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Russian hackers have figured out a way to download free games from Ubisoft's servers, exploiting an existing vulnerability in Ubisoft's uPlay launcher. According to reports, the copies of Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon that are available on torrent sites are the result of a hack of Ubisoft's uPlay service. The hack has allowed users to download advance copies of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, a game which has yet to be officially released. Blood Dragon will be officially released on 1st May, for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. As a proof of the exploit, hackers even posted an 1 hour 30 mins long footage of the game. A Ubisoft spokesman said that the company was aware of the issue and was working to resolve it quickly.  An earlier tweet on their account attributed yesterday's outage to hackers as well, saying " Servers were attacked which limited service from 2:30PM to 9:00PM Paris time [8:30AM to 3:00PM EST]. " The hackers developed a piece of software which tricks

Three members of the high profile internet hacktivist group LulzSec have admitted to their parts in a series of cyber attacks against the NHS, Sony and News International. Ryan Ackroyd, Jake Davis and Mustafa Al-Bassam, pleaded guilty to one charge of carrying out an unauthorized act to impair the operation of a computer, contrary to the Criminal Law Act 1977. In July 2011 the Sun's website was hacked and users were briefly re-directed to a spoof page that falsely claiming that Rupert Murdoch had died. Davis, from Shetland, and Bassam, a student from Peckham, south London, admitted conspiring to bring down the websites of law enforcement authorities in Britain and the US, including the CIA and the Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA). The group, an offshoot of the Anonymous hacktivists, but Both LulzSec and Anonymous wreaked havoc throughout 2011 and 2012, knocking thousands of websites offline and pilfering data from well-known companies. The men are said to h

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,

Researchers from Kaspersky Lab have discovered a new spam message campaign being transmitted via Skype contains malware capable of using an infected computer to mine for Bitcoins. The malware, identified as Trojan.Win32.Jorik.IRCbot.xkt . Bitcoin is a non-governmental, fully-digital currency based on an open-source and peer-to-peer internet protocol. Cybercriminals have figured out that distributed Bitcoin mining is a perfect task for botnets and have started developing malware that can abuse the CPUs and GPUs of infected computers to generate Bitcoins. " Bitcoin mining is the process of making computer hardware do mathematical calculations for the Bitcoin network to confirm transactions and increase security, " Victims are encouraged to install malware file that is included with messages like " this my favourite picture of you ". Those who click the links, infected with a virus dropper downloaded from a server in India. If the malicious file is ins

A vulnerability in AirDroid application  which provides wireless management of your Android phone or tablet from any browser on the same Wi-Fi network allow hackers  to perform Dos attack from your Android device. Cross Site scripting or  XSS vulnerability in the browser version of AirDroid allows an attacker is able to send a malicious text message to the browser associated with the account when attacker is able to get access to a phone with AirDroid installed. According to advisory posted by US-Cert , When this message is viewed on the AirDroid web interface an attacker can conduct a cross-site scripting attack, which may be used to result in information leakage, privilege escalation, and/or denial of service on the host computer. Vulnerability is currently not patched and also AirDroid team didn't annouce any update regarding fix. As a general good security practice, only allow connections from trusted hosts and networks. Flaw registered as  CVE-2013-0134

Exploit kits are one of the dangerous cyber crime tool, where The Phoenix Exploit Kit is a good example of exploit packs used to exploit vulnerable software on the computers of unsuspecting Internet users. The Phoenix Exploit Kit is available for a base price of $2,200 in underground market by its malware author or developer.  Like other exploit kits , Phoenix also developed to exploit browser-based  vulnerabilities in outdated and insecure versions of browser plugins like Java, and Adobe Flash and Reader. Developer of Phoenix is known by nickname AlexUdakov on several forums. According to new investigation report published by  krebsonsecurity , AlexUdakov was also member of a forum called Darkode , whose administrator accounts were compromised few weeks before and that the intruders were able to gain access to private communications of the administrators.  Intruders was able to view full profiles and database of Darkode members, as well as the private email addres

