 21, 2023, were leveraged as part of an iPhone exploit chain in an attempt to deliver a spyware strain called  Predator  targeting former Egyptian member of parliament Ahmed Eltantawy between May and September 2023. "The targeting took place after Eltantawy publicly  stated his plans  to run for President in the 2024 Egyptian elections," the Citizen Lab  said , attributing the attack with high confidence to the Egyptian government owing to it being a known customer of the commercial spying tool. According to a joint investigation conducted by the Canadian interdisciplinary laboratory and Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG), the mercenary surveillance tool is said to have been delivered via links sent on SMS and WhatsApp. "In August and September 2023, Eltantawy's Vodafone Egypt mobile connection was persistently selected for targeting via network injection; when Eltantawy visited certain we...

Who else didn't see this coming? It was so obvious as I stressed earlier that the  Let's Encrypt free HTTPS certificates would not just help legitimate website operators to encrypt its users' traffic, but also help criminals to bother innocent users with malware through secure sites. Let's Encrypt allows anyone to obtain free SSL/TLS ( Secure Socket Layer/Transport Layer Security ) certificates for their web servers that encrypt all the Internet traffic passed between a server and users. Let's Encrypt is recognized by all major browsers, including Google's Chrome, Mozilla's Firefox and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The organization started offering Free HTTPS certs to everyone from last month, and it is very easy for anyone to set up an HTTPS website in a few simple steps ( How to Install Free SSL Cert ). However, the most bothersome part is that Let's Encrypt free SSL certs are not only used by website owners to secure its...

Next time when you see an advertisement of your favorite pair of shoes on any website, even if it is legitimate, just DO NOT CLICK ON IT. …Because that advertising could infect you in such a way that not just your system, but every device connected to your network would get affected. A few days ago, we reported about a new exploit kit, dubbed Stegano , that hides malicious code in the pixels of banner advertisements rotating on several high profile news websites. Now, researchers have discovered that attackers are targeting online users with an exploit kit called DNSChanger that is being distributed via advertisements that hide malicious code in image data. Remember DNSChanger? Yes, the same malware that infected millions of computers across the world in 2012. DNSChanger works by changing DNS server entries in infected computers to point to malicious servers under the control of the attackers, rather than the DNS servers provided by any ISP or organization. So, wheneve...

Cyberattacks on small and midsized companies in 2019 cost $200,000 per company on average, mercilessly putting many of them out of business, says CNBC in its analysis of a recent Accenture report. In light of the global cybersecurity skills shortage, the number is set to soar in 2020. Solely in the UK, over 50,000 British SMEs could collapse next year following a cyberattack. This article brings a list of free tools that are already being used to combat these alarming challenges and enabling SMEs to arm themselves against a wide range of cyber offenders. Website Security Test with GDPR and PCI DSS Compliance Scan The problem: It would be hard to come across an SME without a website, or at least a web page on the Internet. Such websites are habitually poorly protected, becoming low-hanging fruit for cybercriminals. Even if the website does not store or handle any payment transactions or otherwise sensitive information, once breached, access to it can be sold in Dark Web mark...