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Apple has patched the security flaw in its Find My iPhone online service that may have allowed hackers to get access to a number of celebrities' private pictures leaked online. OVER 100 CELEBRITIES AFFECTED So far, I hope everybody have heard about probably the biggest digital exposure of personal nude photographs belonging to as many as 100 high-profile celebrities, including Jenny McCarthy, Kristin Dunst, Mary E Winstead, and the Oscar winning actress Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton. Initial reports suggested that the privacy breach of the celebrities' iCloud accounts was made possible by a vulnerability in Find My iPhone feature that allowed hackers to allegedly take nude photographs of celebrities from their Apple iCloud backups. Anonymous 4chan users who claims to have grabbed images, posted some of the images to the " b " forum on notorious bulletin-board 4chan, where the owners demanded Bitcoin in exchange for a peek of the images. The anonymous 4c

With a need to give more controls in users' hands, LinkedIn has introduced a few new security features that the company says will help users of the social network for professionals keep their accounts and data more secure. SESSION ALERTS Just like Google, Facebook, Yahoo and other online services, LinkedIn has added a new option within the settings tab that allows users to see where and on what devices they are logged into their account. From there, users can sign out of various sessions with one click. This will include details about the users' current sessions, the browser name, operating system, carrier and IP address, which is used to give an approximate location of the device through which the session is occurring. Just like the Facebook feature, LinkedIn lets people to approve the devices to be used, and if somebody accesses a user's LinkedIn account from an unapproved device it will alert user. PASSWORD ALERTS LinkedIn has also introduced its password c

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,

Good news for Firefox lovers! The Mozilla Foundation has introduced a bunch of new features in Firefox to improve browser security with the launch of Firefox 32, now available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android platforms. The new version of Firefox makes the browser even more competitive among others. Firefox version 32 has some notable security improvements, including a new HTTP cache for improved performance, public key pinning - a defense that would help protect its users from man-in-the-middle and other attacks, and easy language switching on Android. PUBLIC KEY PINNING ENABLED BY-DEFAULT In the latest Firefox version 32, Mozilla has enabled Public Key Pinning support by default that will protect its users from man-in-the-middle-attacks and rogue certificate authorities. Public key pinning is a security measure that ensures people that they are connecting to the websites they intend to. Pinning allows users to keep track of certificates in order to specify wh

LA-based domain name registrar and hosting company Namecheap warned its customers on Monday that cybercriminals have begun accessing their accounts by using the list of credentials gathered from third-party websites. The Hosting company confirmed the security breach and informed that the hackers have compromised some of its customers' accounts, probably using the " biggest-ever " password theft via Russian Hackers that disclosed list of 1.2 billion usernames and passwords compiled by Russian CyberVor Gang . RUSSIAN GROUP BEHIND THE ATTACK - CYBERVOR The CyberVor Gang allegedly stolen a vast cache of compromised login credentials for " 1.2 billion " accounts, belonging to over half a billion e-mail addresses, warned Hold Security , a Milwaukee-based security company that tracks stolen data on underground cybercriminal forums. The gang appears to have broken into at least 420,000 websites vulnerable to SQL injection attacks, among other techniques,

Now this gonna be the height of Privacy Breach! Images of several high-profile persona including actors, models, singers and presenters have been made available online in a blatant hacking leak linked to the Apple iCloud service. The recent privacy breach appears to be one of the biggest celebrity privacy breaches in history and represents a serious offense and violation of privacy. A hacker allegedly breached Apple's iCloud service and copied the personal photos of at least 100 high-profile stars. WHO IS BEHIND IT The anonymous hacker, using the name Tristan , sparked the scandal on Sunday after dumping a large cache of female celebrities' alleged naked photographs onto the 4chan online forum, an online message board used for sharing pictures. The list of those celebrities allegedly affected, whose photographs are supposedly in this cache, is very long that includes Jenny McCarthy, Rihanna, Kristin Dunst, Kate Upton, the American actress Mary E Winstead , and the

A New York-based online ad network company AppNexus, that provides a platform specializing in real-time online advertising, has again been spotted as the origin of a recent "malvertising" campaign that makes use of the Angler Exploit Kit to redirect visitors to malicious websites hosting the Asprox malware. AppNexus servers process 16 billion ad buys per day, making it the biggest reach on the open web after Google. Back in May, AppNexus was serving malicious ads targeting Microsoft's Silverlight platform. The world's largest Internet Video Subscription service Netflix runs on Silverlight, and because of its popularity, hackers have been loading exploit kits with Silverlight. As part of this campaign, users of several high-profile websites including Java.com, Deviantart.com, TMZ.com, Photobucket.com, IBTimes.com, eBay.ie, Kapaza.be and TVgids.nl , last week were redirected to websites serving malicious advertisements that infected visitors by installing botnet ma

