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22 million Yahoo! Japan's user IDs may have been stolen during an unauthorised attempt to access the administrative system of its Japan portal. " We don't know if the file of 22 million user IDs was leaked or not, but we can't deny the possibility given the volume of traffic between our server and external terminals ", Yahoo said. The information did not include passwords and the kind of data necessary to verify a user's identity or reset passwords, it said, adding that the company had updated its security measures to prevent a repeat of the incident. In 2011, Sony said information such as usernames, passwords and birth dates of more than 100 million people may have been compromised after hackers struck the PlayStation Network and Sony Online Entertainment services. Japan acknowledges that its preventative measures against cyberattacks remain underdeveloped, with the national police agency having announced this month it would launch a team to analyze and combat cyberatt

Earlier this week, new Mac spyware was discovered on a computer at the Oslo Freedom Forum , which is an annual human rights conference. Dubbed as  OSX/KitM.A , discovered by computer security researcher Jacob Appelbaum . This Mac malware that has been used to spy on activists, targeted via spear phishing attack and had received emails that duped them into installing the malware. The malware is a backdoor application called " macs.app " which launches automatically upon login. There are two command-and-control servers, located at securitytable.org and docsforum.info. Interestingly, the malware is signed with an Apple Developer ID , which is designed to prevent the installation of malware, associated with the name Rajender Kumar  and  the use of the ID appears to be an attempt to bypass Apple's Gatekeeper execution prevention technology. As of right now, F-Secure is looking into the origination of the malware and though it doesn't appear to be widespread.  You can

In today's digital world, where connectivity is rules all, endpoints serve as the gateway to a business's digital kingdom. And because of this, endpoints are one of hackers' favorite targets.  According to the IDC,  70% of successful breaches start at the endpoint . Unprotected endpoints provide vulnerable entry points to launch devastating cyberattacks. With IT teams needing to protect more endpoints—and more kinds of endpoints—than ever before, that perimeter has become more challenging to defend. You need to improve your endpoint security, but where do you start? That's where this guide comes in.  We've curated the top 10 must-know endpoint security tips that every IT and security professional should have in their arsenal. From identifying entry points to implementing EDR solutions, we'll dive into the insights you need to defend your endpoints with confidence.  1. Know Thy Endpoints: Identifying and Understanding Your Entry Points Understanding your network's

New issue of English-language al-Qaeda magazine posted on the terror group's website earlier this week linked to the Boston terrorist attacks has possibly been hacked by Western intelligence agencies and its content beyond its cover page was scrambled. The magazine, produced by al Qaeda's Yemeni affiliate, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which regularly includes how-to instructions for followers to carry out terrorist attacks in the West, has received significant scrutiny in recent weeks. Investigators believe that Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev accessed Inspire magazine, and the material had instructions on bomb-making, a law enforcement official said.  According to analysts , the explosive devices the Boston bombers built had striking similarities to a bomb recipe in the first issue of the magazine, " How to build a bomb in your Mom's kitchen ", that has been downloaded by militants in multiple Islamist terrorist plots. Previous issu

The Financial Times has become the latest news outlet to be hacked by supporters of the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad , following a phishing attack on the company's email accounts. The posh broadsheet's Tech Blog - at https://blogs.FT.com/beyond-brics was compromised to run stories headlined " Syrian Electronic Army Was Here " and " Hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army ". Twelve posts appeared on the FT's tech blog between 12.38pm and 12.42pm on Friday, with official Twitter feeds also disrupted. In a later Twitter statement the FT said, " Various FT blogs and social-media accounts have been compromised by hackers and we are working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible." The Syrian Electronic Army , understood to be a number of hackers and online activists that support the current Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, may have gained control for up to 14 Twitter accounts run by the newspaper. The group of hackers has claime

