The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Cybersecurity News Site — Index Page

If you're not already particularly picky about who you friend on Facebook, you might want to think about rejiggering those privacy settings. It's not the backdoor access that the FBI has been pushing for, but US District Judge William Pauley III has now ruled that it and other law enforcement agencies are entitled to view your Facebook profile if one of your "friends" gives them permission to do so. As GigaOm reports, a New York City federal judge ruled in a recent racketeering trial that it's legal for police to view your Facebook profile if one of your friends grants them permission. Better start sniffing out the rats on your friends list. That's because all of that data that you think is personal really isn't that personal after all, according to the Judge. " Colon's legitimate expectation of privacy ended when he disseminated posts to his friends because those friends were free to use the information however the wanted including sharing it with the Government

A team of researchers has discovered a weakness in the command-and-control infrastructure of one of the major DDoS toolkits, Dirt Jumper, that enables them to stop attacks that are in progress. The command and control (C&C) servers of the Dirt Jumper DDoS toolkit can be compromised and, in principle, completely taken over via SQL injection holes. SQL injection involves inserting database instructions in unexpected and unprotected places, effectively taking charge of a web application's database from the outside. According to the Prolexic report, the open source penetration testing tool sqlmap can be used to dump the contents of Dirt Jumper's database configuration file in a matter of seconds, revealing administrative usernames and passwords. The company's research includes Dirt Jumper v.3, Pandora and Di BoT. According to Prolexic, the Dirt Jumper family of DDoS botnet kits was originally authored by an individual who uses the handle 'sokol.' Various versions of Dir

Identities now transcend human boundaries. Within each line of code and every API call lies a non-human identity. These entities act as programmatic access keys, enabling authentication and facilitating interactions among systems and services, which are essential for every API call, database query, or storage account access. As we depend on multi-factor authentication and passwords to safeguard human identities, a pressing question arises: How do we guarantee the security and integrity of these non-human counterparts? How do we authenticate, authorize, and regulate access for entities devoid of life but crucial for the functioning of critical systems? Let's break it down. The challenge Imagine a cloud-native application as a bustling metropolis of tiny neighborhoods known as microservices, all neatly packed into containers. These microservices function akin to diligent worker bees, each diligently performing its designated task, be it processing data, verifying credentials, or

Adobe has missed dozens of vulnerabilities in Reader in this week's Patch Tuesday run according to Google engineers who reported the flaws. Sixteen vulnerabilities still affected the Windows and Mac OS X versions, while 31 critical and "trivially exploitable" bugs were found in the Linux application. Of particular concern to Google's Mateusz Jurczyk and Gynvael Coldwind are bugs in Reader for Linux, although other issues affect versions for Windows and OS X. For the Linux version, which went completely unpatched, Adobe and Google have been working together to counter 14 "new unique crashes" and nine "test-cases" that were potentially exploitable for remote code execution. When Adobe released a new version of Reader for Windows and Mac OS X earlier this week, it patched 12 vulnerabilities, but another 16 remained unpatched. Jurczyk and Coldwind decided to come forward with information on those flaws in the interest of user safety, as Adobe has no plans to issue additional out of band

FireEye Security experts are analyzing a targeted trojan that leverages emailed PDF files to gain access to systems and deliver its payload to specified networks in the aerospace, chemical, defense and tech industries. " We have seen different versions of this malware arriving as an exe inside a zipped file or as a PDF attachment. In this particular sample, the exe once executed opens up a PDF file called "Health Insurance and Welfare Policy." In addition to opening up a PDF file, the initial exe also drops another executable called ABODE32.exe (notice the typo) in the temp directory ." The malware also uses JavaScript to assess which version of Adobe Reader is currently running on the host machine, and then executes attacks based on known vulnerabilities in the discovered version. Once the trojan has infected its host machine, it communicates with its command and control server, the user agent string and URI of which are hard-coded into MyAgent's binary. FireEye

There's a new family of malware that's using a complex set of capabilities to disable antimalware and listen in on sessions between users and some social networks. Bafruz is essentially a backdoor trojan that also is creating a peer-to-peer network of infected computers. Microsoft has announced that its Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool has recently been modified to detect two new malware families, Matsnu and Bafruz. The payload seems to start by terminating a long list of security processes listed in its code. It then displays a fake system alert that looks like that of any standard rogue AV attack. The device actually restarts in Safe Mode. Here, the malware can disable all the security products more easily, allowing it to perform its other tasks without being interrupted. " This may lead the user into believing all is well with their security product, while in the meantime, Bafruz is downloading additional components and malware onto the computer in the back