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Do you know — 1 Gram of DNA Can Store 1,000,000,000 Terabyte of Data for 1000+ Years. Just last year, Microsoft purchased 10 Million strands of synthetic DNA from San Francisco DNA synthesis startup called Twist Bioscience and collaborated with researchers from the University of Washington to focus on using DNA as a data storage medium. However, in the latest experiments, a pair of researchers from Columbia University and the New York Genome Center (NYGC) have come up with a new technique to store massive amounts of data on DNA, and the results are marvelous. The duo successfully stored around 2mb in data, encoding a total number of six files, which include: A full computer operating system An 1895 French movie "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat" A $50 Amazon gift card A computer virus A Pioneer plaque A 1948 study by information theorist Claude Shannon The new research, which comes courtesy of Yaniv Erlich and Dina Zielinski, has been published in the jou

Well, there's some good news for hackers and bug bounty hunters! Both tech giants Google and Microsoft have raised the value of the payouts they offer security researchers, white hat hackers and bug hunters who find high severity flaws in their products. While Microsoft has just doubled its top reward from $15,000 to $30,000, Google has raised its high reward from $20,000 to $31,337, which is a 50 percent rise plus a bonus $1,337 or 'leet' award. In past few years, every major company, from Apple to P*rnHub and Netgear , had started Bug Bounty Programs to encourage hackers and security researchers to find and responsibly report bugs in their services and get rewarded. But since more and more bug hunters participating in bug bounty programs at every big tech company, common and easy-to-spot bugs are hardly left now, and if any, they hardly make any severe impact. Sophisticated and remotely exploitable vulnerabilities are a thing now, which takes more time and

In today's digital world, where connectivity is rules all, endpoints serve as the gateway to a business's digital kingdom. And because of this, endpoints are one of hackers' favorite targets.  According to the IDC,  70% of successful breaches start at the endpoint . Unprotected endpoints provide vulnerable entry points to launch devastating cyberattacks. With IT teams needing to protect more endpoints—and more kinds of endpoints—than ever before, that perimeter has become more challenging to defend. You need to improve your endpoint security, but where do you start? That's where this guide comes in.  We've curated the top 10 must-know endpoint security tips that every IT and security professional should have in their arsenal. From identifying entry points to implementing EDR solutions, we'll dive into the insights you need to defend your endpoints with confidence.  1. Know Thy Endpoints: Identifying and Understanding Your Entry Points Understanding your network's

The major internet outage across the United States earlier this week was not due to any virus or malware or state-sponsored cyber attack, rather it was the result of a simple TYPO. Amazon on Thursday admitted that an incorrectly typed command during a routine debugging of the company's billing system caused the 5-hour-long outage of some Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers on Tuesday. The issue caused tens of thousands of websites and services to become completely unavailable, while others show broken images and links, which left online users around the world confused. The sites and services affected by the disruption include Quora, Slack, Medium, Giphy, Trello, Splitwise, Soundcloud, and IFTTT, among a ton of others. Here's What Happened: On Tuesday morning, members of Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) team were debugging the S3 cloud-storage billing system. As part of the process, the team needed to take a few billing servers offline, but unfortunately, it end

Bad News for privacy concerned people! It will be once again easier for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to sell your personal data for marketing or advertisement purposes without taking your permission. Last October, the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) passed a set of privacy rules on ISPs that restrict them from sharing your online data with third parties without your consent and require them to adopt "reasonable measures" to protect consumers' data from hackers. However, now the FCC suspended privacy rules before they came into effect. The reason? President Donald Trump's newly appointed FCC chairman Ajit Pai, a Republican and ex-Verizon lawyer. Ajit Pai, who has openly expressed his views against net neutrality in the past, just last week said during a speech at Mobile World Congress that Net Neutrality was "a mistake" and indicated that the Commission is now moving back to internet regulations. Now, Pai suspends p

Last year Google employees took an initiative to help thousands of Open Source Projects patch a critical remote code execution vulnerability in a widely used Apache Commons Collections (ACC) library. Dubbed Operation Rosehub , the initiative was volunteered by some 50 Google employees, who utilized 20 percent of their work time to patch over 2600 open source projects on Github, those were vulnerable to "Mad Gadget vulnerability." Mad Gadget vulnerability ( CVE-2015-6420 ) is a remote code execution bug in the Java deserialization used by the Apache Commons Collections (ACC) library that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on a system. The ACC Library is widely deployed by many Java applications to decode data passed between computers. To exploit this flaw, all an unauthorized attacker need to do is submit maliciously crafted input to an application on a targeted system that uses the ACC library. Once the vulnerable ACC libra

Yahoo has just revealed that around 32 million user accounts were accessed by hackers in the last two years using a sophisticated cookie forging attack without any password. These compromised accounts are in addition to the Yahoo accounts affected by the two massive data breaches that the company disclosed in last few months. The former tech giant said that in a regulatory filing Wednesday that the cookie caper is likely linked to the "same state-sponsored actor" thought to be behind a separate, 2014 data breach that resulted in the theft of 500 Million user accounts . "Based on the investigation, we believe an unauthorized third party accessed the company's proprietary code to learn how to forge certain cookies," Yahoo said in its annual report filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). "The outside forensic experts have identified approximately 32 million user accounts for which they believe forged cookies were used or taken

Security researchers have discovered a new variant of Dridex – one of the most nefarious banking Trojans actively targeting financial sector – with a new, sophisticated code injection technique and evasive capabilities called " AtomBombing ." On Tuesday, Magal Baz, security researcher at Trusteer IBM  disclosed new research, exposing the new Dridex version 4, which is the latest version of the infamous financial Trojan and its new capabilities. Dridex is one of the most well-known Trojans that exhibits the typical behavior of monitoring a victim's traffic to bank sites by infiltrating victim PCs using macros embedded in Microsoft documents or via web injection attacks and then stealing online banking credentials and financial data. However, by including AtomBombing capabilities, Dridex becomes the first ever malware sample to utilize such sophisticated code injection technique to evade detection. What is "AtomBombing" Technique? Code injection te

If you are also searching for the answers to what skills are needed for a job in cyber security, you should know that this varies widely based upon the responsibilities of a particular role, the type of company you want to work with, and especially on it's IT architect. However, Linux is the most required skills in information technology and cyber security, as Linux are everywhere! Whether you know it or not you are already using Linux every day – when you Google, you use Linux; when you buy metro tickets, you use Linux; It powers your smart devices; most airplane or automobile entertainment systems are also running on Linux; even your Android phone is Linux. Moreover, nearly all of the hacking and penetration testing tools are developed specifically for Linux. In fact, one of the popular operating systems of hackers, KALI, is also a Linux distro that comes with over 300 tools for penetration testing, forensics, hacking and reverse engineering. So, due to the rapid growth of Li

Is anything safe? It's 2017, and the likely answer is NO. Making sure your passwords are secure is one of the first line of defense – for your computer, email, and information – against hacking attempts, and Password Managers are the one recommended by many security experts to keep all your passwords secure in one place. Password Managers are software that creates complex passwords, stores them and organizes all your passwords for your computers, websites, applications and networks, as well as remember them on your behalf. But what if your Password Managers itself are vulnerable? Well, it's not just an imagination, as a new report has revealed that some of the most popular password managers are affected by critical vulnerabilities that can expose user credentials. The report, published on Tuesday by a group of security experts from TeamSIK of the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology in Germany, revealed that nine of the most popular Android pass