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800 Million US based Credit and Debit cards compromised! Really it's a big number and till now it has not been sized by the cyber security officials but a hacker group claims that they had stolen data on hundreds of millions of U.S. card accounts. Last week, the hacker group called itself Anonymous Ukraine ( Op_Ukraine) , said it has seized information pertained to 800 million U.S. credit and debit card accounts, including the cards' data belong to U.S. President Obama and other political figures. The group says the intention behind this data theft is to harm the U.S. economy. The messages posted on March 24 shows clearly that they were by anti-American. The first message read, " After the USA showed its true face when she unilaterally decides which of the peoples to live independently and who under the yoke of the Federal Reserve, we decided to show the world who is behind the future collapse of the American banking system. We own all the financial information of the

The respected encryption and network security company RSA Security (now a division of EMC), whose respect was already on stack after revelation by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden  revealed that the NSA created a flawed random number generation system ( Dual_EC_DRBG ), Dual Elliptic Curve, which the most trusted security provider company RSA used in its Bsafe security tool.  Until then RSA wasn't able to come up from this aspersion, a new document by Snowden revealed that RSA received $10 million from NSA for keeping Encryption Weak. Researchers from Johns Hopkins , the University of Wisconsin , the University of Illinois  have claimed that the RSA adopted one more NSA recommended tool called Extended Random extension  for secure websites, which actually helps NSA to crack a version of the Dual Elliptic Curve software tens of thousands of times faster,  Reuters reported. Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator ( Dual EC_DRBG ) is a cryptograph

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,

Again the sophisticated piece of malware, " njRAT " has come to picture targeting the government agencies and organizations in the Middle East, according to the research carried out by Symantec security researchers. The researchers analyzed 721 samples of malicious code ' njRAT ' and revealed that a large number of about 24,000 infected computers worldwide were targeted by the malware infections with 542 control-and-command (C&C) server domain names. njRAT is not a new piece of malware in the market, it is available since June 2013. Till now its three variants have been released and all of which can be propagated through infected USB keys or networked drives. njRAT is a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) intensive in its data-stealing capabilities. In addition to log keystrokes, the malware is capable to access the victim's camera, steal credentials stored in browsers, upload and download files, perform process and file manipulations, view the victim's desktop. Thi

Smart Phones, Smart TVs, Smart Refrigerators, even Smart Cars! When it comes to Smart devices, we simply provide them the master control of various tasks to make our life easy and more comfortable, unaware about its worst impact. At the starting of last month we reported that by using a $20 toolkit called CAN Hacking Tool (CHT) , hackers can hack your Smart Cars, giving entire control of your car to an attacker from windows and headlights to its steering and brakes. Now a new research carried out on the  Tesla Smart car  has proved that the hackers are able to remotely locate or unlock the Tesla Motors Inc. electric vehicles, just by cracking a six-character password using traditional hacking techniques. At the Black Hat Asia security conference in Singapore on Friday, Nitesh Dhanjani , a corporate security consultant and Tesla owner, said a recent study conducted by him on the Tesla Model S sedan pointed out several design flaws in its security system, and there wasn&

I know we all have freedom of speech, but unfortunately it's not free, especially in the countries govern by the governments where they are ready to kill our voice anyhow, even by censoring the social media. The same happened few days before, when Twitter , the biggest Social Media platform, was banned by the Turkey government after an audio clip was leaked on YouTube and Twitter about the massive corruption of Turkey Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan instructing his son to dispose of large amounts of cash in the midst of a police investigation. The Prime minister of the country, Erdoğan has full control on the old media, the television and the printing press, but he failed to stop the Ten Million Turkish citizen on twitter from sharing the audio all over the social media site, when Twitter itself reportedly refused to delete the incriminating audio of him. But it doesn't work very well, since the users have all way out. Millions of Turkey users began using Google's DNS servi

The Distributed Denial of Service ( DDoS ) attack has become more sophisticated and complex and therefore has become one of the favorite weapon for the cyber criminals to temporarily suspend the services of any host connected to the Internet and till now nearly every big site had been a victim of this attack, from WordPress to online game websites. According to the new report released by a US based security solutions provider  Incapsula , DDOS activities have become threefold since the start of the year 2013, pointing the key source of trash traffic to be the remotely controlled " zombie army " that can be used to flood various websites by DDoS attacks and other malicious activities. The report site as " DDOS Threat Landscape ", explains that almost one in every three DDoS attacks is above 20Gbps and 81% of attacks feature multiple vector threats. The attackers are becoming more skillful at working around the network security and reusing their DDOS Botnets to attack multi

