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

Ransomware is an emerging threat in the evolution of cybercriminals techniques to part you from your money. Typically, the malicious software either lock victim's computer system or encrypt the documents and files on it, in order to extort money from the victims. Though earlier we saw the samples of Ransomware tended to be simple with dogged determinations to extort money from victims. But with the exponential rise in the samples of Ransomware malwares, the recent ones are more subtle in design, including Cryptolocker , Icepole , PrisonLocker , CryptoDefense and its variants. Now, the ransomware dubbed as Crytowall , a latest variant of the infamous ransomware Cryptolocker is targeting users by forcing them to download the malicious software by through advertising on the high profile domains belonging to Disney, Facebook, The Guardian newspaper and others. Cryptolocker is designed by the same malware developer who created the sophisticated CryptoDefense ( Trojan.Crypt

Vodafone , the world's second-largest mobile carrier with more than 400 million customers around the world has issued its first " Law Enforcement Disclosure Report ", reveals that the governments in some of the countries it operates, have direct access to its network allowing them to listen to all conversations. The Company has broken its silence on government surveillance and after Snowden's revelations about NSA , this is the only most comprehensive transparency report ever published by an International company detailing that how some Governments are taking advantage of their laws to infiltrate citizens privacy. Vodafone operates in 29 countries, where the government agencies need legal notices to tap into customers' communications, but some of those countries are actually tapping directly into their network, without any need for a warrant or any explanation. There are many countries like Albania, Egypt, Hungary, India , Malta, Qatar, Romania, South Africa and Turk

The  ransomware industry surged in 2023  as it saw an alarming 55.5% increase in victims worldwide, reaching a staggering 5,070.  But 2024 is starting off showing a very different picture.  While the numbers skyrocketed in Q4 2023 with 1309 cases, in Q1 2024, the ransomware industry was down to 1,048 cases. This is a 22% decrease in ransomware attacks compared to Q4 2023. Figure 1: Victims per quarter There could be several reasons for this significant drop.  Reason 1: The Law Enforcement Intervention Firstly, law enforcement has upped the ante in 2024 with actions against both LockBit and ALPHV. The LockBit Arrests In February, an international operation named "Operation Cronos" culminated in the arrest of at least three associates of the infamous LockBit ransomware syndicate in Poland and Ukraine.  Law enforcement from multiple countries collaborated to take down LockBit's infrastructure. This included seizing their dark web domains and gaining access to their backend sys

Today Microsoft has released its Advance Notification for the month of June 2014 Patch Tuesday releasing seven security Bulletins, which will address several vulnerabilities in its products, out of which two are marked critical and rest are important in severity. This Tuesday, Microsoft will issue Security Updates to address seven major vulnerabilities and all those are important for you to patch, as the flaws are affecting various Microsoft software, including Microsoft Word, Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer. CRITICAL VULNERABILITY THAT YOU MUST PATCH Bulletin one is considered to be the most critical one, which will address a the zero-day Remote Code Execution vulnerability, affecting all versions of Internet Explorer, including IE11 in Windows 8.1.  All server versions of Windows are affected by this vulnerability, but at low level of severity because by default, Internet Explorer runs in Enhanced Security Configuration and just because Server Core version

Remember OpenSSL Heartbleed vulnerability ? Several weeks ago, the exposure of this security bug chilled the Internet, revealed that millions of websites were vulnerable to a flaw in the OpenSSL code which they used to encrypt their communications. Now once again the OpenSSL Foundation has issued software updates to patch six new vulnerabilities, and two of them are critical. MAN-IN-THE-MIDDLE ATTACK (CVE-2014-0224) First critical vulnerability (CVE-2014-0224) in OpenSSL is " CCS Injection " - resides in ChangeCipherSpec (CCS) request sent during the handshake that could allow an attacker to perform a man-in-the-middle attack against the encrypted connection servers and clients.  By exploiting this vulnerability an attacker could intercept an encrypted connection which allows him to decrypt, read or manipulate the data. But the reported flaw is exploitable only if both server and client are vulnerable to this issue. According to the OpenSSL advisory , " An attacker

We have seen cybercriminals targeting PCs with Ransomware malware that encrypts your files or lock down your computer and ask for a ransom amount to be paid in a specified duration of time to unlock it. To deliver the Ransomware malwares to the mobile devices, cyber criminals have already started creating malicious software programs for android devices. Last month, we reported about a new Police Ransomware malware that locks up the devices until the victims pay a ransom to get the keys to unlock the phone. But, the malware just lock the mobile screen and a loophole in the its implementation allowed users to recover their device and data stored on SDcard. Now, in an effort to overcome this, threat actors have adopted encryption in the development of mobile Ransomware malwares. Recently, the security firm ESET has discovered a new Android ransomware, dubbed as Android/Simplocker.A , that has ability to encrypt the files on the device SD card and then demand a ransom from the victim

