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An online "hacktivist" group that calls itself Anonymous has claimed responsibility for hacking into email accounts of Swedish government in response to the seizure of world renowned The Pirate Bay website and server by Swedish police last week. Apart from Sweden government officials, the Anonymous hacktivist group also claimed to have hacked into the government email accounts of Israel, India, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico, and revealed their email addresses with passwords in plain-text. The Anonymous group also left a message at the end of the leak: " Warning: Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year to all!! Bye :* " The hack was announced by Anonymous group on their official Twitter account. The tweet also shared a link of Pastebin where leaked data has been dumped with the list of the emails. The tweet reads: " BREAKING: Emails from Swedish government were hacked in retaliation for the seizure of servers of The Pirate Bay https://pastebin.c

Credit card frauds are very common these days – today a data breach occurs in retailer's shop, online shopping site or banking site and at the next moment millions of cards appears in the underground black market – how simple is that for cyber criminals nowadays. But imagine if there is no possible way to hack credit cards and ID cards. Seems like next to impossible, but quantum cryptography ensures that stealing people's personal data will soon be very difficult for hackers and cyber thieves due to an extra layer of verification. SECURE FRAUD-PROOF CREDIT CARDS The research at the University of Twente in Enschede, Netherlands has suggested that " fraud-proof " credit cards are possible to develop using Quantum Physics that will protect users' financial and personal information from hackers. Security researchers describe this extra layer of verification as Quantum-Secure Authentication (QSA) of a " classical multiple-scattering key ." With the

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

The massive hacking attack against Sony Pictures Entertainment has yet exposed about 200 gigabytes of confidential data belonging to the company from upcoming movie scripts to sensitive employees data, celebrities phone numbers and their travel aliases, and also the high-quality versions of five newest films , marking it as the most severe hack in the History. Now, the so-called "Guardians of Peace" (GoP) group who promised to release a big "Christmas gift" for Sony Pictures posted an eighth batch of documents to the Internet on Tuesday of what everyone in Hollywood has been waiting for — Thousands of personal emails stolen from Sony Pictures co-Chairman and CEO Michael Lynton . The personal emails released just one day after Michael Lynton convened a town-hall meeting for Sony employees in the wake of the company's widespread data breach and proclaimed, "Our business has a strong foundation… This won't take us down." Along with Linto

The year is about to end, but serious threats like  Shellshock is " far from over ". Cyber criminals are actively exploiting this critical GNU Bash vulnerability to target those network attached storage devices that are still not patched and ready for exploitation. Security researchers have unearthed a malicious worm that is designed to plant backdoors on network-attached storage (NAS) systems made by Taiwan-based QNAP and gain full access to the contents of those devices. The worm is spread among QNAP devices, which run an embedded Linux operating system, by the exploitation of the GNU Bash vulnerability known as ShellShock or Bash, according to security researchers at the Sans Institute. QNAP vendor released a patch in early October to address the flaw in its Turbo NAS product, but because the patches are not automatic or easy to apply for many users, so a statistically significant portion of systems remain vulnerable and exposed to the Bash bug . Sh

Google is ready to give New Year gift to the Internet users, who are concerned about their privacy and security. The Chromium Project's security team has marked all HTTP web pages as insecure and is planning to explicitly and actively inform users that HTTP connections provide no data security protections. There are also projects like Let's Encrypt , launched by the non-profit foundation EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) in collaboration with big and reputed companies including Mozilla, Cisco, and Akamai to offer free HTTPS/SSL certificates for those running servers on the Internet at the beginning of 2015. This is not the first time when Google is taking initiative to encourage website owners to switch to HTTPS by default. Few months ago, the web Internet giant also made changes in its search engine algorithm in an effort to give a slight ranking boost to the websites that use encrypted HTTPS connections. "We, the Chrome Security Team, propose that

Security pros everywhere rely on SolarWinds Log & Event Manager for powerful, affordable, and efficient Security Information and Event Management (SIEM). Our All-In-One SIEM combines log management, event correlation, visualization, reporting, File Integrity Monitoring , USB defense, SQL database monitoring, and active response in a virtual appliance that's easy to deploy, manage, and use. We've designed our SIEM specifically for smaller security departments—providing the feature set you need without the complexity and cost. Gain the power of SIEM without spending a fortune or hiring an army Increase security visibility with 24x7 automated monitoring and real-time analysis Obtain broader compliance support, stronger security intelligence, and a faster time-to-respond duration with embedded file integrity monitoring and active response Tackle compliance, security, and insider threats with expert-developed, per-packaged templates and automated log management Perform rapid r

