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In recent The Hacker News updates, we have reported about some major hacking events and critical vulnerabilities i.e Cyber attack and spying on The New York Times and Wall Street Journal by Chinese Hackers,  Security Flaws in UPnP protocol , Botnet attack hack 16,000 Facebook accounts, 700,000 accounts hacked in Africa and new android malware that infect more that 620,000 users . Today Twitter also announced that they have recorded some unusual access patterns that is identified as unauthorized access attempts to Twitter user data. Unknown hackers breach Twitter this week and may have gained access to passwords and other information for as many as 250,000 user accounts " the attackers may have had access to limited user information – usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/salted versions of passwords " said Bob Lord ,Director of Information Security, at Twitter. For security reasons twitter have reset passwords and revoked session tokens

In London today, an 18-year-old anonymous hacker received an 18-month youth rehabilitation order and a 60-hour unpaid work requirement for his involvement in " Operation Payback ". One strike against Paypal alone cost the site £3.5 million pounds. But Jake Birchall escaped jail today after the judge ruled he had been affected by special needs. He was an advanced user of the internet and had used it for nine years, since he was eight years old. " He did play a prominent and important part in this and I think he has got to learn to get out of bed in a morning and do unpaid work ." The judge said. Jake Birchall had admitted conspiring to impair the operation of computers in 2010 and 2011. They were convicted for their distributed denial of service attacks, which paralyse computer systems by flooding them with online requests. Ashley Rhodes , 28, of Bolton Crescent, Camberwell, south London, was given seven months , and Peter Gibson , 24, from Castl

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo

Kim Dotcom is offering a bounty of €10,000 (approx. US$13,580) to the first person who breaks its newly launched file storage service. Mega's launch last month was meet by criticism from multiple security researchers, Kim Dotcom announced a prize to the hackers last week. Kim tweeted," #Mega's open source encryption remains unbroken! We'll offer 10,000 EURO to anyone who can break it. Expect a blog post today ." Dotcom believes the improvements made to his service's security have made the site close to unbreakable, and Mega staff remain bullish about the site's privacy qualities. Less than two weeks old, Mega passed 1 million registered users after just one day online, and is storing nearly 50 million files. Mega continues to face claims of illegal filesharing on the site. Dotcom claimed this week that only 0.001 percent of files on Mega have been removed for potential copyright infringement. The company blocked a third-party search engine from accessing publi

The FBI Tuesday announced the arrest of Karen 'Gary' Kazaryan , a 27-year old man, who is said to have blackmailed more than 350 women after convincing them to strip off in front of their webcams has been arrested in the US. He was arrested in Glendale, California on Tuesday after being indicted on 15 counts of computer intrusion and 15 counts of aggravated identity theft, and faces a possible 105 years in the Big House if convicted. The FBI described the alleged blackmail as " se*tortion ". He is accused of hacking into the victims accounts and changing their passwords, locking them out of their own online accounts. He then searched emails or other files for naked or semi-naked pictures of the victims, as well as other information, such as passwords and the names of their friends.  He then posed online as the women, sent instant messages to their friends and somehow, persuaded those friends to get undressed so that he could view and take pictures of the

VideoLAN recently published a security advisory warning of a buffer overflow vulnerability in versions 2.0.5 and earlier of VLC Media Player, which might be exploited to execute arbitrary code. This vulnerability was reported by Debasish Mandal. The vulnerability is caused due to an error in the "DemuxPacket()" function (modules/demux/asf/asf.c) when processing ASF files and can be exploited to cause a buffer overflow via a specially crafted ASF file. To exploit the vulnerability, a user must explicitly open a specially crafted ASF movie. Successful exploitation may allow execution of arbitrary code, but requires tricking a user into opening a malicious file. VideoLAN advises users to refrain from opening files from untrusted locations and to disable the VLC browser plug-ins until the issue is patched. A patch will be included in VLC 2.0.6, the next version of the media player, which is only available for testing purposes at the moment.

The New York Times says Chinese hackers probably working for the military or Chinese government have carried out sustained attacks on its computer systems, breaking in and stealing the passwords of high-profile reporters and other staff members. For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times . On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal announced that it too had been hacked by Chinese hackers who were trying to monitor the company's coverage of China. It said hackers had broken into its network through computers in its Beijing bureau. " The hackers tried to cloak the source of the attacks on The Times by first penetrating computers at United States universities and routing the attacks through them " " Evidence shows that infiltration efforts target the monitoring of the Journal's coverage of China, and are not an attempt to gain commercial advantage or to misappropriate customer information, " the statement rea