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Smart devices are growing at an exponential pace with the increase in connecting devices embedded in cars, retail systems, refrigerators, televisions and countless other things people use in their everyday life, but security and privacy are the key issues for such applications, which still face some enormous number of challenges. Millions of Network-connected electricity meters or Smart meters used in Spain are susceptible to cyberattack by hackers due to lack of basic and essential security controls that could put Millions of homes at risk, according to studies carried out by a pair of security researcher. HACKERS TO CAUSE BLACKOUT AND BILL FRAUD The security vulnerabilities found in the electricity meters could allow an intruder to carry out billing fraud or even shut down electric power to homes and cause blackouts. Poorly protected credentials inside the devices could let attackers take control over the gadgets, warn the researchers. The utility that deployed the

Facebook is moving a step ahead from others and making its social media service as an information sharing platform in serious situations as well. The social networking giant has announced a new tool, which lets users notify their family and friends that they are safe during or after natural disasters. The tool, named " Safety Check, " will soon be available globally to over 1.32 billion Facebook users on Android, iOS, feature phones and the desktops. The tool is designed to be activated after a natural disaster and by using either the city you lived in or your last location - if you have checked in on " Nearby Friends ", it let's you alert your friends and family that you are safe, while also tracking the status of others. " In times of disaster or crisis, people turn to Facebook to check on loved ones and get updates, " wrote the company in a blog post about the feature. " It is in these moments that communication is most critical both for people in the affected

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

As part of monthly patch update, Microsoft released eight security bulletins on Tuesday that address dozens of vulnerabilities including a zero-day flaw reportedly being exploited by Russian hackers to target NATO computers and a pair of zero-day Windows vulnerabilities that attackers have been exploiting to penetrate major corporations' networks. Just a day before yesterday, our team reported you about a Zero-day vulnerability discovered by the cyber intelligence firm iSight Partners affecting all supported versions of Microsoft Windows and is being exploited in a five-year old cyber-espionage campaign against the Ukrainian government and U.S organisations. Researchers at FireEye found two zero-day flaws, used in separate, unrelated attacks involving exploitation of Windows kernel, just a day after iSight partners disclosed zero-day in Windows. The pair of zero-day vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to access a victim's entire system. According to the res

Another Heartbleed-like vulnerability has been discovered in the decade old but still widely used Secure Sockets Layer ( SSL ) 3.0 cryptographic protocol that could allow an attacker to decrypt contents of encrypted connections to websites. Google's Security Team revealed on Tuesday that the most widely used web encryption standard SSL 3.0 has a major security vulnerability that could be exploited to steal sensitive data. The flaw affects any product that follows the Secure layer version 3, including Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. Researchers dubbed the attack as " POODLE ," stands for Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption , which allows an attacker to perform a man-in-the-middle attack in order to decrypt HTTP cookies. The POODLE attack can force a connection to "fallback" to SSL 3.0, where it is then possible to steal cookies, which are meant to store personal data, website preferences or even passwords. Three Google security engineers - Bodo Möll

Internet users have faced a number of major privacy breaches in last two months. Major in the list are The Fappening , The Snappening and now the latest privacy breach in Dropbox security has gained everybody's attention across the world. Dropbox , the popular online locker service, appears to have been hacked by an unnamed hacker group. It is still unclear how the account details of so many users were accessed and, indeed, if they are actually legitimate or not. However, the group claims to have accessed details from nearly 7 million individual accounts and are threatening to release users' photos, videos and other files. HACKERS CLAIMED TO RELEASE 7 MILLION USERS' PERSONAL DATA A thread surfaced on Reddit today that include links to files containing hundreds of usernames and passwords for Dropbox accounts in plain text. Also a series of posts with hundreds of alleged usernames and passwords for Dropbox accounts have been made to Pastebin, an anonymous information-sha