Privacy of Internet users is dead somewhere as the Intelligence agencies can watch our every move, hear our every conversation and read our every email and find out anything related to our personal and private life.  Last year, Edward Snowden revealed about the mass surveillance carried out by NSA and other countries intelligence agencies on every citizen of their country. The US Government has allotted a large share of its ' Black Budget ' for secret surveillance programs and to make this happen, NSA has used a number of unethical ways and labelled as legal solutions, harvesting hundreds of millions of Metadata from emails, web activity, chats, social networks, and everything else around the world. The revelations encouraged Internet users think about their privacy and digital rights, and the time came when different organisations started several campaigns to block mass surveillance and fight back against the U.S. National Security Agency ( NSA ). RESET YOU

Attackers care about ROI – they want to accomplish their objective with the least investment of time and resources possible. The same is true for you - to most effectively manage vulnerabilities, you need to think like an attacker. Ask yourself: How would you go about compromising systems, exfiltrating valuable information and making money? What are the key assets in your network that you would target? How would you get to these assets? Attackers are looking for vulnerabilities that are exposed – ones offering them an easy way to penetrate your network and pivot into the truly valuable assets on your network. Although zero-day exploits are heavily publicized, attackers more often use older, proven exploits very effectively. Fortunately, many such exploits are well known and have clear remediation methods. So, how can you determine if a known vulnerability is actually exploitable? The key is to correlate system vulnerabilities with threat intelligence so you can prioriti

The development of self own languages has become emblematic of the hot new trend in business as every big Internet service provider is now developing their own and unique programming languages. Two months ago, Facebook released its modern programming language called ' HACK ', which is specially designed to make the process of writing and testing code of complex websites and other software faster, and the company already drives almost all of the its social networking site to HACK over the last year. This Monday, Apple surprises the gathering of people who build software applications for Apple hardware devices at its World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) by introducing its whole new programming language called Swift , which probably replace Apple's main programming language - Objective-C that is being loved by the developers who build software applications for Apple hardware devices, from iPhone, iPad to Macintosh. The first app built on Swift is the WWDC ap

GnuTLS, a widely used open source SSL/TLS cryptographic library is vulnerable to a buffer overflow vulnerability that could be exploited to crash TLS clients or potentially execute malicious code on underlying systems. The GnuTLS library implements secure sockets layer (SSL) and transport layer security (TLS) protocols on computers, servers, and softwares to provide encrypted communications over insecure channels. The bug ( CVE-2014-3466 ) was independently discovered by Joonas Kuorilehto of security firm Codenomicon, the same security firm who discovered the biggest Internet vulnerability, Heartbleed. Unlike Heartbleed, the GnuTLS library is not as widely deployed as OpenSSL. The GnuTLS Vulnerability resides in the way GnuTLS parses the session ID from the server response during a TLS handshake. It does not check the length of session ID value in the ServerHello message, which allows a malicious server to send an excessively long value in order to execute buffer overf

Everything we do online, whether chatting on phone, talking via video or audio, sending messages on phones or emails are being watched by Governments and Intelligence agencies. However, many Internet giants offer encrypted environment in an effort to protect our online data from prying eyes, but still those companies can read our data stored into their servers. But, there is a great news for Gmail users. On Tuesday, Google has announced two major privacy enhancements in its Gmail and this new push for its email service will even protect our data and communication from Google itself. With the ongoing concerns about privacy and the pervasiveness of email communications, Google already provides encryption for its Gmail called Transit encryption (HTTPS). In which only the transmission of emails sending or receiving is protected by the transit encryption but not the content of the email. Few Months back, Google itself admitted that their automated systems read our email c

Ransomware is one of the most blatant and obvious money making schemes for cybercriminals and it was most likely to be known when last year Cryptolocker ransomware targeted millions of computers worldwide. Recently, security researchers at the Antivirus firm TrendLabs have unearthed another sophisticated variant of the ransomware malware which is employing  Windows PowerShell  in an effort to encrypt files on the victims' computer. The firm detected the variant as TROJ_POSHCODER.A . Windows PowerShell is a task automation and configuration management framework from Microsoft, consisting of a command-line shell and associated scripting language. It provides full access to COM and WMI, enabling administrators to perform administrative tasks on both local and remote Windows systems as well as WS-Management and CIM enabling management of remote Linux systems and network devices. It is believed that cybercriminals have used this feature of Windows just in order to make

Mozilla is planning to provide a new feature that will allow free audio and video calls between its Firefox web browser , thereby ending the need of any third-party client service or plugin. Mozilla will soon release a new experimental version of Firefox Nightly , which will include an open source and Peer-to-peer communication protocol called WebRTC that enables Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities between two web browsers via simple Javascript APIs. NO PLUGINS REQUIRED WebRTC is not a web browser plugin, and its components run in the browser sandbox. Its components do not require separate installation or any separate process to run and it will receive its updates along with the web browser updates. " No plugins, no downloads. If you have a browser, a camera and a mic, you'll be able to make audio and video calls to anyone else with an enabled browser ." reads the blog post and when the camera or microphone are running, this is clearly shown by the Fire