Microsoft today reissued a security update for Windows to the faulty update that previously caused PCs to suffer Blue Screens of Death (BSoD) . The new security update comes almost two weeks after reports emerged that the dodgy update crippled users' computers with the infamous "Blue Screens of Death." The company later advised people to uninstall the update, but now it has fixed the issue. " This month we had our first roll out with additional non-security updates. A small number of customers experienced problems with a few of the updates ," Tracey Pretorius, director of Microsoft Trustworthy Computing, wrote in a blog post .   " As soon as we became aware of some problems, we began a review and then immediately pulled the problematic updates, making these available to download. We then began working on a plan to re-release the affected updates." The offending Microsoft patch identified as MS14-045 , fixes Windows kernel vulnerabilities in 47 of Micro

Hackforums - one of the popular hacking forum in the world - has been hacked and defaced by the famous Egyptian hacker with the online handle Eg-R1z . HackForums is popular among both whitehats and blackhats. On one end of the spectrum, HackForums helps over 110,000 hacking community members to remove dangerous malware off of their computers, as well as promotes research and learning of various malwares. But on the other end, it servers as a great platform for hackers and cyber thieves as well, who posts infected material in order to victimize others. The website is hosted in Europe on a server and expected to be earning an estimated $7,316 USD on a daily basis. Last night, hackforums.net went dark with a defacement message that reads: "[403 Forbidden Error] - You might be blocked by your IP, Country, or ISP." That's really nasty msg guys , don't u think so?! Just sending greets from Egypt i-Hmx , H3ll C0D3 , Egyptian.H4x0rZ ./Eg-R1z Cr3w It i

Routers manufactured and sold by Chinese security vendor have a hard-coded password that leaves users with a wide-open backdoor that could easily be exploited by attackers to monitor the Internet traffic. The routers are sold under the brand name Netcore in China, and Netis in other parts of the world , including South Korea, Taiwan, Israel and United States. According to Trend Micro , the backdoor — a semi-secret way to access the device — allows cybercriminals the possibility to bypass device security and to easily run malicious code on routers and change settings. Netis routers are known for providing the best wireless transfer speed up to 300Mbps, offering a better performance on online gaming, video streaming, and VoIP phone calling. The Netcore and Netis routers have an open UDP port listening at port 53413 , which can be accessed from the Internet side of the router . The password needed to open up this backdoor is hardcoded into the router's firmware.

Along with the release of Chrome 37 for Windows, Mac, and Linux , Google today also released a long-awaited 64-bit stable version of its Chrome browser for Windows systems. The company has been working on the 64-bit support for Windows 7 and Windows 8 since June. Back in June, Google first released Chrome 64-bit only in the browser's Dev and Canary channels. Then in July, the beta channel received the same update, and now, finally Chrome 64-bit is available in the stable channel. The new 64-bit version of Chrome offers three main advantages: Speed Security Stability Therefore, for those of you on a compatible 64-bit system, this new version will offer faster performance as well as security and stability enhancements in comparison to 32-bit version. But, Chrome 64-bit is still an opt-in process. So, if you want to take advantage of it, you can hit the new "Windows 64-bit" download link over at google.com/chrome . SPEED ENHANCEMENT Google claims that certain

More than half of South Korea's 50 million population aged between 15 and 65 have been affected in a massive data breach, compromising their personal information. The data breach came to light when 16 individual were arrested following the theft of about 220 million stolen records from a number of online game, ringtone storefronts and movie ticket sites that contains personally identifiable information related to 27 million victims. The stolen records included actual name, account name, password and resident registration number of the victims, According to the English version of a Seoul-based daily newspaper, the Korea Joongang Daily . Among 16 perpetrators, the South Jeolla Provincial Police Agency arrested a 24-year-old man named 'Kim' , for allegedly obtaining and selling all 220 million personal information including names, registration numbers, account names, and passwords , from a Chinese hacker he met through an online game in 2011. Police estimated the

