The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Cybersecurity News Site — Index Page

Google has fixed a series of serious vulnerabilities in its Chrome OS , including three high-risk bugs that could be used for code execution on vulnerable machines. Bug bounties is the cash prizes offered by open source communities to anyone who finds key software bugs have been steadily on the rise for several years now. As part of its reward program, Google paid out $31,336 to a researcher who found three of the vulnerabilities . Google's post notes : " We're pleased to reward Ralf-Philipp Weinmann $31,336 under the Chromium Vulnerability Rewards Program for a chain of three bugs, including demo exploit code and very detailed write-up. We are grateful to Ralf for his work to help keep our users safe. " The three-bug chain credited to Weinmann exploited O3D, a JavaScript API (application programming interface) designed for crafting interactive 3-D graphics-based Web applications. The API and supporting browser plug-in were created by Google, with a preliminary ve

The Guardian's Twitter accounts have been taken over by pro-Syrian government hackers ' Syrian Electronic Army ' , who previously targeted the Associated Press BBC , al-Jazeera, the Qatari government and National Public Radio in the United States, as well as France 24 TV. " We are aware that a number of Guardian Twitter accounts have been compromised and we are working actively to resolve this ," a Guardian spokesperson said. Nine bogus tweets were broadcast in an hour, including some with anti-Israeli sentiments, and others saying " Long Live Syria " and " Syrian Electronic Army Was Here ".  Cyber-security experts believe the SEA have targeted a series of western media organisations in an apparent attempt to cause disruption and spread support for President Bashar al-Assad's regime, which has been under increasing Western pressure to end an ongoing bloody civil war in Syria. The group's domain names were apparently registered by the Syr

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,

McAfee said it has found a vulnerability in Adobe Systems' Reader program that reveals when and where a PDF document is opened. The issue emerges when some users launch a link to another file path, which calls on a JavaScript application programming interface (API), while Reader alerts a user when they are going to call on a resource from another place. The issue is not a serious problem and does not allow for remote code execution, but McAfee does consider it a security problem and has notified Adobe. It affects every version of Adobe Reader, including the latest version, 11.0.2. " We have detected some PDF samples in the wild that are exploiting this issue. Our investigation shows that the samples were made and delivered by an 'email tracking service' provider. We don't know whether the issue has been abused for illegal or APT attacks ," wrote McAfee's Haifei Li. McAfee declined to reveal the details of the vulnerability as Adobe i

Cyber crime enterprise is showing a growing interest in monetization of botnets , the most targeted sector in recent months is banking. One of most active malware that still menaces Banking sector is the popular Zeus . Zeus is one of the oldest, it is active since 2007, and most prolific malware that changed over time according numerous demands of the black-market. Recently, Underground forums are exploded the offer of malicious codes, hacking services and bullet proof hosting to organize a large scale fraud. Cyber criminals are selling kits at reasonable prices or entire botnets for renting, sometimes completing the offer with information to use during the attacks. The model described, known also as a Fraud-as-a-Service , is winning, malicious code such as Zeus, SpyEye , Ice IX, or even Citadel have benefited of the same sales model, cyber criminals with few hundred dollars are able to design their criminal operation. Since now the sales model and the actor invol

After only a few days since the developer edition of Google Glass landed, Jay Freeman aka " Saurik " has jailbroken it. Though Google Glass run on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, he get root access using an exploit first discovered by another hacker named B1nary .  Freeman, who obtained the device by pre-ordering it at Google I/O last year, announced his success on Friday via Twitter. Such tactics give the user full command of the operating system without restriction. Freeman is not the first to crack Glass, though: just yesterday, another developer, Liam McLoughlin, also got root on his device. Although both jailbreaks were successful on the current Explorer Edition of Glass, it's not clear whether those holes will still be available in the consumer edition. Freeman says that Glass could be made to store data on the device itself or on a nearby phone connected by Bluetooth, instead of sending data to Google servers. McLoughlin says that Google Gla

The Dutch police have confirmed the arrest of a 35-year-old man suspected of taking part in a massive DDoS attack against the anti-spam group Spamhaus back in March . The attack's bandwidth peaked at over 300Gbps, making it the largest DDoS attack in history. Their target, Spamhaus, is a company which creates blacklists of spam sites and sells them to Internet Service Providers. Spamhaus was attacked with DDOS and the website overcrowded with traffic and went offline. Later CloudFlare was hired by Spamhaus to protect against such attacks. The suspect was arrested by Spanish authorities in Barcelona based on a European arrest warrant and is expected to be transferred to the Netherlands soon. The man arrested is believed to be Sven Kamphuis, the owner and manager of Dutch hosting firm Cyberbunker that has been implicated in the attack. This DDoS attack was believed to have been sparked when Spamhaus placed CyberBunker on its spam blacklist. Cyberbunker is a D

