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A ban on the use of pen drives has not been able to safeguard cyber security as it has now been labeled as a major threat in defence forces, the Army officials said. The use of pen drives as an easy-to-carry storage device has increased in the recent past and internal reports have confirmed that over 70 percent cyber security breaches in the armed forces are due to their unauthorised use " These pen drives, which are mostly manufactured in China, have emerged as a big threat to our cyber security systems ," they said. Generally it is found that officials use pen drive to store official data for use at their personal computers but from there, it is transmitted from their IP addresses to hackers from the 'malware' present in the pen drives. About a couple of years ago, a Major posted in Andaman and Nicobar Islands was apprehended as it was found that sensitive data was being transferred from his computer.  However, it later emerged that his system had been hacked and

It's a fact that as smartphones get more capable, the possibilities for their misuse also increase. They're already exploited by crooks to swipe personal information, but a new Android app created by the U.S. Navy is on another level entirely. It's a scary piece of malware called " PlaceRaider " that was developed by the US Naval Surface Warfare center and for now it is being viewed as just a proof of concept. According to the MIT Technology Review, researchers at Indiana University and the Naval Surface Warfare Center have developed a new form of malware designed to record and reconstruct a victim's environment. They has just worked out how to infect a mobile phone with a Trojan that can take photos without you knowing anything about it and send sensor data back to a server. The data are used to construct a 3D model which can be used not only to perform the reconnaissance necessary to break in, but also to steal confidential information such as bank details. O

It comes as no surprise that today's cyber threats are orders of magnitude more complex than those of the past. And the ever-evolving tactics that attackers use demand the adoption of better, more holistic and consolidated ways to meet this non-stop challenge. Security teams constantly look for ways to reduce risk while improving security posture, but many approaches offer piecemeal solutions – zeroing in on one particular element of the evolving threat landscape challenge – missing the forest for the trees.  In the last few years, Exposure Management has become known as a comprehensive way of reigning in the chaos, giving organizations a true fighting chance to reduce risk and improve posture. In this article I'll cover what Exposure Management is, how it stacks up against some alternative approaches and why building an Exposure Management program should be on  your 2024 to-do list. What is Exposure Management?  Exposure Management is the systematic identification, evaluation,

Raphael Mudge (Creator of Cobalt Strike ) announced Another Advance Payload for Cobalt Strike called " Beacon ". In a conversation with The Hacker News  Raphael said " A big gap in the penetration tester's toolbox are covert command and control options, especially for long engagements. Beacon is a new feature in Cobalt Strike to remedy this problem ." Cobalt Strikes's graphical user interface offers direct control of the 700+ exploits and advanced features in the open source Metasploit Framework. Beacon is a Cobalt Strike payload for long-term asynchronous command and control of compromised hosts. It works like other Metasploit Framework payloads. You may embed it into an executable, add it to a document, or deliver it with a client-side exploit. Beacon downloads tasks using HTTP requests. You may configure Beacon to connect to multiple domains. For extra stealth, Beacon may use DNS requests to check if a task is available. This limits the comm

Researchers at Security Explorations disclosed a new vulnerability in Java that could provide an attacker with control of a victim's computer. The researchers have confirmed that Java SE 5 – Update 22, Java SE 6 – Update 35, and Java SE 7 Update 7 running on fully patched Windows 7 32-bit operating systems are susceptible to the attack. This Flaw allowing a malicious hackers to gain complete control of a victim's machine through a rigged website. The affected web browsers are Safari 5.1.7, Opera 12.02, Chrome 21.0.1180.89, Firefox 15.0.1, and Internet Explorer 9.0.8112.16421. Though Oracle released a fix for the most critical vulnerabilities reported by Security Explorations on August 30th, the security firm quickly found another flaw in that fix that would allow a hacker to bypass the patch. That bug in Oracle's patch still hasn't been patched, leaving users vulnerable to both the new flaw and the previous attack. " We hope that news about one billion users of Oracle Java SE so

A Romanian researcher - Radu Drăgușin  found that 100000 usernames and passwords of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) was stored in plaint-text on a publicly accessible FTP server. According to him, on Sept. 18 he first discovered a log with usernames and passwords in plaintext, publicly available via IEEE's FTP server for at least a month. He informed them of his find yesterday, and evidently the organization is addressing the issue. On the FTP server, according Dragusin were the logfiles for the offers and ieee.org spectrum.ieee.org - Total data to approximately 376 million HTTP requests. Including 411,308 log entries with login and password in plain text. Among the users who's information was exposed are researchers at NASA, Stanford, IBM, Google, Apple, Oracle and Samsung. IEEE's membership of over 340,000 is roughly half American (49.8 percent as of 2011). " IEEE suffered a data breach which I discovered on September 18. For a few da

A security issue has been reported in phpMyAdmin, which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a vulnerable system. The security issue is caused due to the distribution of a compromised phpMyAdmin source code package containing a backdoor, which can be exploited to e.g. execute arbitrary PHP code. One of the SourceForge.net mirrors, namely cdnetworks-kr-1, was being used to distribute a modified archive of phpMyAdmin, which includes a backdoor. This backdoor is located in file server_sync.php and allows an attacker to remotely execute PHP code. Another file, js/cross_framing_protection.js, has also been modified. SourceForge.Net is the world's largest open source software development website. A very large impact on the domestic users with this incident. The vulnerability has been cataloged as being a critical one. A screenshot as shown of a system containing a malicious backdoor that was snuck into the open-source phpMyAdmin package. On official website in issue &qu