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Next time when someone sends you a photo of a cute cat or a hot chick on WhatsApp or Telegram then be careful before you click on the image to view — it might hack your account within seconds. A new security vulnerability has recently been patched by two popular end-to-end encrypted messaging services — WhatsApp and Telegram — that could have allowed hackers to completely take over user account just by having a user simply click on a picture. The hack only affected the browser-based versions of WhatsApp and Telegram, so users relying on the mobile apps are not vulnerable to the attack. According to Checkpoint security researchers, the vulnerability resided in the way both messaging services process images and multimedia files without verifying that they might have hidden malicious code inside. For exploiting the flaw, all an attacker needed to do was sending the malicious code hidden within an innocent-looking image. Once the victim clicked on the picture, the attacker coul

In a large-scale Twitter hack, thousands of Twitter accounts from media outlets to celebrities, including the European Parliament, Forbes, BlockChain, Amnesty International, UNICEF, Nike Spain and numerous other individuals and organizations, were compromised early Wednesday. The compromised Twitter accounts is pushing a disturbing spam message written in Turkish comparing the Dutch to the Nazis, with Swastikas and a " #NaziHollanda " or " #Nazialmanya " (Nazi Germany) hashtag, and changed some of the victims' profile pictures to an image of the Turkish flag and Ottoman Empire coat of arms. In addition to the message, the hackers are also posting a link to a YouTube video and the Twitter account Sebo . According to the latest reports, this weird Twitter activity on numerous high-profile accounts is the result of a vulnerability in the third-party app called Twitter Counter. Twitter Counter is a social media analytics service that helps Twitter users to

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

After last month's postponement, Microsoft's Patch Tuesday is back with a massive release of fixes that includes patches for security vulnerabilities in Windows and associated software disclosed and exploited since January's patch release. Meanwhile, Adobe has also pushed out security updates for its products, releasing patches for at least seven security vulnerabilities in its Flash Player software. Microsoft patched a total of 140 separate security vulnerabilities across 18 security bulletins, nine of them critical as they allow remote code execution on the affected computer. Microsoft Finally Patches Publicly Disclosed Windows Flaws Among the "critical" security updates include a flaw in the SMB (server message block) network file sharing protocol, which had publicly disclosed exploit code since last month. The original patch released last year for this flaw was incomplete. The flaw is a memory corruption issue that could allow remote code execu

With the rise in the mobile market, Adware has become one of the most prevalent mobile threats in the world. Adware has traditionally been used to aggressively push ads like banners or pop-ups on mobile screens to make money. The troublesome part is that Adware is now becoming trojanized and more sophisticated, as it aggressively collects personal data from the mobile device it's installed on, including name, birth date, location, serial number, contacts, and browser data without users' consent. However, the risk is a bit higher on Android than other platforms because of the extra permissions that apps enjoy. Although Google has stepped up its efforts to remove potentially harmful apps from its Play Store in the past years and added more stringent malware checks for new apps, Adware app eventually finds its way into its mobile app marketplace to target millions of Android users. In its recent efforts to make its Play Store ecosystem safe, Google has recently discover

Imagine a pocket-sized hard drive capable of storing the entire list of 35 Million Songs? This isn't yet practical, but IBM has just taken a big step towards improving computing technology: IBM researchers just discovered a way to store data on a single atom. Data storage is undergoing dramatic evolution, recently researchers successfully stored digital data — an entire operating system, a movie, an Amazon gift card, a study and a computer virus — in strands of DNA. The IBM Research results announced Wednesday that the researchers have developed the world's smallest magnet using a single atom and they packed it with one bit of digital data. Currently, hard drives use about 100,000 atoms to store a single bit of information — a 1 or 0 — using traditional methods. So, this breakthrough could allow people to store 1,000 times more information in the same amount of space in the future applications. Scientists Store 1 Bit of data on a single Atom, whereas modern hard dri

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

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