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Researchers on Thursday discovered a critical remotely exploitable vulnerability in the widely used command-line shell GNU Bourne Again Shell ( Bash ), dubbed " Shellshock " which affects most of the Linux distributions and servers worldwide, and may already have been exploited in the wild to take over Web servers as part of a botnet that is currently trying to infect other servers as well. BOTNET ATTACK IN THE WILD The bot was discovered by the security researcher with the Twitter handle @yinettesys , who reported it on Github and said it appeared to be remotely controlled by miscreants, which indicates that the vulnerability is already being used maliciously by the hackers. The vulnerability (CVE-2014-6271) , which came to light on Wednesday, affects versions 1.14 through 4.3 of GNU Bash and could become a dangerous threat to Linux/Unix and Apple users if the patches to BASH are not applied to the operating systems. However, the patches for the vulnerabil

Users might have praised the technology companies for efforts to encrypt their latest devices that would prevent law enforcement agencies' hands on users' private data, but the FBI is not at all happy with Apple and Google right now. The Federal Bureau of Investigation director, James Comey , said Thursday he was " very concerned " over Apple and Google using stronger or full encryption in their Smartphones and Tablets that makes it impossible for law enforcement to collar criminals. According to Comey, the Silicon Valley tech giants are "marketing something expressly to allow people to place themselves above the law." " There will come a day – well it comes every day in this business – when it will matter a great, great deal to the lives of people of all kinds that we be able to with judicial authorization gain access to a kidnapper's or a terrorist or a criminal's device, " Comey told reporters . " I just want to make sure we

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

A Critical remotely exploitable vulnerability has been discovered in the widely used Linux and Unix command-line shell, known as Bash , aka the GNU Bourne Again Shell , leaving countless websites, servers, PCs, OS X Macs, various home routers, and many more open to the cyber criminals. Earlier today, Stephane Chazelas publicly disclosed the technical details of the remote code execution vulnerability in Bash which affects most of the Linux distributions and servers worldwide. REMOTELY EXPLOITABLE SHELLSHOCK The vulnerability (CVE-2014-6271) affects versions 1.14 through 4.3 of GNU Bash and being named as Bash Bug , and Shellshock by the Security researchers on the Internet discussions. According to the technical details, a hacker could exploit this bash bug to execute shell commands remotely on a target machine using specifically crafted variables. " In many common configurations, this vulnerability is exploitable over the network, " Stephane said. This 22-ye

The official website of the popular cross-platform JavaScript library jQuery (jquery.com) has been compromised and redirecting its visitors to a third-party website hosting the RIG exploit kit , in order to distribute information-stealing malware. JQuery is a free and open source JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML. It is used to build AJAX applications and other dynamic content easily. The popular JavaScript library is used by 30 percent of websites, including 70 percent of the top 10,000 most visited websites. James Pleger , Director of Research at Risk management software company RiskIQ , reported yesterday that the attack against jQuery.com web servers launched for a short period of time on the afternoon of September 18th. So, the users who visited the website on September 18th may have infected their system with data-stealing malware by redirecting users to the website hosting RIG. Pleger urged those who visited the site durin

The developers of one of the most advance open source operating system for penetration testing, ' KALI Linux ' have announced yesterday the release of a new Kali project, known as NetHunter , that runs on a Google Nexus device. Kali Linux is an open source Debian-based operating system for penetration testing and forensics, which is maintained and funded by Offensive Security, a provider of world-class information security training and penetration testing services. It comes wrapped with a collection of penetration testing and network monitoring tools used for testing of software privacy and security. After making its influence in hacker and security circles, Kali Linux has now been published with Kali Nethunter, a version of the security suite for Android devices. The tool is a mobile distribution designed to compromise systems via USB when installed and run on an Android phone. Kali Linux NetHunter project provides much of the power to Nexus users, those runni

TripAdvisor's  Online travel booking and review website  Viator  has reportedly been hit by a massive data breach at its  that may have exposed payment card details and account credentials of its customers, affecting an estimated 1.4 million of its customers. The San Francisco-based Viator, acquired by TripAdvisor – the world's largest travel site – for £122 million ( US$ 200 million ) back in July, admitted late on Friday that the intruders have hacked into some of its customers' payment card accounts and made unauthorized charges. The data breach was discovered in the bookings made through Viator's websites and mobile offerings that could potentially affect payment card data. Viator said that the company has hired forensic experts to figure out the extent of the breach. Meanwhile, the company has begun notifying its affected customers about the security breach as said by the travel outfit in a press release . " On September 2, we were informed by