Previous articles on The Hacker News have highlighted that How Internet of Things (IoT) opens your home to cyber threats. Recently the security researchers from vulnerability research firm  ReVuln  published a video demonstration shows that Philips Smart TV is prone to cyber attacks by hackers. According to the researchers, some versions of Philips Smart TV with latest firmware update are wide open to hackers and also vulnerable to cookie theft. The fault is in a feature called Miracast , that allows TVs to act as a WiFi access point with a hard-coded password 'Miracast,' and allows devices nearby within the range to connect the device for receiving the screen output. " The main problem is that Miracast uses a fixed password, doesn't show a PIN number to insert and, moreover, doesn't ask permission to allow the incoming connection, " Luigi Auriemma, CEO and security researcher at ReVuln, told SCMagazine . The vulnerability allows an attacker within the device'

Cyber criminals are more business-minded than you might expect. As the business has moved to greater use of mobile and non-Windows computers, so cyber criminals have adapted techniques monetize their efforts. Security researchers at Lookout Mobile Security discovered that various apps uploaded to Google Play Store containing hidden Coinkrypt android malware, that can turn your mobile device into crypto-currency miners. As we know, coin mining is the key component for digital currencies, so the malware uses a botnet of infected Android Smartphones to mine for currency. Such malware does not steal data. Instead, they are capable of mining Bitcoin , Litecoin and Dogecoin using the victim's device. " Mining can be incredibly resource-intensive and, if allowed to run without any limits, could potentially damage hardware by causing it to overheat and even burn out. " researchers said. The Antivirus firm Trend Micro also spotted two apps named - ' Song

When it comes to Information Security, there's a great way to learn, train and keep sharp your skills. This can be done using gamification mechanics to speed up the learning curve and improve retention rate. Capture The Flag competitions use gamification mechanics and represent one of the best ways to learn security hands on. The Infosec team behind Capture The Flag platform  CTF365  has created a place for hackers to play weekend CTFs with great prizes, called  Hacker's Dome . In order to access the Hacker's Dome, you need is a registered and confirmed CTF365 account.  At Hacker's Dome CTF Platform users can deploy their own CTFs and can invite web developers, system administrators and security professionals to take hard challenges. Think RackSpace, of CTF Competitions. Hacker's Dome - First Blood:  First Blood is the first CTF and will start on May 17 2014 15:00 UTC and winners will win more than $6000 in prizes . If Information Security  gamific

A 31-year-old South Korean has been recently accused by the police for the allegation of infiltrating and hacking the accounts of 25 million users of   Naver , one of the popular search portal in South Korea. On Wednesday, the Asian National Police Agency revealed that the suspect purchased the private information of 25 million users, including names, residential numbers, Internet IDs and passwords from a Korean-Chinese, back in August last year, Korea Herald reported. The suspect surnamed  ' Seo ', supposedly used the purchased information to hack into the accounts of Naver users and sent out spam messages and other ' illicit emails ' to the account holders. He had made an illegal profit of some 160 million won ( $148,000 ) using this, according to the report. Also a hacker surnamed  ' Hong ', has been arrested by the police who was suspected to develop the hacking program that automatically enter users' IDs and passwords, which was apparently used by

The devices are becoming smarter, therefore the chances to abuse them have increased. As the share of Android has become 87% in the global Smartphone market, so the Android is by far an elementary target of the mobile malware developers. The number of malware variants has increased rapidly and today 99 out of 100 mobile viruses are targeting Android Devices. Most of the sophisticated malware has the capability to steal keylogs , send text messages to the premium numbers, steal personal data without requesting permission from the device user, also have the caliber to modify SMS and MMS messages and contacts.  Mobile Malware can modify or steal the content stored on your device's SD card and some advance botnet  malware even can give complete remote control of your device to an attacker. DENDROID Beginning this month, we warned our readers from one such sophisticated android malware toolkit discovered by the Symantec researchers that dubbed as ' Dendroid ', which runs on HTTP prot

The Android operating system has hardened its security with application Sandboxing features to ensure that no application can access sensitive information held by another without proper privileges. Android applications communicate with each other through Intents and these intents can be abused by hackers to provide a channel for a malicious application to inject malicious data into a target, potentially vulnerable application. Security Researchers at IBM have discovered multiple vulnerabilities in Firefox for Android platform that allow a malicious application to leak the sensitive information related to the user's profile. Android's Firefox app stores the personal data at following location: / data /data/org . mozilla . firefox /files/mozilla/<RANDOM-STRING >. default . Where the random name for user's profile is used to prevent unwanted access to this directory in case of Firefox exploitation. Researchers developed an exploit to brute-force the &