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Self-described troll and Grey hat AT&T Hacker Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer, 26, has been sentenced to 41 months in prison for exploiting an AT&T security hole three years ago, and releasing thousands of iPad owners email addresses. According to authorities, they obtained the ICC-ID and e-mail address for about 120,000 iPad users. Each charge carried with it a potential prison terms of five years. He will serve 41 months in a federal prison, with concurrent probation for three years. He also owes restitution to the U.S. Treasury to be dispersed to AT&T in the amount of $73,000. In 2010, Auernheimer and Daniel Spitler, discovered that visiting an unsecured AT&T Web server and entering a number associated with the customer's wireless account allowed him to obtain that customer's email address. Computer security researcher Charlie Miller tweeted " We could all go to jail for security research at any moment, and a jury would happily convi

Researchers are already warning that malware authors developing more sophisticated attack techniques for mobile devices, using encryption and randomization or hiding malicious code in image files. As analyzed by Symantec a malicious Infrared X-Ray  Android application, attempting to lure Android device owners to download an app that supposedly allows the camera on the device to see through clothes. This malware app is spreading quickly widely in Japan by sending the spam messages via SMS to phone numbers stored in the device's Contacts, so that the recipients of the spam to be tricked easier because the invitation to download the app is coming from someone they know rather than from an unknown sender. The app is designed to steals all details in the device's contact list and are uploaded to a predetermined server. Symantec  confirmed that there are several variants of this app exist, ". .the latest variants have added an interesting payload: rather than sending SMS message

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,

Little more than a year ago I wrote about the possibility to attack gaming platform to compromise large audience of gamers in stealthy way, the access to millions of machines represent a dream for every attackers and I hypnotized its repercussion in cyber warfare domains. Gaming platform are usually complex systems equipped with the latest technology and the idea to exploit them as possible attack vectors cultivated by many governments. Researchers at ReVuln, Luigi Auriemma and Donato Ferrante , presented at Black Hat Europe 2013 in Amsterdam how to convert local bugs and features in remotely exploitable security vulnerabilities by using the popular EA Origin 3 platform as an attack vector against remote systems. EA Origin is one of the biggest gaming related digital delivery platforms with more than 40 million the access it to purchase games for any kind of platform, from mobile to PC. Before describe the discovery of the two Italian experts let's give analy

During  March Patch Tuesday of 2013 , Microsoft released seven new security bulletins, with four rated as critical, and others as Important. Most interesting one was MS13-027 , which is rated as "important" because the attack requires physical access to the vulnerable machine. This flaw allows anyone with a USB thumb drive loaded with the payload to bypass security controls and access a vulnerable system even if AutoRun is disabled, and the screen is locked. Flaw exposes your Windows PCs to major risk. If you remember Stuxnet, worm was injected to Iran's nuclear program system using USB thumb drive. Windows typically discovers USB devices when they are inserted or when they change power sources (if they switch from plugged-in power to being powered off of the USB connection itself). To exploit the vulnerability an attacker could add a maliciously formatted USB device to the system. When the Windows USB device drivers enumerate the device, parsing a speciall

Once again Google Security Team Shoot itself in the foot. Ansuman Samantaray , an Indian penetration tester discovered a small, but creative Security flaw in Google drive that poses phishing threat to million of Google users was ignored  by Google Security team by replying that," It is just a mare phishing attempt,not a bug in Google ". According to Ansuman , he reported a JavaScript Script Execution vulnerability in Google Drive Files on 20th December 2012 to Google Security Team and but Google rejected the report on 21st December. Ability to execute malicious script through Google drive files poses security threats, not just phishing attack, but an attacker able to extends the attack to malware spreading, etc. The flaw exist in the way Google Drive preview the documents in the browser. Online preview of the files executing code written in doc files as HTML/JavaScript just by changing the value of a parameter called " export " in the URL. ie.  

It's not a mystery, every nation is worried of the level of security of its infrastructure, the United States are among the most concerned governments due the high number of cyber-attack against its networks. US Government representative such us former States Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano warned in more than one occasion on the possible consequences of a cyber offensive and declared the necessity to improve the cyber capabilities of the country.  Senators are interested to evaluate the level of protection of nuclear stockpile of foreign governments against cyber attacks, question has been raised after that Pentagon's chief cyber officer admitted to ignore if countries such as Russia or China have adopted efficient countermeasures. Nelson and Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. will request to national intelligence an assessment about the ability of foreign states to safeguard networked

A critical vulnerability discovered in certain LaserJet Pro printers that could give remote attackers access to sensitive data. Homeland Security's Computer Emergency Response Team recently issued a vulnerability note warning that HP LaserJet Professional printers contain a telnet debug shell which could allow a remote attacker to gain unauthorized access to data. This flaw was discovered by a Germany security expert, Christoph von Wittich . He detected the vulnerability during a routine network scan of his company's corporate network. He said the vulnerability could also be used for a denial-of-service attack. " As long as the printer is not connected to the Internet, this vulnerability should not cause much trouble for the end user ,". Marked as CVE-2012-5215 ( VU#782451 , SSRT101078), vulnerability affected 12 printer models including HP LaserJet Pro P1102w, P1102w, P1606dn, M1212nf MFP, M1213nf MFP, M1214nfh MFP, M1216nfh Multifunction Printer, M1217n

