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" Talent has no Age Limit " That's what I said for a 10-year-old Finnish boy on our official Facebook page while sharing his recent achievement with our readers i.e. Winning $10,000 bug bounty from Instagram . Last Tuesday when we at The Hacker News first acknowledged this talented boy and the flaw he discovered in image-sharing social network Instagram, I did not have an idea that the Facebook post would get an enormous response from our followers, encouraging me to introduce Jani to our website readers too. Those who aren't aware, Jani from Helsinki recently reported an Instagram bug to Facebook that allowed him to delete other Instagram users' comments just by entering a malicious code into the app's comment field. " I would have been able to eliminate anyone's comment from Instagram, even Justin Bieber, " Jani told a local newspaper. Jani responsibly disclosed the vulnerability details to Facebook, who owns Instagram, in February and

In Brief Arthur Budovsky, co-founder of popular digital currency business 'Liberty Reserve', was sentenced Friday to 20 years in prison for running a money laundering scheme for hackers, identity thieves, child pornographers and drug dealers around the globe. Since its inception, 2005, to the year 2013, when Liberty Reserve was shut down by authorities, the company processed more than $8 billion worth of transactions for more than 5.5 million users worldwide. He was also ordered to forfeit $122 million and fined $500,000. The co-founder of Liberty Reserve, a widely-used digital currency, was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Friday for running a global money-laundering scheme that operated as "the financial hub for cyber criminals around the world." Arthur Budovsky Belanchuk, 42, ran an online digital currency business out of Costa Rica called Liberty Reserve from around 2005 until it was shut down by the federal authorities in 2013 with the arrest of Bud

Identities now transcend human boundaries. Within each line of code and every API call lies a non-human identity. These entities act as programmatic access keys, enabling authentication and facilitating interactions among systems and services, which are essential for every API call, database query, or storage account access. As we depend on multi-factor authentication and passwords to safeguard human identities, a pressing question arises: How do we guarantee the security and integrity of these non-human counterparts? How do we authenticate, authorize, and regulate access for entities devoid of life but crucial for the functioning of critical systems? Let's break it down. The challenge Imagine a cloud-native application as a bustling metropolis of tiny neighborhoods known as microservices, all neatly packed into containers. These microservices function akin to diligent worker bees, each diligently performing its designated task, be it processing data, verifying credentials, or

Without adequate analysis and algorithms, mass surveillance is not the answer to fighting terrorism and tracking suspects. That's what President Obama had learned last year when he signed the USA Freedom Act , which ends the bulk collection of domestic phone data by US Intelligence Agencies. There is no doubt that US Government is collecting a vast quantity of data from your smartphone to every connected device i.e. Internet of the things , but… Do they have enough capabilities to predict and identify terrorists or cyber criminals or state-sponsored hackers before they act? Well, if they had, I would not be getting chance to write about so many brutal cyber attacks , data breaches, and terrorist attacks that not only threatened Americans but also impacted people worldwide. The Ex-NSA technical director William E. Binney, who served the US National Security Agency for over 30-years, said last year in the front of Parliamentary Joint Committee that forcing analysts t

In Brief What would you do if you get access to a Quantum Computer? IBM Scientists launches the world's first cloud-based quantum computing technology, calling the IBM Quantum Experience, for anyone to use. It is an online simulator that lets anyone run algorithms and experiments on the company's five-qubit quantum computer. Quantum computers are expected to take the computing technology to the highest level, but it is an experimental and enormously complex technology that Google and NASA are working on and is just a dream for general users to play with. Hold on! IBM is trying to make your dream a reality. IBM just made its new quantum computing project online ( with tutorials ), making it available for free to anyone interested in playing with it. Quantum Computers — Now A Reality! The technology company said on Wednesday that it is giving the world access to one of its quantum computing processors, which is yet an experimental technology that has the potential

OpenSSL has released a series of patches against six vulnerabilities, including a pair of high-severity flaws that could allow attackers to execute malicious code on a web server as well as decrypt HTTPS traffic . OpenSSL is an open-source cryptographic library that is the most widely being used by a significant portion of the Internet services; to cryptographically protect their sensitive Web and e-mail traffic using the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol. One of the high-severity flaws, CVE-2016-2107 , allows a man-in-the-middle attacker to initiate a " Padding Oracle Attack " that can decrypt HTTPS traffic if the connection uses AES-CBC cipher and the server supports AES-NI. A Padding Oracle flaw weakens the encryption protection by allowing attackers to repeatedly request plaintext data about an encrypted payload content. The Padding Oracle flaw ( exploit code ) was discovered by Juraj Somorovsky using his own developed tool c

A massive database of 272 million emails and passwords for popular email services, including Gmail, Microsoft, and Yahoo, are being offered for sale on the Dark Web for less than $1, media reports. An anonymous Russian hacker, who goes by the moniker " the Collector ," was first spotted by cybersecurity firm Hold Security advertising 1.17 Billion user records for email accounts on a dark web forum. The stolen credentials apparently came from some of the world's biggest email providers, including Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft and Russia's Mail.ru. When security analysts at Hold Security reached out to the hacker and began negotiating for the dataset to verify the authenticity of those records, the hacker only asked for 50 Rubles (less than a buck) in return of the complete dump. However, it seems that there is actually nothing to worry about. Hold Security CEO Alex Holden said that a large number of those 1.17 Billion accounts credentials turned out to be duplicate an