The Pirate Bay is the world's largest torrent tracker site which handles requests from millions of users everyday and is in the top 100 most visited websites on the Internet. Generally, The Pirate Bay is famous for potentially hosting illegal contents on its website. Despite years of persecution, it continues to disobey copyright laws worldwide. Even both the founders of The Pirate Bay (TPB) file exchange service were arrested by the authorities and are in prison, but their notorious pirated content exchange continues to receive millions of unique visitors daily. That's really Strange!! But how?? Recently, The Pirate Bay team has revealed how cloud technology made its service's virtual servers truly secure to avoid police raids and detection. While it doesn't own any physical servers, The Pirate Bay is working on " virtual machines " through a few commercial cloud hosting services, even without knowing that whom they are dealing with. According to Torren

Facebook going to charge users per month?? Nobody expected such a news story this week, but it seems that Facebook will No longer be a Free Service, according to reports claimed by the National Report , " Facebook To Begin Charging Users $2.99/mo Starting November 1st ", which turns out fake. Thank God !! This new report is circulating via social media which claims that the social networking giant will begin charging charging $2.99 (€2.33) per month for each user starting November 1, 2014 in an effort to fight against the rising costs the company is facing. Of course, the claims are simply untrue. Facebook has not announced any such plans to begin charging its users a monthly fee for access to the regular site services that has more than 1.3 billion monthly users. NICELY FRAMED HOAX The report comes via the 'satirical' fake-news website , which is a complete Hoax, just like many similar ' Facebook to start charging ' hoaxes before it. But Wh

A new surge of malware has been discovered which goes on to infect hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide and allegedly steals users' social and banking site credentials. Few days back, a list of 5 million combinations of Gmail addresses and passwords were leaked online. The search engine giant, Google said that Gmail credentials didn't come from the security breaches of its system, rather the credentials had been stolen by phishing campaigns and unauthorized access to user accounts. Just now, we come across another similar incident where cyber criminals are using a malware which has already compromised thousands of Windows users worldwide in an effort to steal their Social Media account, Online account and Banking account Credentials. A Greek Security Researcher recently discovered a malware sample via a spam campaign (caught in a corporate honeypot), targeting large number of computers users rapidly. He investigated and posted a detailed technical analyses of

The search engine giant Google will soon come up with its next version of Android operating system, dubbed as Android L , with full-disk encryption enabled by default, Google confirmed Thursday. This will be for the first time that Google's Android OS will be encrypting your information, preventing both hackers and law enforcement agencies from gaining access to users' personal and highly sensitive data on their devices running the Android operating system. While Android has been offering data encryption options for some Android devices since 2011. However the options are not enabled by default, so users have had to activate the functionality manually. But Android L will have new activation procedures that will encrypt data automatically. Although Google is yet to provide more details about Android L, which is set to be released next month. But the move by the web giant will surely provide an extra layer of security on the personal data that users typically have on t

Four month ago, a massive data breach on the eBay website affected 145 million registered users worldwide after its database was compromised. Meanwhile, another critical vulnerability on the eBay website was reported, allowing an attacker to hijack millions of user accounts in bulk. An Egyptian security researcher ' Yasser H. Ali ' informed The Hacker News about this vulnerability 4 months ago, which could be used by the cyber criminals in the targeted attacks. At that time, Mr.Yasser secretly demonstrated the vulnerability step-by-step to ' The Hacker News ' team and we confirmed - IT WORKS . Since it was not addressed by the eBay security team, we kept the technical details of this vulnerability hidden from our readers. But, as we promised to share the technical details of this interesting flaw, once after eBay team patch it. So, Here we go! The vulnerability Yasser found could allow you to Reset Password of any eBay user account and that too without any user interaction or d

From last week, Google began paving the way to run Android apps on Chrome Operating System through the project named " App Runtime for Chrome ", but the release came with a lot of limitations – it only supported certain Android apps and on Chrome OS only. At the launch, initially only 4 Android apps – Vine, Evernote, Duolingo and Sight Words – were added to the Chrome Web Store. That was pretty exciting, but it merely whet the appetite of users hungry for more functionality. So, what if you could run more than just 4 Android apps on Chrome OS? And Also could run them on other operating systems as well? A developer by the name of " Vlad Filippov " began working on it to stripped away the limits Google has imposed. He successfully figured out a way to bring more Android apps to Chrome , instead of just the four that are officially supported by Google. The bigger success was that when Filippov got Android apps to work on any desktop Operating System tha