Peter Sunde ,   the former spokesman for The Pirate Bay has announced he will run in the European Parliament elections next year. Sunde, will participate for the Finnish branch of the Pirate Party. The Pirate Party was founded in Sweden in 2006, and in 2009 Christian Engström was the first member of the Pirate Party elected to European Parliament. Sunde, along with partners Carl Lundström, Frederik Neij , and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg , were convicted of accessory to breaching copyright laws by a Swedish court in 2009. Peter Sunde, who was born in Sweden but holds Finnish citizenship, is facing a prison sentence for his involvement with BitTorrent doesn't seem to concern him very much. He has been fighting the sentence for a while and if he gets elected things might get very interesting indeed. Sunde describes himself as ' socialist, green and a pirate ' on his blog. " I am doing what I can to help solve the problems we have today, as well as the ones we

There are many unpatched loopholes or flaws in Facebook website, that allow hackers to inject external links or images to a wall, hijacking any facebook account or bypassing your social privacy . Today we are going to report about another unfixed facebook app vulnerability that allow a hacker to spoof the content of any Facebook app  easily. Nir Goldshlager from Break Security today exposed another major flaw that allows hacker to wall post spoofed messages from trusted applications like Saavn, Candy Crush, Spotify, Pinterest, or really any other application on Facebook. In 2012 Facebook's method of publishing called stream.publish and the  Stream Publish Dialog looks like the following:  https://www.facebook.com/dialog/stream.publish?app_id=xxxx&redirect_uri=https://www.facebook.com/&action_links=&attachment=%7B%27media%27:%20[%7B%27type%27:%20%27flash%27,%27swfsrc%27:%27https://files.nirgoldshlager.com/goldshlager2.swf%27,%27imgsrc%27:%27https://w

In the recent months I had the opportunity to conduct an interesting study on the use of Social Media in the Military Sector, large diffusion of media platforms makes them very attractive for governments and intelligence agencies . Social media platforms reveal enormous potentiality that could be exploited also in critical sectors such as military and defense. Modern social media networks are actively used by every government, the US, China and Russia are the most active in this field, but also emerging cyber countries like Iran and North Korea demonstrates an increasing interest in the matter. The principal uses of social media for government are Psychological Operations (PsyOps) OSInt Cyber espionage Offensive purposes On May 10th the Illinois Air National Guard 183rd Fighter Wing published a notice in the monthly issue of a newsletter titled Falcon View. The notice, that seems to be authentic, dedicates a paragraph to the use of social networking sites for

Four men accused of launching online attacks under the banner of LulzSec appeared in a London courtroom Wednesday for sentencing.  Ryan Ackroyd , Jake Davis , Mustafa al-Bassam and Ryan Cleary have all pleaded guilty to hacking offences. The name Lulzsec is a combination of ' lulz ' or 'lols', " LAUGHING AT YOUR SECURITY " meaning 'laugh out loud' and security, and was a direct descent of notorious hacking group Anonymous. Working from their bedrooms in 2011, caused millions of pounds of damage with attacks on NHS, CIA and US military websites, they stole huge amounts of sensitive personal data including emails, online passwords and credit card details belonging to hundreds of thousands of people, Southwark Crown Court in London heard. They also carried out distributed denial of service ( DDoS ) attacks on many institutions, crashing their websites. Ackroyd, 26, from Mexborough, South Yorkshire, has admitted stealing data from Sony . To do it, t

Mozilla has launched Firefox 21 for Mac, Windows, and Linux, adding a number of improvements, namely to the browser's Social API. " Today, we are adding multiple new social providers Cliqz, Mixi and msnNOW to Firefox ," wrote Mozilla in a blog post today. The browser first added Facebook integration back in December, and the inclusion of these services goes a long way towards making social integration an even larger part of the services offered. The Do Not Track feature has been part of Firefox for some time now. You can enable it to add information to each connection request to tell sites about your tracking preference. Along with adding more social integration, the release also closed up security holes in the browser rated as high in severity, including two in the Mozilla Maintenance Service although only one of them left the browser open to potential remote exploits . Fixed in Firefox 21 MFSA 2013-48 Memory corruption found using Address Sanitize

