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We have seen for the past couple years the cyber wasteland become something that is not dominated by young ambitious hackers anymore. The age of the Wild West is over and the big boys want a piece of the action. With so many infrastructures connected to the web these days it is only natural for more powerful and interested concerns to take their skills to the web. We are seeing the beginnings of true cyber war and it is something that is not going to be stop anytime soon. In the past, what we have seen mostly is governments stay behind the scenes and do defense when it comes to the cyber war. If the government did go on the offensive it would be in secret only discovered when some security firm would get lucky and find some code that would hint to government influence . But these days it is not like that anymore. Everyone knows that the governments of the world are going all out when it comes to cyber war. And the worst part about it is that when it comes to regular civilian

(DDI) Vulnerability Research Team (VRT) for reported a critical vulnerability in VMware View Server , that  is a directory traversal vulnerability that allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to retrieve arbitrary files from affected View Servers. Exploitation of this issue may expose sensitive information stored on the server. VMware has issued a patch for its VMware View product. It is listed as ' VMSA-2012-0017 ' in security advisory. This vulnerability affects both the View Connection Server and the View Security Server; VMware recommends that customers immediately update both servers to a fixed version of View. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project has assigned the name CVE-2012-5978 to this issue. VMware's update to VMware View is available for free to license holders of the product and can be downloaded here . Disabling the Security Server will prevent exploitation of this vulnerability over untrusted remote networks or It may be p

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,

This week Corey and Marty over at FixMeStick shared the specs of their recently released FixMeStick PRO with me. This Pro is the best remote malware remediation product we've seen. It retails for $299.99 per year, or $209.99 for the first 50 'The Hacker News' readers ( use coupon code  'THNFIX ' for 30% Discount ), and can be used an unlimited number of times on an unlimited number of PCs per year. The price is per year because the FixMeStick contains three anti-virus engines licensed from three anti-virus companies keeping three malware definition databases up to date etc... Finds: Three anti-virus engines working together to find the widest range of infections. Removes: 'Computer on a stick' architecture provides a separate and clean operating system to fix Windows operating systems. Delivers: Highest confidence remediation. Remote Access: Remote access independent of the host operating system, i.e. out-of-band remote management, like a remote access

U.S. intelligence sources confirmed that, Official websites of Al-Qaida were knocked offline two weeks back and still down due to DDoS attack. According to source , " This is one of the longest disruptions the organization has experienced since it set up its online distribution system in 2006. Al-Qaida also was hit by a massive cyber attack in late 2008, from which the online network never recovered ." The websites are forced to offline, just before the release of a film titled as " Salil al-Sawarim 3 ", which is actually the propaganda video of Iraqi soldiers with dead insurgents by Al-Qaida. From last few months, online jihadists are discussing the release and had been sharing images and footage from the production. The cyber attack comes as the U.S. State Department, according to a senior official. The cyber attack on Al-Qaida network delayed the release of movie. According to another source, the last version " Salil As-Sawarim 2 " movie was do

Anonymous Croatia hacking crew yesterday deface two Croatian Banks websites and add Anonymous Logo on home pages. The hackers left a message saying: " We are Anonymous. We don't forgive. We don't forget. You were stealing enough from people. Soon the other banks will fall ". Karlovacka Banka (kaba.hr) and samoborska banka (sabank.hr) websites were hacked last morning. Defaced page had a background music with lyrics " No, No more sorrow I've paid for your mistakes Your time is borrowed Your time has come to be replaced " In Talk with ' The Hacker News ' member, hacker give statement ," You have been stealing for too long. Soon more banks will fail. " "This operation will go under  #OpBanks and we are going to hack more banks" hacker said.

Sudoku is one such game that I believe will benefit your brain, but now not for your system. Peter Szabo from SophosLabs have identified a piece of malware that resides behind a Microsoft Excel-based Sudoku generator. The Malware developed in Visual Basic requires macros, a scripting language that allows users to create equations based on values in different columns and rows. Microsoft disable macros by default , because in past macros were the weapon of choice for cyber criminals . But in order for the generator to work, the user must activate macros. Unfortunately, while the user is enjoying the Sudoku, the macro is installing malware in the targeted machine. Keyboard and mouse macros allow sequences of keystrokes and mouse actions to be transformed into shorter commands and also it can easily gathers system information by using the ipconfig, systeminfo like commands. Once the bug has collected a machine's IP address, running processes, installed applications

One of the ' The Hacker News ' reader inform us today about porn content on some Indian Government websites. After analyzing such websites, we came across more than 30 sub domains belongs to ' entegramam.gov.in ' . Where ' entegramam' means "My village" and all sub domains of this website are names of the different cities of Kerala state. The websites are in Malayalam language and most of the sites are powered by Joomla and Drupal (older vulnerable versions) with discussion forums on them. On our further analyze we found that time stamp of the Porn articles posted on forum dated back to " 2012/08/30 16:00 ".  That means, Government websites hosting Child Porn content from last four months and authorities or  the moderators of the website are not aware about the issue. On a simple Google search, one can found all such pages : site:gov.in "nude"  for further reports and analyzing. Google also giving notification " This site ma

Accunetix a web application security company reported vulnerabilities found in the Wordpress Pingback feature. According to report, Pingback vulnerability exists in the WordPress blogging platform that could leak information and lead to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. " WordPress has an XMLRPC API that can be accessed through the xmlrpc.php file. When WordPress is processing pingbacks, it's trying to resolve the source URL, and if successful, will make a request to that URL and inspect the response for a link to a certain WordPress blog post. If it finds such a link, it will post a comment on this blog post announcing that somebody mentioned this blog post in their blog. " Bogdan Calin explained . Pingback is one of three types of linkbacks, methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles. Some weblog software, such as Mo

Iranian CERT is sounding the alarm over another bit of data-deleting malware it's discovered on PCs in the country. Dubbed Batchwiper , the malware systematically wipes any drive partitions starting with the letters D through I Drive, along with any files stored on the Windows desktop of the user who is logged in when it's executed Why naming Batchwiper ?  The name was chosen because the malware is packed in a batch file. The malware initiates its data wiping routine on certain dates, the next one being Jan. 21 2013. However, the dates of Oct. 12, Nov. 12 and Dec. 12, 2012, were also found in the malware's configuration, suggesting that it may have been in distribution for at least two months. GrooveMonitor.exe is the original dropper, which is a self-extracting RAR file, once executed it extracts the following files: -- \WINDOWS\system32\SLEEP.EXE, md5: ea7ed6b50a9f7b31caeea372a327bd37 -- \WINDOWS\system32\jucheck.exe, md5: c4cd216112cbc5b8c046934843c579f6 -- \WIND

Stuxnet case is considered by security expert the first concrete act of cyber warfare, a malware specifically designed to hit SCADA systems inside nuclear plants in Iran. The event has alerted the international security community on the risks related to the effects of a cyber attack against supervisory control and data acquisition in industrial environment.  SCADA systems are adopted practically in every industrial control system (ICS) used for the control and monitor of industrial processes that are potential targets of a cyber attack such as a critical infrastructures or a utility facilities. Manufacturing, production, power generation, water treatment facilities, electrical power transmission and distribution and large communication systems are all considered critical asset for every countries and represent privileged targets for cyber attacks. Obtain access to SCADA systems is fundamental step for a attackers that desires to compromise the controlled processes and contrary to