LivingSocial, a daily deals website part-owned by Amazon Inc ., hit by a cyber attack that may have affected more than 50 million customers and will need to reset their passwords. LivingSocial says it has 70 million members worldwide. Leaked data includes names, e-mail addresses, dates of birth and encrypted passwords. Customers' credit card information and merchants' financial and banking information were not affected by the hack, LivingSocial said. So it looks like some personal info may have fallen into the wrong hands, but credit card and other financial details should be safe. The cyberattack affected LivingSocial customers in North America, Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Ireland and Malaysia and its LetsBonus users in Southern Europe and Latin America. So if you're among the affected users, the hackers have just the right amount of information to phish you. The site is sending out emails to customers advising them to change their passwords.

A new sophisticated and stealthy Apache backdoor meant to drive traffic to malicious websites serving Blackhole exploit kit widely has been detected by  Sucuri recently. Researchers claimed that this backdoor affecting hundreds of web servers right now. Dubbed Linux/Cdorked.A , one of the most sophisticated Apache backdoors we have seen so far. The backdoor leaves no traces of compromised hosts on the hard drive other than its modified httpd binary, thereby complicating forensics analysis. All of the information related to the backdoor is stored in shared memory.  The configuration is pushed by the attacker through obfuscated HTTP requests that aren't logged in normal Apache logs. The HTTP server is equipped with a reverse connect backdoor that can be triggered via a special HTTP GET request. This means that no command and control information is stored anywhere on the system. ESET researchers  analyzed the binary and discovered a nasty hidden backdoor. In the Li

Google just released a new Play Store version 4.0.27 that, contains only very minor tweaks and Google has changed the rules of its Google Play Store to put an end to the practice of developers updating their apps through their own means rather than the official Google Play channel. Shortly before the Facebook Home launch, some users noticed a new version of Facebook was available on their device, but it wasn't through the Play Store. Instead, the update came directly through the app, bypassing the Store altogether. Under the " Dangerous Products " section of the Google Play developer policies, Google now states that " an app downloaded from Google Play may not modify, replace or update its own APK binary code using any method other than Google Play's update mechanism. " Essentially this means that once an app is downloaded by an Android user it cannot contact home base and auto-update its own operating code. Instead, it has to use the off

BackTrack Linux, a specialized distribution of penetration testing tools, has long been a favorite of security specialists and IT pros. Security professionals have been relying on the BackTrack security distribution for many years to help them perform their assessments. A couple of weeks ago, futuristic major release of BackTrack was announced as   Kali Linux . Today Backtrack team released few updates to Kali Linux as version 1.0.3 and fixed couple of bugs. " Our first attempts at building an accessible version of Kali failed and after a bit of digging, we found that there were several upstream GNOME Display Manager (GDM3) bugs in Debian, which prevented these accessibility features from functioning with the GDM greeter. Working together with an upstream GNOME developer, we knocked out these bugs and had the fixes implemeted in Kali, and hopefully in future builds of GDM3 in Debian ." Download  new version of Kali Linux ( kali-linux-1.0.3-i386.iso ) wi

It seems that 2013 is the " Data Leakage Year "! Many customers' information and confidential data have been published on the internet coming from government institutions, famous vendors, and companies too. Ebrahim Hegazy(@Zigoo0) an Egyptian information security advisor who found a high severity vulnerability in " Avira license daemon " days ago, is on the news again, but this time for finding and reporting Blind SQL Injection vulnerability in one of Yahoo! E-marketing applications. SQL Injection vulnerabilities are ranked as Critical vulnerabilities, because if used by Hackers it will cause a database breach which will lead to confidential information leakage. A time based blind SQL Injection web vulnerability is detected in the official Yahoo! TW YSM Marketing Application Service. The vulnerability allows remote attackers to inject own SQL commands to breach the database of that vulnerable application and get access to the user data.

More than 50 millions of Smartphone users worldwide are facing a risk posed by a critical flaw in Viber app. The security company Bkav announced that it has found a way to gain full access to Android phones using the popular Viber messaging app. Unlike the Samsung lockscreen issue we reported on earlier, this attack doesn't take any fancy finger work. Instead, all it needs is two phones, both running Viber, and a phone number. " The way Viber handles to popup its messages on smartphones' lock screen is unusual, resulting in its failure to control programming logic, causing the flaw to appear, " said Mr. Nguyen Minh Duc, Director of Bkav's Security Division. Steps to exploit: Send Viber message to victim Combine actions on Viber message popups with tricks like using victim's notification bar, sending other Viber messages, etc. to make Viber keyboard appear Once Viber keyboard has appeared, to fully access the device, create misse