23-year-old Todd Miller , suspected of hacking into Sony's PlayStation Network , was due to be arrested, will spend a year on house arrest, but not for the hacking. Instead, he was sentenced yesterday in federal court for obstructing a federal investigation because he smashed his computers, halting an FBI investigation into his hacking. The court heard that the accused was part of the hacker group KCUF, which led an attack on the PSN in 2008. Without his computers, they couldn't prove he was involved in the hacks. The judge said that because Miller had a troubled childhood and now had stability and a full time job, that he could "see no sense" in sentencing him to prison. He said he has learned his lesson. The PSN hack, and the dozens of copycat attacks that ensued, cost Sony and their partners millions of dollars, as well as endangering the privacy and personal financial security of more than seventy million PSN users. U.S. District Judge Peter C. Economus sentenced M

SolarWinds ® Log & Event Manager (LEM) , a full-function Security & Information Event Management (SIEM) solution, delivers powerful log management capabilities in a highly affordable, easy-to-deploy virtual appliance. SolarWinds LEM combines real-time log analysis, event correlation, and a groundbreaking approach to IT search, delivering the visibility, security, and control users need to overcome everyday IT challenges. How does LEM work? SolarWinds LEM integrates with and collects log data from a variety of assets in your IT environment including security appliances, network devices, workstations, operating systems, databases and servers. With the collected and normalized log data, LEM performs real-time, in-memory, non-linear multiple event correlation to analyze device and machine logs, and provides advanced incident awareness on all operational, security and policy-driven events on your network. What can you do with LEM? LEM allows you to alert on securi

Another day, Another verified twitter account with over 900,000 followers hacked by 'Colin'. Hacker hacked into a Sky News Twitter account earlier today, and left a semi-permanent mark on the internet's consciousness. The mysterious Colin soon began to trend on Twitter as #ColinWasHere hashtag. However, the tweet which simply said " Colin was here " - has now been deleted, with Sky blaming the tweet on a hack. The post was retweeted more than 7,500 times before it was removed half an hour later. The Syrian Electronic Army in the recent past has been accused of hacking social media feeds of a number of well known Twitter handles, such as AP , The Guardian and even for some bizarre reason, the satire news agency ' The Onion ' UPDATE:  The Sky News press office has informed that Colin was, in fact, " a 'disaster recovery' test message which accidently went live " and that "no Colin was harmed in the making of this message".

The hacktivist group Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) briefly took over the Twitter account of the satirical news publication The Onion, posting a series of anti-Israeli joke stories and an anti-Obama meme image. In a post on The Onion tech team's GitHub blog , the fake news site explains that the Syrian Electronic Army didn't wrestle control of its Twitter account using some advanced hacker scheme. The hack attack penetrated the publication with at least three methods of phishing attacks, where a false e-mail redirected people to a fake Website which then asked for Google Apps credentials. Previously the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) has shanghaied its way into the official Twitter feeds of AP and the Guardian, using the former to post a tweet falsely claiming that there had been an explosion at the white House. Exposing details about an attack is not the normal approach companies take after they are hacked. The New York Times revealed earlier this year how Chinese hackers breac

This coming Tuesday, Microsoft will issue fixes for 33 vulnerabilities in total, including two critical  zero-day flaws relating to Internet Explorer recently discovered that has been used to attack several high-profile targets. Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 are the recipients of a patch that can prevent an exploit that enables remote code execution in the browser. This affects all Windows operating systems except XP. The vulnerability ( CVE-​​2013-​​1347 ) had previously been addressed in a workaround yesterday , but given the way it was being exploited with attacks reported on the US Department of Labor and European aerospace and nuclear researchers the patch has been prioritised. A second bulletin deals with another IE vulnerability believed to be one disclosed in March at the annual Pwn2Own hacking competition. At least four of the patches require a restart, Microsoft said. The remaining eight patches will address flaws that range from denial-of-servic

The security features built into Apple 's iOS software are so good that the police are unable to gain access to defendant's iPhones when they need to.  Companies like Apple and Google are being asked by law enforcement officials to bypass these protections to aid in investigations. Apple receives so many police demands to decrypt seized iPhones that it has created a waiting list to handle the deluge of requests. In one of the recent cases, according to court documents, the federal agents were baffled by the encrypted iPhone 4S of a man in Kentucky who was charged for supplying crack cocaine. CNET reports that ATF agent Rob Maynard spent three months trying to "locate a local, state, or federal law enforcement agency with the forensic capabilities to unlock" an iPhone 4S. After everyone said that they did not have the capabilities, Maynard turned to Apple. Apple can reportedly bypass the security lock to get access to data on a phone, download it to an external devic