A serious zero-day vulnerability has been discovered in ImageMagick , a widely popular software tool used by a large number of websites to process user's photos, which could allow hackers to execute malicious code remotely on servers. ImageMagick is an open-source image processing library that lets users resize, scale, crop, watermarking and tweak images. The ImageMagick tool is supported by many programming languages, including Perl, C++, PHP, Python, Ruby and is being deployed by Millions of websites, blogs, social media platforms, and popular content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress and Drupal. Slack security engineer Ryan Huber disclosed a zero-day flaw (CVE-2016–3714) in the ImageMagick image processing library that allows a hacker to execute malicious code on a Web server by uploading maliciously-crafted image. For example, by uploading a booby-trapped selfie to a web service that uses ImageMagick, an attacker can execute malicious code on the website&#

Yesterday, BBC broke a story allegedly revealing Craig Wright as the original creator of Bitcoin digital currency Satoshi Nakamoto. However, the highly skeptical cryptographic community is definitely not yet convinced with the technical proofs Wright has yet provided to the media outlets and on his  blog . Now, Wright has promised to provide further evidence for his claim that he is behind the pseudonym, Satoshi Nakamoto. Wright's spokesman told BBC that he would " move a coin from an early block " of Bitcoin owned by Nakamoto " in the coming days. " However, the spokesman did not specify a deadline. " So, over the coming days, I will be posting a series of pieces that will lay the foundations for this extraordinary claim, which will include posting independently-verifiable documents and evidence addressing some of the false allegations that have been levelled, and transferring bitcoin from an early block. ", Wright said in a latest blog post

A Russian man who spent about 3 years behind bars in the United States has been spared further prison time but ordered to pay $7 Million to cover damages he caused to banks using a vicious computer virus. Nikita Vladimirovich Kuzmin was arrested in 2010 and imprisoned in August 2011 for developing a sophisticated computer malware called Gozi and infecting more than 1 million computers worldwide, causing tens of millions of dollars in losses. Kuzmin was sentenced Monday to the 37 months he has already served in custody, and ordered to pay $6,934,979 that authorities have identified as the damages experienced by two major Banks, one located in the U.S. and the other in Europe, Department of Justice says . Kuzmin received a lighter sentence due to his "substantial assistance" in the investigation that resulted in the conviction of Latvian national Deniss Calovskis as well as the arrest of Romanian Mihai Ionut Paunescu, who is awaiting extradition to the United States.

In Brief For the second time in past five months, a Brazil court ordered local telecommunications companies to block the popular messaging app WhatsApp for 72 hours, afterFacebook-owned WhatsApp company refused to hand over information requested in a drug trafficking investigation. The WhatsApp's shutdown is affecting more than 100 million users throughout the country. Moreover, if Brazilian telecommunications companies do not comply, they could face a fine of $143,000 per day. Brazil just blocked its roughly 100 Million citizens from using WhatsApp, the popular messaging service owned by Facebook, for 72 hours (3 days). A Brazilian Judge ordered the blackout after WhatsApp failed to comply with a court order asking the company to help a branch of civil police access WhatsApp data tied to a criminal investigation. This is for the second time in last five months when a Brazil court ordered local telecommunications companies to block access to the popular messaging servi

Yes, you heard it right. You can now end up your whole life behind bars if you intentionally hack into a vehicle's electronic system or exploit its internal flaws. Car Hacking is a hot topic. Today, many automobiles companies are offering cars that run mostly on the drive-by-wire system, which means the majority of functions are electronically controlled, from instrument cluster to steering, brakes, and accelerator. No doubt these auto-control electronic systems improve your driving experience, but at the same time also increase the risk of getting hacked. Previous research demonstrated hackers capabilities to hijack a car remotely and control its steering, brakes and transmission, and to disable car's crucial functions like airbags by exploiting security bugs affecting significant automobiles. Messing with Cars can Cost You Keeping these risks in mind, the Michigan state Senate has proposed two bills which, if passed into law, will introduce life sentences i

The mysterious creator of the BITCOIN digital cryptocurrency seems to have been identified as an Australian entrepreneur, and his name is: Craig Steven Wright. Five months after Wright, an Australian computer scientist and businessman was outed as Satoshi Nakamoto , revealed himself as the original inventor of Bitcoin digital currency. Wright has published a blog post offering Cryptographic Key as proof of his work, backed up by other technical information and the prominent Bitcoin community members have also corroborated his claim. However, Satoshi Nakamoto has always shown the desire to remain anonymous, while Wright has not. " I am not seeking publicity, but want to set the record straight, " he explains. Wright has provided some technical proofs to BBC , The Economist, and GQ media outlets that link him to the identity of Nakamoto. Craig Wright Claims He is Satoshi Nakamoto At the meeting with the BBC and Economist, he digitally signed messages using th