The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Cybersecurity News Site — Index Page

Guess how many devices participated in last Friday's massive DDoS attack against DNS provider Dyn that caused vast internet outage? Just 100,000 devices. I did not miss any zeros. Dyn disclosed on Wednesday that a botnet of an estimated 100,000 internet-connected devices was hijacked to flood its systems with unwanted requests and close down the Internet for millions of users. Dyn executive vice president Scott Hilton has issued a statement , saying all compromised devices have been infected with a notorious Mirai malware that has the ability to take over cameras, DVRs, and routers. "We're still working on analyzing the data but the estimate at the time of this report is up to 100,000 malicious endpoints," Hilton said. "We are able to confirm that a significant volume of attack traffic originated from Mirai-based botnets." Mirai malware scans for Internet of Things (IoT) devices that are still using their default passwords and then enslaves those

The world's largest online professional network LinkedIn could face a ban in Russia after the company has failed to comply with a Russian data localization law that compels companies to keep data on Russian users in their country. If you are not aware, LinkedIn is the only major social network which is not banned in China, because the company agreed to cooperate with the Chinese government and remove controversial content. However, LinkedIn could be the first social network in Russia to be blocked by the Russian state's federal media regulator, called Roskomnadzor, for not complying with the rules. In July 2014, the Russia approved amendments to the Russian Personal Data Law which came into force in 1st September 2015, under which foreign tech companies were required to store the personal data of its citizens within the country. However, Russia was not the first country to enforce such law on foreign tech companies. A few months ago, Iran also imposed new regulations

Super Low RPO with Continuous Data Protection: Dial Back to Just Seconds Before an Attack Zerto , a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, can help you detect and recover from ransomware in near real-time. This solution leverages continuous data protection (CDP) to ensure all workloads have the lowest recovery point objective (RPO) possible. The most valuable thing about CDP is that it does not use snapshots, agents, or any other periodic data protection methodology. Zerto has no impact on production workloads and can achieve RPOs in the region of 5-15 seconds across thousands of virtual machines simultaneously. For example, the environment in the image below has nearly 1,000 VMs being protected with an average RPO of just six seconds! Application-Centric Protection: Group Your VMs to Gain Application-Level Control   You can protect your VMs with the Zerto application-centric approach using Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs). This logical grouping of VMs ensures that your whole applica

Hey readers, guess what? The Hacker News (THN) is about to complete its 6 years as a leading Information Security Channel – attracting over 9 Million readers worldwide – and a trusted source for Hacking, Cyber Security and Infosec News for the enthusiasts, technologists & nerds. In the special occasion of this year's Anniversary, The Hacker News is excited to announce the launch of its THN Deals Store ! THN Deals Store aims to give anything you need to take your potential to the next level, and that too, at amazingly good prices and incredible discounts. In fact, we even have a bunch of freebies and giveaways for our readers. THN Deals Store is packed with great deals on everything from Online Cyber Security and Hacking Courses to gear and gadgets , downloadable Security Products, privacy services, IT Certification Preparation Courses , programming courses and even drones. So, if you are searching for a great deal for anything you need, Welcome to the THN Deals St

The Israeli firm Cellebrite , which provides digital forensics tools and software to help law enforcement access mobile phones in investigations, has had its firmware and software leaked online. Yes, you heard that right. Cellebrite's most sensitive in-house capabilities have been made public by one of its products' resellers, who is now distributing copies of Cellebrite's firmware and software for anyone to download. The apparent reseller is McSira Professional Solutions , which hosts software for various versions of Cellebrite's Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED). UFED is one of the company's key products that help investigators bypass the security mechanisms of mobile phones, especially iPhones, and extract all data and passwords from them. For the Cellebrite's hand on iOS devices, you can watch the 2015 YouTube video (below), which demonstrates one of the company's products that unlocked the iPhone device in few hours. Download  L

Joomla – the world's second popular open source Content Management System (CMS) software packages, has just released the latest version of its CMS, which includes patches for two critical security vulnerabilities and a bug fix. The two critical flaws, both exist in the Joomla Core functionalities, include Account Creation Vulnerability ( CVE-2016-8870 ) and Elevated Privileges flaw ( CVE-2016-8869 ) that, if unpatched, could put millions of websites that run on Joomla at risk. The account creation bug could allow any user to register on a website, even if the registration process has been disabled, while the elevated privileges flaw could enable users to perform advanced functions on a registered site that ordinary users are not authorized to do. Both the critical vulnerabilities affect Joomla version 3.4.4 through 3.6.3. The update also includes a bug fix for Two-Factor Authentication. Millions of websites used in e-commerce and other sensitive industries used Joomla,