The IT sector has become one of the most significant growth catalysts for the Indian economy. The government approved the National Cyber Security Policy that aims to create a secure computing environment in the country and build capacities to strengthen the current set up with focus on manpower training. The policy was approved by the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) that lays stress on augmentation of the India's indigenous capabilities in terms of developing the cyber security set-up.  The policy is not aimed only at government entities and big business, but at home users as well. It aims to create a cyber security framework that will address all related issues over a long period.  The framework will lead to specific actions and programmes to enhance the security posture of country's cyber space. Cyber Security Policy will also help in enhancing the intelligence as its integral component and help in anticipating attacks and adopt, counter measures.

They didn't use guns, masks or even threatening notes passed to bank tellers. It may be the largest bank robbery in history. A gang of cyber-criminals operating in 26 countries stole $45 million by hacking their way into a database of prepaid debit cards. Reportedly, the group of hackers targeted weaknesses in how banks and payment processors handle prepaid debit cards. Authorities said they arrested these seven U.S. citizens and residents of Yonkers, New York: Jael Mejia Collado, Joan Luis Minier Lara, Evan Jose Peña, Jose Familia Reyes, Elvis Rafael Rodriguez, Emir Yasser Yeje and Chung Yu-Holguin. The eighth defendant charged in the indictment, Alberto Yusi Lajud-Peña, also known as 'Prime' and 'Albertico,' was murdered on April 27 in the Dominican Republic. They're suspected of working with hackers who twice broke into credit card processing companies' computer systems, stole ATM card data and bypassed the withdrawal limits on the accounts.

Trend Micro researchers have uncovered a new backdoor pieces of malware from the Winnti family, which are mainly used by a Chinese  cyber criminal group to target South East Asian organizations from the video gaming sector. Winnti malware used by hackers to hijack control of web users systems using a new backdoor contained in the legitimate Aheadlib analysis tool. Dubbed as " Bkdr_Tengo.A, " passes itself off as a legitimate system DLL file called winmm.dll. " We believe that this was done using a legitimate tool called Aheadlib, which is a legitimate analysis tool. "  wrote Trend Micro's Eduardo Altares. " The file is not encrypted and neither was it particularly hard to analyze. Its main behavior is to steal Microsoft Office, .PDF, and .TIFF files from USB drives inserted into the system. These stolen files are stored in the $NtUninstallKB080515$ under the Windows folder. It also creates a log file named Usblog_DXM.log. The files can be retrieved by

Watering hole Internet Explorer 8 zero-day attack on the US Department of Labor website last week has spread to 9 more global websites over the weekend, including those run by a big European company operating in the aerospace, defense , and security industries as well as non-profit groups and institutes Attacks exploiting a previously unknown and currently unpatched vulnerability in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser have spread to at least. Researchers analyzing the attacks say that the attack tie it to a China-based hacking group known as " DeepPanda ". Security firm CrowdStrike said its researchers unearthed evidence suggesting that the campaign began in mid-March. Their analysis of logs from the malicious infrastructure used in the attacks revealed the IP addresses of visitors to the compromised sites. The logs showed addresses from 37 different countries, with 71 percent of them in the US, 11 percent in South/Southeast Asia, and 10 percent in Europe. Micros

A suspect hacker ' Shih ' was arrested by Taiwan Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB)  last week for hacking into a popular local classic music website. The police raided the apartment of the suspect and seized his computer. The investigation was launched by the bureau after it received a report from the website's operator who said its site was hacked in March. During initial investigations, Shih confessed to the police that he hacked into the website's customer database and made unauthorized changes to customer data. Shih also confessed that he has used a hacking technique called SQL injection to attack the website's database . SQL injection is a technique used to take advantage of non-validated input vulnerabilities to pass SQL commands through a Web application for execution by a backend database. The result is that the attacker can execute arbitrary SQL queries and/or commands on the backend database server through the Web application. The  Criminal Investi