" Hacking " is not just popular among cyber security experts and criminals, but also is a great interest for movies industries as well. Hollywood movies such as 1995 released Hackers and 2001 released Swordfish are examples of it, and now Chris Hemsworth 's new flick Blackhat . Blackhat – An upcoming cyber thriller, directed and co-written by Michael Mann ( who also directed Tom Cruise' Collateral ), in which actor Chris Hemsworth trades brawn for brains to save the world. The latest trailer for Blackhat has arrived online, and you can watch it below. Hemsworth's character in the upcoming cyber thriller is a former Blackhat hacker, named Nicholas Hathaway , who is serving a 15-year sentence for cyber crimes. He was recruited straight from prison by a mixed team of American and Chinese law enforcement officials to stop high-level cybercrime network from Chicago to Los Angeles to Hong Kong to Jakarta and save the world from global hackers. Hathaway a

The users of WordPress , a free and open source blogging tool as well as content management system (CMS), are being informed of a widespread malware attack campaign that has already compromised more than 100,000 websites worldwide and still counting. The news broke throughout the WordPress community earlier Sunday morning when Google blacklisted over 11,000 domains due to the latest malware campaign , that has been brought by SoakSoak.ru , thus being dubbed the ' SoakSoak Malware ' epidemic. While there are more than 70 million websites on the Internet currently running WordPress, so this malware campaign could be a great threat to those running their websites on WordPress. Once infected, you may experience irregular website behavior including unexpected redirects to SoakSoak.ru web pages. You may also end up downloading malicious files onto your computer systems automatically without any knowledge. The search engine giant has already been on top of this infection a

British government surveillance agency GCHQ – counterpart of NSA – has fired-up another debate over the Internet by launching Android application to encourage teenagers to tackle emerging cybersecurity threats. The newly launched Android app , dubbed " Cryptoy ", was developed by STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) students on an industrial year placement at GCHQ. The Cryptoy app was highly appreciated and liked by GCHQ at the Cheltenham Science Festival that they made it available to download today. The app is designed mainly to tempt youngsters between the ages of 14 and 16 into trying their hand in cryptography and code-breaking, but can be used by anyone interested in cryptography. According to GCHQ , Cryptoy app will help users to understand basic encryption methods, teach the codes of the past, and create their own encrypted messages. The app allows users to share these encoded messages by using four code-breaking techniques – Shift, Subs

Alibaba Group has patched a major security vulnerability in one of its e-commerce portals that exposed account details of tens of millions of Merchants and shoppers to cyber criminals. An Israeli application security firm, AppSec Labs, found a Cross site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in AliExpress, the company's English language e-commerce site that was found vulnerable to similar flaw a week ago that compromised personal information of Alibaba customers. The flaw was fixed shortly after Cybermoon security firm disclosed it to Alibaba. AliExpress is an online marketplace owned by Chinese E-Commerce giant Alibaba.com, also known as Google of China. The company serves more than 300 Million active users from more than 200 countries including the U.S., Russia and Brazil. But the critical vulnerability found by the researcher could allow an attacker to hijack merchant's account. Using AliExpress XSS vulnerability an attacker can inject any malicious payload script as value

Sony Pictures Entertainment hack that started at the end of the last month and so far has caused a severe damage to its reputation as well as resources, from internal system shutdown to upcoming movies and scripts leak. Now, a similar cyber attack against Casino operator Las Vegas Sands Corp has been revealed that occurred on February 2014. The cyber attack occurred on this year's February but the details of damages to the casino was not publicized until Bloomberg Businessweek exposed it in a story on Thursday. Hackers crippled thousands of servers and computers across the network of the giant Las Vegas Sands Corp. by wiping them with highly destructive malware. The hack attack was believed to be in response to the statement given by the chief executive officer and largest shareholder of Las Vegas Sands Corp., Sheldon Adelson . On October 2013, the billionaire made a statement at the Manhattan campus of Yeshiva University that Iran should be bombed to get the country to

We are living in an era of smart devices that we sync with our smartphones and make our lives very simple and easy, but these smart devices that inter-operates with our phones could leave our important and personal data wide open to hackers and cybercriminals. Security researchers have demonstrated that the data sent between a Smartwatch and an Android smartphone is not too secure and could be a subject to brute force hacks by attackers to intercept and decode users' data, including everything from text messages to Google Hangout chats and Facebook conversations. Well this happens because the bluetooth communication between most Smartwatches and Android devices rely on a six-digit PIN code in order to transfer information between them in a secure manner. Six-digit Pin means approx one million possible keys, which can be easily brute-forced by attackers into exposing entire conversations in plain text. Researchers from the Romania-based security firm Bitdefender ca