Israeli mobile security start-up Skycure has exposed a vulnerability that could allow hackers to control and spy on iPhones. A major security vulnerability for iOS configuration profiles  pose malware threat. The vulnerability affects a file known as mobileconf files, which are used by cell phone carriers to configure system-level settings. These can include Wi-Fi, VPN, email, and APN settings. Apple used to use them to deliver patches, and carriers sometimes use them to distribute updates. Adi Sharabani , CEO and co-founder of Skycure, made a demonstration that how sensitive information, including the victim's exact location, could be retrieved, while also controlling the user's iPhone. In Demo, he setup a fake website with a prompt to install a configuration profile and sent the link out to Victim. After installing it, he found out they were able to pull passwords and other data without his knowledge. These malicious profiles can be emailed or downloaded fro

The U.S. government repository of standards based vulnerability management website National Vulnerability Database (NVD) was hacked by some unknown attacker last week. The website of NVD ( https://nvd.nist.gov/index.html ) is down since Friday due to a malware infection on two web servers, discovered on Wednesday. The main page of website reads," The NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD) has experienced an issue with its Web Services and is currently not available. We are working to restore service as quickly as possible. We will provide updates as soon as new information is available ." According to a post available on Google+ by Kim Halavakoski , who contacted NIST Public Inquiries Office to know about the issue," On Friday March 8, a NIST firewall detected suspicious activity and took steps to block unusual traffic from reaching the Internet. NIST began investigating the cause of the unusual activity and the servers were taken offline. Malware was

Philippines-Malaysia Cyber war over Sabah land dispute take another turn, when Philippines hackers deface their own President  Benigno Aquino III   website early Thursday, and criticized how the President has been handling the conflict in Sabah. The hacker group left a message to the president on the defaced Web site and links to Facebook profiles of the hackers, as shown in screenshot taken. Hacker managed to direct hack into other government websites also including: https://www.gdelpilar.gov.ph https://www.calasiao.gov.ph https://bolinao.gov.ph https://mauban.gov.ph https://apayao.gov.ph https://www.mauban.gov.ph https://www.drd.pnp.gov.ph Complete message from Anonymous Philippines reads: Greetings, President Aquino! We have watched how you signed into law a bill that endangers and tramples upon the citizenship  freedom of speech and expression. Now, we are silent witnesses as to how you are mishandling the Sabah issue. We did not engage the Malaysian hackers who invaded our cyber

According to an exclusive report published today by DNA news, the computers of highly sensitive Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) have reportedly been hacked by Chinese hackers as biggest security breach in the Indian Defence ever. Infiltrate leading to the leak of thousands of top secret files related to Cabinet Committee on Security, which have been detected to have been uploaded on a server in Guangdong province of China. Indian Defence Minister A K Antony said, " Intelligence agencies are investigating the matter at this stage and I do not want to say anything else. " " The leak was detected in the first week of March as officials from India's technical intelligence wing, National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), working with private Indian cyber security experts cracked open a file called "army cyber policy". The file had been attached to hacked email accounts of senior DRDO officials that quickly spread through the system in a matter of

Great news for Hackers and Backtrack Linux fans! The most awaited penetration testing Linux distribution has been released called ' Kali Linux ' or ' Backrack 6 ', from the creators of BackTrack itself. From last 7 years we have seen five awesome versions of Backtrack Linux. But this time to achieve some higher goals, team decided to leave the 4 years old development architecture and ' Kali Linux ' born today. Kali Linux is based upon Debian Linux, instead of Ubuntu and new streamlined repositories synchronize with the Debian repositories 4 times a day, constantly providing users with the latest package updates and security fixes available. Another great feature introduced is that, because of Debian compliant system, it is now able to Bootstrap a Kali Installation/ISO directly from Kali repositories. This allow any user to easily build their own customization of Kali, as well as perform enterprise network installs from a local or remote repository. The Kali Li

Remember the last OAuth Flaw in Facebook , that allow an attacker to hijack any account without victim's interaction with any Facebook Application, was reported by white hat Hacker ' Nir Goldshlager '. After that Facebook security team fixed that issue using some minor changes. Yesterday Goldshlager once again pwn Facebook OAuth mechanism by bypassing all those minor changes done by Facebook Team. He explains the complete Saga of hunting Facebook  bug in a blog post. As explained in last report on The hacker News , OAuth URL contains two parameters i.e.  redirect_uri &   next , and using Regex Protection (%23xxx!,%23/xxx,/) Facebook team tried to secure that after last patch. In recent discovered technique hacker found that next parameter allow  facebook.facebook.com domain as a valid option and multiple hash signs is now enough to bypass Regex Protection. He use facebook.com/l.php file (used by Facebook to redirect users to external links) to redirect victims to

