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U.S. intelligence agencies traced a recent cyber intrusion into U.S. Army database that holds sensitive information about vulnerabilities in U.S. dams.  The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers National Inventory of Dams contains information about 79,000 dams throughout the country and tracks such information as the number of estimated deaths that could occur if a specific dam failed. The database also holds sensitive information, including vulnerabilities, of every major dam throughout the country. Michelle Van Cleave, a former consultant to the CIA, told the Beacon that the data breach appeared to be part of a greater effort to collect vulnerability and targeting data for future cyber or military attacks. The Corps of Engineers National Inventory of Dams was hacked by an unauthorized user believed to be from Chinese government or military cyber warriors, beginning in January and uncovered earlier this month. " In the wrong hands, the Army Corps of Engineers' database cou

The Bitcoin mining rig is becoming a popular alternative to people who want an easy way to earn the digital currency. All you have to do is plug the hardware that specializes in Bitcoin mining and run its customized software. After that, you can sit back and relax as it mines the digital currency for you. A popular eSports league has admitted that one of its employees harnessed the power of member's computers without their knowledge in order to mine Bitcoins. For a period of 2 weeks, gamers noticed that their computers were generating unusually high GPU loads and frequent BSOD errors. Some gamers stated that their GPUs were damaged due to them reaching temperatures above 90 degrees Celsius. The mining began on April 13th and affected thousands of gamers, who unwittingly mined over $3,700 worth of the currency. Eric Thunberg, co-owner of ESEA, stated that the Bitcoin miner was meant to be part of an April Fools joke, however, they weren't able to finish it in time. They then de

Identities now transcend human boundaries. Within each line of code and every API call lies a non-human identity. These entities act as programmatic access keys, enabling authentication and facilitating interactions among systems and services, which are essential for every API call, database query, or storage account access. As we depend on multi-factor authentication and passwords to safeguard human identities, a pressing question arises: How do we guarantee the security and integrity of these non-human counterparts? How do we authenticate, authorize, and regulate access for entities devoid of life but crucial for the functioning of critical systems? Let's break it down. The challenge Imagine a cloud-native application as a bustling metropolis of tiny neighborhoods known as microservices, all neatly packed into containers. These microservices function akin to diligent worker bees, each diligently performing its designated task, be it processing data, verifying credentials, or

Early 2012 ESET company a mysterious malware, dubbed the Avatar rootkit (Win32/Rootkit.Avatar), advertised in the underground forums by Russian cyber crime . " We present you here previously announced product. In connection with work on other projects, we moved the release date for the public from May to February 2013th 2012go.Now nuclear rootkit AVATAR is available for rental. " Despite the malware was described months ago it was not found and published until now, in March ESET researchers detected two droppers with different C&C servers and having different compilation time stamps as showed in the following pictures: The Avatar rootkit appears very sophisticated, it uses two different infection techniques, the first in the dropper so as to bypass detections by HIPS, and the second one in the rootkit driver to allow the malware to be alive after system reboot, the instance detected works only on x86 systems. The 2 level dropper for Avatar rootkit works in conjunct

A dangerous variant of the Ramnit malware has been discovered targeting the UK's financial sector. Trusteer claims to have discovered an interesting trojan based attack technique that injects highly convincing and interactive real-time messages into the user Web stream that they encounter when logging into a UK online banking session. The Ramnit worm was discovered in 2010, but in 2011 researchers spotted a new strain that had incorporated source code from the notorious Zeus banking trojan. Cyber criminals are stepping up their use of social engineering techniques to bypass increasingly security-aware users of online banking and e-commerce sites.   The malware reportedly avoids detection by going into an idle sleep mode until its intended victim logs into their online bank account, at which point it activates and presents them with a fraudulent phishing message. Ramnit circumvented the OTP feature at the target bank using a 'Man in the Browser' attack to in

Distributed Denial of Service attacks have increased in scale, intensity and frequency. The wide range of motives for these attacks political , criminal, or social makes every merchant or organization with an online presence a potential target. Over the weekend Incapsula mitigated a unique DDoS attack against a large gaming website, in which they have discovered a DDoS attack using thousands of legitimate WordPress blogs without the need for them to be compromised. Incapsula released the list of approximately 2,500 WordPress sites from where the attack was originated, including some very large sites like Trendmicro.com, Gizmodo.it and Zendesk.com . In a recent report , we posted about another method for DDoS attacks using DNS amplification , where a DNS request is made to an open DNS resolver with the source IP address forged so that it is the IP address of the targeted site to which the response is thus sent, but this new method uses HTTP rather than DNS. The

Privacy conscious phone users are being offered a new app that claims to be the world's first totally secure messaging service. A London-based iPhone messaging app claims to be unhackable and is offering reward to anyone who can intercept a message sent by it.  Redact believes that messages sent via the app are completely secure, and to prove it a reward of £10,000 has been offered. The application creates a secure and encrypted peer-to-peer network between two iPhones, with messages sent directly from one phone to another and not through the company's servers.  The company has already offered its Secure Messenger service for free to MPs and submitted the technology to CESG, the Government's National Technical Authority for Information Assurance, which provides advice on the security of communications and electronic data. With Redact there are no user names, phone numbers or email addresses. Instead, new users are automatically assigned a unique PIN, simi