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Hacking into computer, networks and websites could easily land you in jail. But what if you could freely test and practice your hacking skills in a legally safe environment? Facebook just open-sourced its Capture The Flag (CTF) platform to encourage students as well as developers to learn about cyber security and secure coding practices. Capture the Flag hacking competitions are conducted at various cyber security events and conferences, including Def Con, in order to highlight the real-world exploits and cyber attacks. The CTF program is an effective way of identifying young people with exceptional computer skills, as well as teaching beginners about common and advanced exploitation techniques to ensure they develop secure programs that cannot be easily compromised. Facebook  CTF Video Demo: Since 2013, Facebook has itself hosted CTF competitions at events across the world and now, it is opening the platform to masses by releasing its source code on GitHub. "

The most popular messaging app WhatsApp now has a fully functional desktop app – both for Mac as well as Windows platform. Facebook-owned WhatsApp messaging software has been a mobile-only messaging platform forever, but from Tuesday, the company is offering you its desktop application for both Windows and OS X. Few months back, WhatsApp launched a Web client that can be run through your browser to use WhatsApp on your desktop, but now users running Windows 8 or Mac OS 10.9 and above can use the new desktop app that mirrors WhatsApp messages from a user's mobile device. According to the company's blog post , the WhatsApp desktop app is similar to WhatsApp Web with synchronized conversations and messages Since WhatsApp desktop app is native for both Windows and OS X platform, it can support desktop notifications and keyboard shortcuts. WhatsApp has been rising at an extraordinary pace recently. The service has over 1 Billion monthly active users. At the beginning

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,

In Brief Britain's top crime fighting force has failed in a legal attempt to force alleged hacker Lauri Love to hand over his hard disk's encryption keys. In a landmark case, District Judge Nina Tempia said the investigative agency should have used the normal police powers rather than a civil action to obtain the evidence. Lauri Love, a 31-year-old hacker, has been accused of aiding cyber-attacks against U.S. targets, including NASA, FBI, US Army and US Federal Reserve networks. The National Crime Agency (NCA) has failed in a legal attempt to force the British citizen and political hacktivist Lauri Love to hand over the keys to encrypted data that has been seized from his home two years ago. At a Tuesday hearing in Court Seven at Westminster Magistrates' Court, the NCA's application to make Love disclose his encrypted computer passwords was refused by the judge. Hacker Fighting Extradition to U.S. Love, 31, is currently fighting extradition to the Uni

There is no doubt that data breaches are on the rise. Hardly a day goes without headlines about any significant data breach. According to the latest ' Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2016 ' report published by UK government, two-thirds of the biggest firm in the UK have experienced at least a cyber attacks or data breaches within the past 12 months. Here's today, I am writing about top 4 data breaches reported in last 24 hours, threatened your data privacy and online security. 1. Kiddicare Hacked! 794,000 Accounts Leaked Kiddicare has admitted that the company has suffered a data breach, which led to the theft of sensitive data belonging to 794,000 users, including phone numbers and residential addresses. Kiddicare, company that sells child toys and accessories across the United Kingdom, became aware of the data breach after its customers started receiving suspicious text messages – most likely part of a phishing campaign – that attempted to pilfer them to click on a li

A security researcher responsibly disclosed vulnerabilities in the poorly secured web domains of a Florida county elections, but he ended up in handcuffs on criminal hacking charges and jailed for six hours Wednesday. Security researcher David Michael Levin, 31, of Estero, Florida was charged with three counts of gaining unauthorized access to a computer, network, or electronic instrument. On 19 December last year, Levin tested the security of Lee County website and found a critical SQL injection vulnerability in it, which allowed him to access site's database, including username and password. Levin was reportedly using a free SQL testing software called Havij for testing SQL vulnerabilities on the state elections website. According to Levin, he responsibly reported vulnerabilities to the respective authorities and helped them to patch all loopholes in the elections website. Video Demonstration of the Elections Website Hack Meanwhile, Levin demonstrates his finding via

In Brief The Smartphone users are fed up with slow security updates, so two United States federal agencies have launched an official inquiry to know how manufacturers and carriers deal with mobile phone security updates and what they are doing to roll out patches as quickly as possible. The Smartphone patch update mechanism is broken, and someone has to fix it. Most smartphone models are not receiving available security patches, and the risk of vulnerabilities , malware infections , and data loss are leaving consumers vulnerable to attacks and putting businesses and corporate networks at risk. The United States federal regulators want to know how and when mobile phone manufacturers and cell phone carriers release security updates to assure its users' security, amid mounting concerns over security vulnerabilities. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in partnership with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have launched its own, parallel inquiry into mobile devic

If you wish to send iMessages from your Android smartphone to a friend who owns an iPhone, it's possible now, at least for those who own MacBooks and iMacs. A developer has come up with a smart solution to bring Apple's iPhone messaging platform to Android phones. Though the solution is not practical for most people, technical people and nerds can use it to send end-to-end encrypted iMessages. The solution is a smart hack, but the best part is: PieMessage totally works . Developed by Eric Chee, PieMessage needs an OS X client as a server to route messages to an Android device, enabling iMessage support on Android devices. So, it's the Mac that handles the entire workload. "Basically, what the Android client does is send the text to a MacBook," Chee said. "And uses the Mac's Messages app to send off the notification. When the Mac detects an incoming message, it will pass it back to the Android. So yes, there is both software you need to run on

Google has patched a high-severity vulnerability that has been around for the last five years, potentially leaving users' text messages, call histories, and other sensitive data open to snooping. The vulnerability, CVE-2016-2060, affects Android versions 4.3 and earlier that use the software package maintained by mobile chipmaker Qualcomm, according to a blog post published by security firm FireEye . The issue was first introduced in 2011 when Qualcomm released a set of new APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) for a network manager system service to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and later the "netd" daemon. Qualcomm modified the netd daemon for providing additional networking capabilities to your smartphone, including additional tethering capabilities, among other things. But unfortunately, the modification introduced a critical bug to the Android operating system that could allow low-privileged apps to gain access to your private data that is sup

" 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