A cyber attack campaign, dubbed #OpIsrael by hacking group Anonymous, targeting Israeli websites caused massive disruption to government, academic and private sites Sunday. Israeli media said small business had been targeted. Some homepage messages were replaced with anti-Israel slogans. Anonymous threatened to disrupt and erase Israel from cyberspace in protest over its mistreatment of Palestinians. In response to the eight day assault that killed 133 Palestinians , Anonymous defaced thousands of Israeli sites and provided information for Gazans facing Internet and communications blackouts.  60 million hacking attempts were reportedly made. Most of the attacks have had little impact, and Israeli experts even say they welcome the attempts as ways of sharpening their defenses. Israel itself is accused of taking part in much more sophisticated cyber attacks against its enemies, particularly Iran. List of all hacked sites are available in following pastebins https://p

Microsoft has released an advance notification of 9 security bulletins that it plans to release on April 9, 2013. Microsoft said it will patch nine vulnerabilities in total and two of them rated critical and that of the remaining 7 as Important. The critical vulnerabilities are remote code execution issues. First vulnerability affects Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer while the second vulnerability affects Microsoft Windows.  The vulnerability will fix a flaw that allows a drive-by attack, which hackers can exploit to attack machines running the software using malware loaded websites. Earlier this year, Microsoft released an emergency update for Internet Explorer after all the commotion about the security holes in Java. The update aimed to patch a security vulnerability in Internet Explorer that is being used for attacks on government contractors and other organisations. The remaining 7 vulnerabilities pertain to issues affecting Microsoft Office, Microsoft Server Software a

We are on the eve of the fateful day, April 7th , the collective of Anonymous announced a massive cyber attack against the state of Israel as part of the campaign started in the last months and named #OpIsrael . The hacktivists are conducting a massive call to army to recruit new forces and inform all the members of collective of the cyber attack planned against Israeli network infrastructures. The hacktivists protest against Israeli bombing of Palestinian territory expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people condemning Israeli Government and its decisions.  The hackers motivated to The Hackers Post website their participation with following statement: " Israel isn't stopping human rights violations. It's to show solidarity with newly recognized Palestinian state." "the hacking teams have decided to unite against Israel as one entity…Israel should be getting prepared to be erased from the internet. " Anonymous has promised to ' erase Israel from the internet ' in a coordin

A 17 year old alleged hacker accused of being associated with Anonymous hacker appeared in Parramatta Children's Court on Friday, over multiple unauthorised access crime on the behalf of hacktivist collective Anonymous. The Australian Federal Police ( AFP ) issued a statement over the matter, saying that a search warrant was issued at the youth's home in Glenmore Park, New South Wales, in November last year. The youth has been charged with six counts of unauthorised modification of data to cause impairment, one count of unauthorised access with intent to commit a serious offence, one count of possession of data with intent to commit a computer offence, and 12 counts of unauthorised access to restricted data.  " Australian Federal Police investigates various types of cybercrime and will continue to take a strong stance against these perpetrators " Suspected hacker faces a maximum of 10 years jail time if convicted and will face court again on May 17.

Cybercriminals, underground hacking communities, hacker's market and Exploit packs.... Russian  cyberspace is well known for such crazy hacking stuff. Recently, the original Carberp botnet developer   ring that stole millions from bank accounts worldwide has been arrested. According to a report from Russian newspaper, a group of 20 people who served as its malware development team, were arrested by the Sluzhba Bezpeky Ukrayiny and the Federalnaya sluzhba bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsii (federal security service of Russia, FSB) in cities around Ukraine. Over $250 million has been stolen by the members of the botnet ring, which had roughly 20 members aged between 25 and 30. " Our experts did an enormous amount of work, which resulted in identifying the head of this criminal group, the owner and operator of a specialized banking botnet, identifying the control servers, and identifying the directing of traffic from popular websites in order to spread malware infectio