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Why waiting for researchers and bug hunters to know vulnerabilities in your products, when you can just throw a contest for that. Google has launched its own Android hacking contest with the first prize winner receiving $200,000 in cash. That's a Hefty Sum! The contest is a way to find and destroy dangerous Android vulnerabilities before hackers exploit them in the wild. The competition, dubbed ' The Project Zero Prize ,' is being run by Google's Project Zero, a team of security researchers dedicated to documenting critical bugs and making the web a safer place for everyone. What's the Requirements? Starting Tuesday and ending on March 14, 2017, the contest will only award cash prizes to contestants who can successfully hack any version of Android Nougat on Nexus 5X and 6P devices. However, the catch here is that Google wants you to hack the devices knowing only the devices' phone numbers and email addresses. For working of their exploits, contes

In Brief You should not miss this month's Patch Updates, as it brings fixes for critical issues in Adobe Flash Player, iOS, Xcode, the Apple Watch, Windows, Internet Explorer, and the Edge browser. Adobe has rolled out a critical update to address several issues, most of which are Remote Code Execution flaws, in its widely-used Adobe Flash Player for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and ChromeOS. Whereas, Microsoft has released 14 security updates to fix a total of 50 vulnerabilities in Windows and related software. First of all, if you have Adobe Flash Player installed and have not yet updated your software plugin, you are playing with fire. Critical Flash Vulnerabilities Affect Windows, Mac, Linux and ChromeOS Adobe has released its l atest round of security patches to address critical vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash Player for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and ChromeOS. The Flash vulnerabilities could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the vulnerable system. So, users are

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,

Around 324,000 users have likely had their payment records stolen either from payment processor BlueSnap or its customer Regpack ; however, neither of the company has admitted a data breach. BlueSnap is a payment provider which allows websites to take payments from customers by offering merchant facilities, whereas RegPack is a global online enrollment platform that uses BlueSnap to process the financial transactions for its online enrollments. The data breach was initially reported on July 10, when a hacker published a link on Twitter, pointing to a file containing roughly 324,000 records allegedly stolen from Waltham, Massachusetts-based BlueSnap. The tweet has since been deleted, but Australian security expert Troy Hunt took a copy of it for later review to analyze the data and after analyzing, he discovered that the leaked payment records are most likely legitimate. Payment Card Data Including CVV Codes Leaked The data contains users' details registred between 10

Bluetooth Low Energy, also known as Bluetooth Smart or Bluetooth 4, is the leading protocol designed for connecting IoT devices, medical equipment, smart homes and like most emerging technologies, security is often an afterthought. As devices become more and more embedded in our daily lives, vulnerabilities have real impact on our digital and physical security. Enter the Bluetooth lock, promising digital key convenience with temporary and Internet shareable access. The problem is, almost all of these locks have vulnerabilities, easily exploited via Bluetooth! DEF CON always has the coolest new hacks and security news, and this year was no exception. The hacking conferences are a great way to get a pulse on the general status of the security world, what people are interested in, worried about, or looking to exploit. This year clearly had an uptick in Internet of Things (IoT) devices and ways to hack them. Obviously, we had to go and take a look at the Bluetooth lock hack, and

What would it take for hackers to significantly disrupt the US' 911 emergency call system? It only takes 6,000 Smartphones. Yes, you heard it right! According to new research published last week, a malicious attacker can leverage a botnet of infected smartphone devices located throughout the country to knock the 911 service offline in an entire state, and possibly the whole United States, for days. The attacker would only need 6,000 infected smartphones to launch automated Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against 911 service in an entire state by placing simultaneous calls from the botnet devices to the emergency numbers. However, as little as 200,000 infected mobile phones could knock the 911 emergency call system offline across the entire US. Where does the Problem Lies? Researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev's Cyber-Security Research Center say the problem is in the fact that current US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regula

Two critical zero-day vulnerabilities have been discovered in the world's 2nd most popular database management software MySQL that could allow an attacker to take full control over the database. Polish security researcher Dawid Golunski has discovered two zero-days, CVE-2016-6662 and CVE-2016-6663, that affect all currently supported MySQL versions as well as its forked such as MariaDB and PerconaDB. Golunski further went on to publish details and a proof-of-concept exploit code for CVE-2016-6662 after informing Oracle of both issues, along with vendors of MariaDB and PerconaDB. Both MariaDB and PerconaDB had fixed the vulnerabilities, but Oracle had not. The vulnerability (CVE-2016-6662) can be exploited by hackers to inject malicious settings into MySQL configuration files or create their own malicious ones. Exploitation Vector The above flaw could be exploited either via SQL Injection or by hackers with authenticated access to MySQL database (via a network conne

Pokémon GO has yet not been officially launched in India, but the location-based augmented reality game has already fueled a privacy debate and request for Ban. Isn't that weird? A Gujarat resident, Alay Anil Dave has recently filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in the Gujarat High Court against Niantic, developers of Pokémon Go , over allegations that the game is hurting religious sentiments of Hindus and Jains by showing virtual eggs in places of worship of different religious groups. The launch date of Pokémon GO for India has not been announced so far, but millions of Indians have already downloaded the game from 3rd-party app markets and playing it on the streets. However, there are many still waiting for an official release of the game in India, as they don't want to end up installing malicious versions of Pokémon GO that could install malware on their phones, allowing hackers to compromise their devices. Pokémon GO has become the most successful game lau