Cyber criminals have exploited the power of two online advertising networks, Google's DoubleClick and popular Zedo advertising agency , to deliver malicious advertisements to millions of internet users that could install malware on a user's computer. A recent report published by the researcher of the security vendor Malwarebytes suggests that the cyber criminals are exploiting a number of websites, including The Times of Israel, The Jerusalem Post and the Last.fm music streaming website, to serve malicious advertisements designed to spread the recently identified Zemot malware . Malvertising is not any new tactic used by cybercriminals, but Jerome Segura, a senior security researcher with Malwarebytes, wrote in a blog post that his company " rarely see attacks on a large scale like this. " "It was active but not too visible for a number of weeks until we started seeing popular sites getting flagged in our honeypots," Segura wrote. "That's

So far people have not forgotten about the recent celebrity iCloud hacking scandal , a new wave of photographs of celebrities have been leaked in what appears to be the second edition of the massive leak related to the celebrities intimate-images on Internet earlier this month. Among the victims of the most recent leak were reality television star Kim Kardashian , 33, actor Vanessa Hudgens , 25, and U.S. national women's soccer team goalie Hope Solo , 33. Mary-Kate Olsen, Avril Lavigne, Hayden Panettiere, Lake Bell, Leelee Sobieski and former Disney stars Aly and AJ Michalka are other potential victims of this hacking scandal. A video of Aubrey Plaza and previously unreleased photographs of celebrities included in the last leak, such as Oscar-winner Jennifer Lawrence and The Big Bang Theory star Kaley Cuoco , were also released with the recent privacy breach . The leaked Celebrity Photos first appeared Saturday morning on the image-sharing site 4Chan and were also post

Yahoo! was recently impacted by a critical web application vulnerabilities which left website's database and server vulnerable to hackers. A cyber security expert and penetration tester, Ebrahim Hegazy a.k.a Zigoo from Egypt , has found a serious SQL injection vulnerability in Yahoo's website that allows an attacker to remotely execute any commands on its server with Root Privileges. According to Hegazy blog post , the SQLi vulnerability resides in a domain of Yahoo! website i.e. https://innovationjockeys.net/tictac_chk_req.php . Any remote user can manipulate the input to the " f_id " parameter in the above URL, which could be exploited to extract database from the server. While pentesting, he found username and password ( encoded as Base64 ) of Yahoo!' admin panel stored in the database. He decoded the Administrator Password and successfully Logged in to the Admin panel. Furthermore, SQL injection flaw also facilitate the attacker to exploit Remote Cod

A popular Anti-virus software Avira that provides free security software to its customers with Secure Backup service is vulnerable to a critical web application vulnerability that could allow an attacker to take over users' account, putting millions of its users' account at risk. Avira is very popular for their free security software that comes with its own real-time protection module against malware and a secure backup service. Avira was considered to be the sixth largest antivirus vendor in 2012 with over 100 million customers worldwide. A 16 year-old security researcher ' Mazen Gamal ' from Egypt told The Hacker News that Avira Website is vulnerable to CSRF (Cross-site request forgery) vulnerability that allows him to hijack users' accounts and access to their online secure cloud backup files. CSRF VULNERABILITY TO  ACCOUNT TAKEOVER Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF or XSRF) is a method of attacking a Web site in which an intruder masquerades as a legitimate

SQL Injection (SQLi) attacks have been around for over a decade. You might wonder why they are still so prevalent. The main reason is that they still work on quite a few web application targets. In fact, according to Veracode's 2014 State of Security Software Report , SQL injection vulnerabilities still plague 32% of all web applications. One of the big reasons is the attractiveness of the target – the database typically contains the interesting and valuable data for the web application. A SQLi attack involves inserting a malformed SQL query into an application via client-side input. The attack perverts the intentions of web programmers who write queries and provide input methods that can be exploited. There is a reason they're on the OWASP Top 10 . Termed " injection flaws ", they can strike not only SQL, but operating systems and LDAP can fall prey to SQLi. They involve sending untrusted data to the interpreter as a part of the query. The attack tricks the interpreter into