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Next time just be careful while swiping your credit card at small retailers or trendy stores that use Square Reader to accept credit card payments. The increasingly popular and widely used Square Reader can be easily turned into a skimming device that can be used to steal your credit card data, a group of researchers warned. Square Reader is a tiny device that allows small retailers to easily accept credit and debit card payments without having to spend the money on the traditional point of sale systems. However, despite its convenience, this cheap and easy-to-use alternative has a critical flaw that could allow anyone to easily steal your payment card information. All an attacker need is a screwdriver, superglue, and roughly 10 minutes to turn the latest generation Square Reader into a tiny, portable card skimmer . Converting a New Generation Square Reader into a Card Skimmer? A team of three security researchers from Boston University has discovered a w

Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) type attacks continue to emerge on a global scale. What makes these attacks deviate from the norm is often the resources required to develop and implement them: time, money, and the knowledge required to create custom pieces of malware to carry out specific, targeted attacks. Operation Lotus Blossom is one of the more recent APT attacks that has been discovered and analyzed. It is an advanced adversary campaign against the mostly government and state-sponsored entities in the Philippines, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Indonesia. It is thought that this group carried out the attack to gain a geopolitical advantage by stealing specific information from government and military institutions in that area.  At this point, it is still too early to tell if the reach of the attack will extend to the private sector (a la Stuxnet and Duqu). How does the attack work? It was found that Operation Lotus Blossom involved a novel custom-built malware

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,

Windows 10 is built with the power features of Windows 7 and 8.1, which makes it a robust operating system. It gained 65 million users in the first three days after its release. Still counting and making Windows 10 as a universal platform for all the devices running the same operating system. By Introducing " Windows as a service " utility, The Microsoft is offering Windows 10 Free Upgrade to all the users running Windows 7 or 8.1 as a Windows update, and not as a separate product. From now on, the company will provide regular updates for Windows in the same manner Apple does with its Mac OS X operating system that gets regular updates on a yearly basis and has been known as OS X for over 15 years. Despite some privacy issues , including " Wi-Fi Sense " and " Bandwidth sharing for Windows Update ", and few more, Windows 10 offers a bevy of new and advanced features that makes the operating system unique from others. Also Read: How to Fix 35+ Windows 10 Privacy Iss

Remember  Mt.Gox ? Once the world's largest Bitcoin exchange… ...then in early 2014, Tokyo-based Mt.Gox Bitcoin exchange filed for bankruptcy saying it lost some 8,50,000 Bitcoins (worth $64 Million) to hackers and suddenly went dark with no explanation. Last Friday, Mark Karpeles , the former CEO of the collapsed Mt.Gox, was arrested by Tokyo Metropolitan Police in connection with the disappearance of Bitcoins worth £247 Million. Police believe Mr. Karpeles had accessed the computer system of the Bitcoin exchange and manipulated the outstanding balance to cover up fraudulent transactions. The company said at the time that 750,000 customers' Bitcoins and another 100,000 belonging to the exchange were stolen due to an unknown vulnerability in the company's software. While he is not yet been charged, the authorities are investigating his involvement in the stealing of Millions of dollars of the Bitcoin virtual currency when the exchange collapsed in 2014. Mt

After installing Windows 10, Feeling like your Internet Bandwidth is dropping away? Windows 10 is stealing your network bandwidth. Along with the privacy features related to Wi-Fi Sense , Windows 10 users should check for another hidden by default feature that uses your network bandwidth to share updates with other Windows 10 users across the Internet. Microsoft launched Windows 10 on July 29 and offered a free upgrade to Windows 7,8 and 8.1 users , and for anyone who wants to download it. But, handling millions of simultaneous 3.5GB downloads is quite difficult for the company. So, in order to cope up with the issue, Microsoft has baked a new feature into its latest desktop operating system that uses the torrent-style approach to obtain software updates , allowing Windows 10 users to download updates from other users. Also Read:  How to Fix 35+ Windows 10 Privacy Issues With Just One Click . Windows 10 is Stealing your Internet Bandwidth The feature, known

Good news for iOS 8.4 users! The Chinese jailbreaking team TaiG has finally released its long-awaited Untethered Jailbreak tool for Apple's iOS 8.4 mobile operating system for the Mac OS X platform. Yes, TaiG Jailbreak is now officially available for OS X users that will allow you to jailbreak iOS 8.4 on your Mac computer without having to resort to using a virtual machine. In late June, the TaiG team released the Jailbreak tool (.exe) only for Windows version, forcing Macs users to rely on other applications or use Boot Camp to tweak their iOS devices. TaiG Jailbreak for Mac, currently at Mac version 1.0.0, is designed from the ground up to support versions of iOS mobile operating system from 8.1.3 to 8.4. You can download the tool from the project's website. How to JailBreak your Device? The process of jailbreaking the device is so easy; anyone can do it. Download and Install the App Disable 'Find My iPhone' on your device's iCloud settings before p

T he O nion R outer (Tor) is weeping Badly! Yes, Tor browser is in danger of being caught once again by the people commonly known as " Spies ," who's one and only intention is to intrude into others' network and gather information. A team of security researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed digital attacks that can be used to unmask Tor hidden services in the Deep Web with a high degree of accuracy. The Tor network is being used by journalists, hackers, citizens living under repressive regimes as well as criminals to surf the Internet anonymously. A plethora of nodes and relays in Tor network is used to mask its users and make tracking very difficult. Any user when connects to Tor, the connection gets encrypted and routed through a path called a "circuit ." The request first reaches an entry node, also known as a ' Guard ' that knows the actual IP address of the user, and then goes through every ho

Earlier this week, security researchers at Zimperium revealed a high-severity vulnerability in Android platforms that allowed a single multimedia text message to hack 950 Million Android smartphones and tablets. As explained in our previous article, the critical flaw resides in a core Android component called " Stagefright ," a native Android media playback library used by Android to process, record and play multimedia files. To Exploit Stagefright vulnerability, which is actively being exploited in the wild, all an attacker needed is your phone number to send a malicious MMS message and compromise your Android device with no action, no indication required from your side. Hacking Without Knowing Phone Number But, Now you Don't even require the mobile numbers of your victims to infect their devices, a recent research claimed. In the previously known attack scenario, an attacker can exploit Stagefright vulnerability only against his/her known contact n

Forget about Financial services and Online shopping websites, but at least we expect from Security Firms and Antivirus vendors to keep our personal and Sensitive data Encrypted and Secured. One of the most popular and much-respected Antivirus and computer security firms 'BitDefender' has recently been hacked and has had a portion of its customer data leaked. The Data Breach in BitDefender is incredibly embarrassing for the security firm, not because the company failed to prevent its customers data from hackers, but because the Security company failed to encrypt its customers' most sensitive data . Now, this is something really not expected from a reputed Security Firm. It appears that the hacker, who uses the online alias DetoxRansome , was able to break into a Bitdefender server that hosted the cloud-based management dashboards for its small and medium-sized business clients, and pilfer usernames and passwords belonged to them. They Forget to Encrypt C