The massive hacking attack against Sony Pictures Entertainment has reached a more scarier phase following another huge leak of sensitive, confidential documents revealing celebrity contact details and upcoming film scripts. The so-called Guardians of Peace (GoP) group taking responsibility for the massive hack attack against Sony Pictures Entertainment claimed to have released a new trove of more confidential data including private information of its employees, celebrity phone numbers and their travel aliases, film budgets, upcoming film scripts and many more. By the end of past two weeks before Sony Pictures Entertainment faced cyber attacks that shut down the company's computer system, the group revealed nearly 40 GB of data which contained confidential information of Sony employees such as salaries, addresses, and the US Social Security Numbers. Also, high-quality versions of five newest films distributed by Sony Pictures were also leaked online. On Monday, s

The Pirate Bay — an infamous Torrent website predominantly used to share copyrighted material such as films, TV shows and music files, free of charge — went dark from the internet on Tuesday after Swedish Police raided the site's server room in Stockholm and seized several servers and other equipment. The piracy site knocked offline worldwide on Tuesday morning and remained unavailable for several hours, but the site appeared back online in the late hours with a new URL hosted under the top-level domain for Costa Rica. Paul Pintér , national coordinator for IP enforcement for the Swedish police, issued only a brief statement on Tuesday, saying that the operation was " a crackdown on a server room in Greater Stockholm" that was "in connection with violations of copyright law. " The raid was also confirmed by Fredrik Ingblad , a prosecutor who specializes in file-sharing cases on behalf of the Swedish government, although he would not share furthe

Last week Microsoft released its Advance Notification for the month of December 2014 Patch Tuesday Updates, and finally today released a total of seven security bulletins, which will address several vulnerabilities in its products, out of which three are marked 'critical' and rest are 'important' in severity. Last month after a big pile of security patches , the company released an an unusual emergency patch to fix a critical vulnerability in Microsoft Windows Kerberos KBC, authentication system used by default in the operating system, that cybercriminals exploited to compromise whole networks of computers. The three critical bulletins affect Internet Explorer, Office and Windows. All the versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) are affected except Server Core, which does not include IE. The critical zero-day IE vulnerability (CVE-2014-8967) was discovered by security researcher Arthur Gerkis of Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) in June this year. By explo

POODLE , a critical SSL flaw discovered in October that was patched and fixed by webmasters around the world after Google alerted software and hardware vendors, has again made its way and this time the vulnerability affects implementations of the newer Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol . Yes, the serious POODLE vulnerability that affected the most widely used web encryption standard Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) 3.0 has once again returned and is likely to affect some of the most popular web sites in the world — including those owned or operated by Bank of America, the US Department of Veteran's Affairs, and Accenture. POODLE (Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption) flaw, disclosed two months ago by Google security team, allowed attackers to perform Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack in order to intercept traffic between a user's browser and an HTTPS website to decrypt sensitive information, like the user's authentication cookies. Now, the dangerous flaw

Security researchers have discovered a highly nasty Linux trojan that has been used by cybercriminals in state sponsored attack in order to steal personal, confidential information from government institutions, military and pharmaceutical companies around the world. A previously unknown piece of a larger puzzle called " Turla ," one of the most complex Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) uncovered by researchers at Kaspersky Lab in August, remained hidden on some systems for at least four years. The malware was notable for its use of a rootkit that made it extremely hard to detect. The German security company G Data believed that Turla campaign is linked to Russia and has in the past exploited a variety of Windows vulnerabilities, at least two of which were zero-days, to infect government institutions, embassies, military, education, research, and pharmaceutical companies in more than 45 countries. Recently, security researchers from Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab

Security researchers have discovered a number of critical vulnerabilities in the Java environment of the Google App Engine (GAE) that enables attackers to bypass critical security sandbox defenses. Google App Engine is Google's PaaS (Platform as a Service) Cloud computing Platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers. GAE offers to run custom-built programs using a wide variety of popular languages and frameworks, out of which many are built on the Java environment. The vulnerabilities was reported by Security Explorations, the same security research company that carried out multiple researches related to Java in past. The discovery was announced on the Full Disclosure security mailing list by Adam Gowdiak , founder and CEO of Security Explorations. According to the security firm, the flaws can be exploited by attackers to achieve a complete Java VM security sandbox escape, as well as to execute an arbitrary code. The researchers