As far sci-fi movies have been entertaining the public, but their ideas have always been a matter of adoption in real life. Just like in any other sci-fi movie, simply touching a laptop can be enough to extract the cryptographic keys used to secure data stored on it. A team of computer security experts at Tel Aviv University (Israel) has come up with a new potentially much simpler method that lets you steal data from computers — Just Touch it — literally. WAYS TO ATTACK ENCRYPTION There are different ways of attacking encryption systems. On one side, there are security vulnerabilities and weakness in the encryption algorithms themselves that make it possible to figure out the cryptographic keys. On the other side, there are flaws and weaknesses in the people themselves that make it easier than it should be to force them to offer up the keys to decrypt something. But, Flaws and weaknesses in neither of which is necessarily quick or easy to find out, as there are seve

The United States National Security Agency ( NSA ) is using a massive information sharing platform that allows multiple law enforcement agencies to infiltrate more than 850 billion communications records detailing e-mails, phone calls, instant messages, and phone geolocation, according to the classified documents disclosed by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden. The NSA has built ICREACH, a Google-like search engine that secretly provides data — metadata of both foreigners and citizens on US soil — to nearly two dozen U.S. government agencies, including the DEA, FBI, and CIA, The Intercept reported . Many of those surveilled data had not been accused of any illegal activity as well. But until now, it is unclear that exact what mechanism was used by the US intelligence agency to share the massive amounts of surveillance data, as well as number of government agencies it was sharing information with. Although, the classified documents show that the FBI and the D

It's been a bad weekend for Sony Playstation. The entire PlayStation Network was down much of the day after a dedicated distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack by online attackers, which left the network inaccessible to users. It's possible that EVE Online and Guild Wars 2 have also been hit by the attackers. Developers on the EVE Online forums have announced DDoS issues, and many users on the Guild Wars 2 forums have been reporting login issues. Sony's PlayStation Network is an online service that connects PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 video game consoles to the Internet and to over-the-top video services such as Netflix. What's weird about this attack is that it also includes a security threat against the American Airlines plane in which the President of Sony Online Entertainment, John Smedley, was traveling today. The aircraft along with a full load of passengers was diverted to Phoenix due to a bomb threat. WHO BRING DOWN SONY PLAYSTATION NETWORK? Tw

A group of security researchers has successfully discovered a method to hack into six out of seven popular Smartphone apps, including Gmail across all the three platforms - Android , Windows, and iOS operating systems - with shockingly high success rate of up to 92 percent. Computer scientists the University of California Riverside Bourns College of Engineering and the University of Michigan have identified a new weakness they believe to exist in Android, Windows, and iOS platforms that could allow possibly be used by hackers to obtain users' personal information using malicious apps. The team of researchers - Zhiyun Qian , of the University of California, Riverside, and Z. Morley Mao and Qi Alfred Chen from the University of Michigan - will present its paper, " Peeking into Your App without Actually Seeing It: UI State Inference and Novel Android Attacks " ( PDF ), at the USENIX Security Symposium in San Diego on August 23. The paper detailed a new type of

Along with a dream to make Internet access available to everyone across the world, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is working to make the Internet a more secure place as well. Till now, a number of large technology companies have bug bounty programs to reward researchers and cyber enthusiast who contribute in the security of Internet by finding out security holes in software or web platforms, and the social networking giant Facebook is the latest one to do so. Facebook and Usenix have together implemented the Internet Defense Prize — an award recognizing superior quality research that combines a working prototype with great contributions to securing the Internet, Facebook announced Thursday at the annual USENIX Security Symposium in San Diego. Also, Facebook announced the first award under its Internet Defense Prize, and crowned a pair of German researchers for their paper , " Static Detection of Second-Order Vulnerabilities in Web Applications " — a seemingly viabl

Pebble, a wristwatch that can connect to your phone - both iOS and Android - and interact with apps, has a hard-coded vulnerability that allows a remote attacker to destroy your Smartwatch completely. Pebble Smartwatch , developed and released by Pebble Technology Corporation in 2013, is considered as one of the most popular SmartWatches that had become the most funded project in the history of Kickstarter. Just two hours after its crowd-funding campaign launched, Pebble had already surpassed its $100,000 goal and at last had reached over $10.25 million pledged by nearly 70,000 Kickstarter backers. A security enthusiast Hemanth Joseph  claimed to have found that his Pebble SmartWatch with the latest v2.4.1 Firmware can be remotely exploited by anyone with no technical knowledge in order to delete all data stored in the device, apps, notes, and other information stored in it. HOW PEBBLE SMARTWATCH WORKS Before proceeding towards how he did this, let me explain how Peb