It's time of stocktaking, principal security firm are proposing their analysis to synthesize actual situation on cyber security, 2012 is widely considered a year when the malware has increased significantly thanks to the contributions of various actors that we will analyze shortly. WebSense has published a new interesting study, 2013 Threat Report , that confirms an extraordinary growth of cyber threats, the data that most of all alert the security community is the increasing number of sophisticated attacks able to elude traditional defense mechanisms. The analysis revealed that technologies most exposed to cyber attacks continue to be mobile platforms and social media, internet is confirmed as primary channel for cyber menaces, let's consider in fact that number of malicious web sites grew nearly 600% and 85% are represented by legitimate web hosts. Another concerning phenomenon is the use of Email as vector for cyber menace, attackers consider this carrier as

One of the best 3rd party Android Mobile Keyboard called ' SwiftKey ' turned into a Keylogger Trojan by an Android developer to show the possible security threat of using pirated cracked apps from from non-official App Stores, " anyone pirating Swiftkey is taking a serious risk " developer said to ' The Hacker News '. He demonstrated how to inject a Keylogger snippets of code into a legitimate Android Keyboard application that infected a mobile device with Trojan, connected with a remote server and transmitted data from the device inducing your all key logs. " Cracked copies of PC and iPhone apps can have malware as well of course but on both those platforms most software is compiled to machine code. Android apps are coded in Java and compiled to byte code that is run on the Dalvik VM and this byte code is not that hard to edit and insert back into an APK. " he explained. He developed a keylogger from SwiftKey( APK Download ), a mali

IRAN has spent years fending off cyber attacks, blocking access and isolated their own intranet off from the outside world. Many Iranians was using of virtual private network (VPNs), which provides encrypted links directly to private networks based abroad, to access Sites like YouTube and Facebook after bypassing the country's internet filter. But recently, Iranian authorities have blocked the use of most virtual private network to stop people in the country from circumventing the government's internet filter. A widespread government internet filter prevents Iranians from accessing many sites on the official grounds they are offensive or criminal. Ramezanali Sobhani-Fard, the head of parliament's information and communications technology committee said, " Within the last few days illegal VPN ports in the country have been blocked. Only legal and registered VPNs can from now on be used. " Registered and legal VPN access can still be purchased, but the typical fi

It's Microsoft Patch Tuesday, and time of the month in which we gather round, hold hands, and see just how much of Microsoft's software needs patching. Prepare your systems, Microsoft is expected to issue seven bulletins affecting all versions of its Windows operating system (OS), some Office components and also Mac OS X, through Silverlight and Office and 4 out of 7 are critical patches. Critical :  The first bulletin will address a remote code execution vulnerability affecting Windows and Internet Explorer. Critical : The second bulletin addresses a remote code execution vulnerability affecting Microsoft Silverlight. Critical :  The third bulletin addresses a remote code execution vulnerability affecting Office. The fourth security bulletin addresses a critical elevation of privilege vulnerability affecting both the Office and Server suites. Important : The fifth and sixth security bulletins address an information disclosure vulnerability affecting Microsoft Off

If hackers want to get into your computer network, they will find a way. You can make it harder but you can't stop them. According to  Australian Financial Review report on Monday, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) was hacked by hackers who infiltrated its networks and allegedly stole information using a Chinese piece of malware. After investigations they found multiple computers had been compromised by malicious software seeking intelligence. Several RBA staffers including heads of department were sent the malicious emails over two days, but it isn't known if the malware executed and succeeded in capturing information from the compromised computers.  The malware consisted of a web address that linked to a zip file that contained a Trojan which at the time was not detected by the anti-virus program, according to the bank.  A Defence department spokesperson said: " The government does not discuss specific cyber incidents, activities or capabilities. [Doing so] could jeopardise

Today a cyber attack on Pakistan Government servers crash many Government departments's official websites including Ministry of Information Technology, Ministry of Railways, Ministry of Economic Affairs & Statistics, Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Religious Affairs, Ministry of Science and Technology, Ministry of Environment and many more. Indian Hacker ' Godzilla ' continue to strike Pakistan Government because of their support to terrorism activities. Hacker said," all network owned including switches because they deserve it, I have not touched any innocent website because target is only Government " While Pakistani official are already aware about the risk from the newest viruses, worms and cyber attacks, so they having their servers running through a proxy server located at  https://202.83.164.6/ , but flawed cyber security practices once again results to messed up whole setup and hacker successfully breach into centralized local server locat

A Google developer helps Apple to fixed a security flaw in its application store that for years has allowed attackers to steal passwords and install unwanted or extremely expensive applications. Security loophole allowed attacker to hijack the connection, because Apple neglected to use encryption when an iPhone or other mobile device tries to connect to the App Store. Researcher Elie Bursztein revealed on his blog that he had alerted Apple of numerous security issues last July but that Apple had only turned on HTTPS for the App Store last week. An attacker only needs to be on the same network as the person who is using the App Store. From there, they can intercept the communications between the device and the App Store and insert their own commands. The malicious user could take advantage of the unsecure connection to carry out a number of different attacks i.e steal a password, force someone to purchase an app by swapping it with a different app that the buyer actually intende