WhatsApp is, no doubt, the largest end-to-end encrypted messaging network that allows over billion of its users to send messages, photos, videos, voice messages, documents, and calls that are secure from falling into the wrong hands. And now it seems like WhatsApp is rolling out a much-awaited feature for the new beta versions of its Android app: Video Calling . New beta version 2.16.318 of WhatsApp brings the ability for users to conduct free video calls, though it is not clear, at this moment, whether the Video calling feature of WhatsApp provides end-to-end encryption. In order to activate video calls, you simply need to pull up a contact in the WhatsApp app, tap on the call icon and choose "Video Call." You can also go directly to the Calls tab, to begin with the option. The Video calls will only work if both the caller as well as the receiver have the same beta build of WhatsApp that supports the feature. If not, you will be notified of an error message that

What's worse than knowing that innocent looking JPEGs, PDFs and font files can hijack your iPhone, iPad, and iPod. Yes, attackers can take over your vulnerable Apple's iOS device remotely – all they have to do is trick you to view a maliciously-crafted JPEG graphic or PDF file through a website or an email, which could allow them to execute malicious code on your system. That's a terrible flaw (CVE-2016-4673), but the good news is that Apple has released the latest version of its mobile operating system, iOS 10.1 , for iPhones and iPads to address this remote-code execution flaw, alongside an array of bug fixes. And now that the company has rolled out a security patch, some hackers would surely find vulnerable Apple devices to exploit the vulnerability and take full control of them. So, users running older versions of iOS are advised to update their mobile devices to iOS 10.1 as soon as possible. Besides this remote code execution flaw, the newest iOS 10.1 incl

You might be surprised to know that your security cameras, Internet-connected toasters and refrigerators may have inadvertently participated in the massive cyber attack that broke a large portion of the Internet on Friday. That's due to massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against Dyn, a major domain name system (DNS) provider that many sites and services use as their upstream DNS provider for turning IP addresses into human-readable websites. The result we all know: Twitter, GitHub, Amazon, Netflix, Pinterest, Etsy, Reddit, PayPal, and AirBnb, were among hundreds of sites and services that were rendered inaccessible to Millions of people worldwide for several hours. Why and How the Deadliest DDoS Attack Happened It was reported that the Mirai bots were used in the massive DDoS attacks against DynDNS, but they "were separate and distinct" bots from those used to execute record-breaking DDoS attack against French Internet service and hosting

The alleged Russian hacker, who was arrested by the FBI in collaboration with the Czech police, was believed to be the one responsible for massive 2012 data breach at LinkedIn, according to a statement released by LinkedIn. Now, United States authorities have officially indicted Yevgeniy Aleksandrovich Nikulin , 29-years-old Russian national, for hacking not just LinkedIn , but also the online cloud storage platform Dropbox, and now-defunct social-networking company Formspring. Nikulin was arrested in Prague [ Watch Video ] on October 5 by the Czech police after Interpol issued an international arrest warrant. According to an indictment unsealed Friday, Nikulin had hacked three Bay Area technology companies in the spring and summer of 2012, which includes LinkedIn Corp, Dropbox, and Formspring. Nikulin gained access to LinkedIn's network between March 3 and March 4, 2012; Dropbox's network between May 14 and July 25, 2012; and Formspring between June 13 and June 2

Earlier last year, security researchers from Google's Project Zero outlined a way to hijack the computers running Linux by abusing a design flaw in the memory and gaining higher kernel privileges on the system. Now, the same previously found designing weakness has been exploited to gain unfettered "root" access to millions of Android smartphones, allowing potentially anyone to take control of affected devices. Researchers in the VUSec Lab at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam have discovered a vulnerability that targets a device's dynamic random access memory (DRAM) using an attack called Rowhammer . Although we are already aware of the Rowhammer attack , this is the very first time when researchers have successfully used this attack to target mobile devices. What is DRAM Rowhammer Attack? The Rowhammer attack against mobile devices is equally dangerous because it potentially puts all critical data on millions of Android phones at risk, at least until a secu