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Microsoft today announced that its Digital Crimes Unit ( a center of excellence for advancing the global fight against cybercrime ) has successfully disrupted the ZeroAccess botnet, one of the world's largest and most rampant botnet .The Botnet is " disrupted ," not "fully destroyed" , Microsoft itself admits that " do not expect to fully eliminate the ZeroAccess botnet due to the complexity of the threat. " This is the Microsoft's 8th botnet takedown operation in the past three years. With the help of U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation  ( FBI ) and Europol's European Cybercrime Centre (EC3), Microsoft led to the seizure of servers that had been distributing malware which has infected nearly 2 million computers all over the world, and with that, ZeroAccess botnet's masters are earning more than $2.7 million every month. ZeroAccess was first identified in 2011 by Symanetc, being used for click fraud, the malware can also be used to illicitly mine the v

It is always important to secure our system against outside threats i.e. Hackers, but it also required to protect against insider threats. The potential of damage from an Insider threat can be estimated from the example of Edward Snowden who had worked at the NSA , and had authorized access to thousands of NSA's Secret Documents, networks and systems. ' According to a recent Verizon report, insider threats account for around 14% of data breaches in 2013." Mostly, securing data involves just encryption in the cloud and keeping encryption keys out of the hands of rogue employees, but it is not enough where rogue employees should have access to encryption keys as part of their work. To prevent such risk of rogue employees misusing sensitive data, CloudFlare has released an open source encryption software " Red October ," with " two-man rule " style file encryption and decryption. " Two-man rule ", a control mechanism designed to achieve a hi

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

JPMorgan Chase , one of the world's biggest Banks has recently announced that it was the victim of a cyber attack and warned round 465,000 of its holders of prepaid cash cards on the possible exposure of their personal information. In the Security Breach that took place on the bank's website www.ucard.chase.com  in July, around 465,000 accounts are compromised i.e. 2% of the overall 25 million UCard users. JPMorgan confirmed that there is no risk for holders of debit cards, credit cards or prepaid Liquid cards. They informed the law enforcement in September, and till now no information on how attackers have conducted the attack has been disclosed. The JPMorgan spokesman Michael Fusco declared that the investigation allowed the identification of victim accounts and the data stolen, the bank already notifying the cardholders of the incident. JPMorgan representative also remarked that hackers haven't stolen money from any user's account, due this reason the company is not i

Just like other Web Browsers, The Google Chrome also offers a password manager feature that can save your logins and basic information for automatic form-filling. The Google Chrome browser stores all your passwords in the plain text format and is available for access by opening the following URL in your Chrome browser – " chrome : //settings/passwords ". Unlike Firefox , till now Google Chrome was not offering any Master Protection. Finally Google has implemented a Master Password protection on Chrome password manager in Windows and Mac. Now you have to enter your Windows account password to reveal the saved passwords. The protection will be lifted for a minute, after entering the password, and after that user need to re-login. Previously, Google was criticized many times for such bad password storage Practice because there is no master password, no security, not even a prompt that " these passwords are visible " and this allows anyone with access to a user's c

Believe it or not, but the National Security Agency (NSA) is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on mobile phone locations around the world. Snowden released documents that show that the NSA is tracking cell phone locations the world over as well as map the relationships of the mobile phone user and of course the purpose of this program is to identify terrorists and their networks overseas.  " Sophisticated mathematical techniques enable NSA analysts to map cell phone owners' relationships by correlating their patterns of movement over time with thousands or millions of other phone users who cross their paths. " The Washington Post wrote. According to the WP, the NSA's tracking tool is known as CO-TRAVELER , that tracks the locations of cell phones abroad as well as domestic cell phones that place calls abroad and capable of tracking cell phones even when they're not being used. ' U.S. Officials said the programs that collect and analyze location data are

In a recent cyber attack on a Forum site, thousands of outdated legitimate WordPress blogs were abused to perform DDOS attacks using previously known vulnerabilities . After analyzing the Log file from the victim's server, we have noticed many Wordpress CMS based educational (.EDU) and Government (.GOV) websites from where the attack was originated. In the past we have reported about many such cyber attacks, where attackers hacked into the Wordpress blogs using password brute-force attack or they used the  PINGBACK  vulnerability in older versions of Wordpress without compromising the server. WordPress has a built in functionality called Pingback , which allows anyone to initiate a request from WordPress to an arbitrary site and it can be used for a single machine to originate millions of requests from multiple locations. We have seen more than 100,000 IP addresses involved in the recent DDOS attack and the victim's Forum website received more than 40,000 requests in 7 mi