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

Bought a brand new Android Smartphone? Do not expect it to be a clean slate. At least 36 high-end smartphone models belonging to popular manufacturing companies such as Samsung, LG, Xiaomi, Asus, Nexus, Oppo, and Lenovo, which are being distributed by two unidentified companies have been found pre-loaded with malware programs. These malware infected devices were identified after a Check Point malware scan was performed on Android devices. Two malware families were detected on the infected devices: Loki and SLocker. According to a blog post published Friday by Check Point researchers, these malicious software apps were not part of the official ROM firmware supplied by the smartphone manufacturers but were installed later somewhere along the supply chain, before the handsets arrived at the two companies from the manufacturer's factory. First seen in February 2016, Loki Trojan inject devices right inside core Android operating system processes to gain powerful root privi

This week WikiLeaks published "Vault 7" — a roughly 8,761 documents and files claiming to detail surveillance tools and tactics of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The leak outlined a broad range of flaws in smartphones and other devices that the agency uses to intercept communications and spy on its targets, making even China and Germany worried about the CIA's ability to hack all manner of devices. While WikiLeaks promised the "Vault 7" release is less than one percent of its 'Year Zero' disclosure, and there's more to come, we are here with some new developments on the CIA leak. But, before knowing about the latest developments in the CIA hacking tool leak, I would suggest you read my previous piece to know 10 important things about 'WikiLeaks-CIA Leak .' We believe the US intelligence agencies have access to much bigger technical resources and cyber capabilities than the leak exposed in the leak. The dump so far just

Over the past two years, a shocking  51% of organizations surveyed in a leading industry report have been compromised by a cyberattack.  Yes, over half.  And this, in a world where enterprises deploy  an average of 53 different security solutions  to safeguard their digital domain.  Alarming? Absolutely. A recent survey of CISOs and CIOs, commissioned by Pentera and conducted by Global Surveyz Research, offers a quantifiable glimpse into this evolving battlefield, revealing a stark contrast between the growing risks and the tightening budget constraints under which cybersecurity professionals operate. With this report, Pentera has once again taken a magnifying glass to the state of pentesting to release its annual report about today's pentesting practices. Engaging with 450 security executives from North America, LATAM, APAC, and EMEA—all in VP or C-level positions at organizations with over 1,000 employees—the report paints a current picture of modern security validation prac

The Dutch police have managed to decrypt a number of PGP-encrypted messages sent by criminals using their custom security-focused PGP BlackBerry phones and identified several criminals in an ongoing investigation. PGP, or Pretty Good Privacy, an open source end-to-end encryption standard that can be used to cryptographically sign emails, files, documents, or entire disk partitions in order to protect them from being spied on. You'll be surprised to know how the police actually decrypted those PGP messages. In April last year, the Dutch Police arrested a 36-year-old man on suspicion of money laundering and involvement in selling customized BlackBerry Phones with the secure PGP-encrypted network to criminals that were involved in organized crimes. At the time, the police also seized a server belonging to Ennetcom, the company owned by Danny Manupassa, which contains data of end-to-end encrypted communications belong to a large number of criminal groups. Later, in Januar

Security researchers have discovered a Zero-Day vulnerability in the popular Apache Struts web application framework, which is being actively exploited in the wild. Apache Struts is a free, open-source, Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework for creating elegant, modern Java web applications, which supports REST, AJAX, and JSON. In a blog post published Monday, Cisco's Threat intelligence firm Talos announced the team observed a number of active attacks against the zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2017-5638) in Apache Struts. According to the researchers, the issue is a remote code execution vulnerability in the Jakarta Multipart parser of Apache Struts that could allow an attacker to execute malicious commands on the server when uploading files based on the parser. "It is possible to perform an RCE attack with a malicious Content-Type value," warned Apache. "If the Content-Type value isn't valid an exception is thrown which is then used to display an erro

The secure messaging app used by staffers in the White House and on Capitol Hill is not as secure as the company claims. Confide, the secure messaging app reportedly employed by President Donald Trump's aides to speak to each other in secret, promises "military-grade end-to-end encryption" to its users and claims that nobody can intercept and read chats that disappear after they are read. However, two separate research have raised a red flag about the claims made by the company. Security researchers at Seattle-based IOActive discovered multiple critical vulnerabilities in Confide after a recent audit of the version 1.4.2 of the app for Windows, Mac OS X, and Android. Confide Flaws Allow Altering of Secret Messages The critical flaws allowed attackers to: Impersonate friendly contacts by hijacking an account session or guessing a password, as the app failed to prevent brute-force attacks on account passwords. Spy on contact details of Confide users, incl