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Chinese Hackers have taken Smishing attack to the next level, using rogue cell phone towers to distribute Android banking malware via spoofed SMS messages. SMiShing — phishing attacks sent via SMS — is a type of attack wherein fraudsters use number spoofing attack to send convincing bogus messages to trick mobile users into downloading a malware app onto their smartphones or lures victims into giving up sensitive information. Security researchers at Check Point Software Technologies have uncovered that Chinese hackers are using fake base transceiver stations (BTS towers) to distribute " Swearing Trojan ," an Android banking malware that once appeared neutralized after its authors were arrested in a police raid. This is the first ever reported real-world case in which criminals played smart in such a way that they used BTS — a piece of equipment usually installed on cellular telephone towers — to spread malware. The phishing SMS, which masquerades itself as the on

If you use iCloud to sync your Apple devices, your private data may be at risk of getting exposed or deleted by April 7th. It has been found that a mischievous group of hackers claiming to have access to over 300 million iCloud accounts is threatening Apple to remotely wipe data from those millions of Apple devices unless Apple pays it $75,000 in crypto-currency or $100,000 worth of iTunes gift cards. The hacking group, who identified themselves as 'Turkish Crime Family,' has demanded a ransom to be paid in Bitcoin or Ethereum, another popular crypto-currency. Motherboard broke this story on Tuesday after a hacker claiming to represent the alleged hacking group shared screenshots of alleged emails between the group and Apple's security team with the publication. "I just want my money and thought this would be an interesting report that a lot of Apple customers would be interested in reading and hearing," the hacker told Motherboard. The screenshots o

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

A team of security researchers from Cybellum, an Israeli zero-day prevention firm, has discovered a new Windows vulnerability that could allow hackers to take full control of your computer. Dubbed DoubleAgent , the new injecting code technique works on all versions of Microsoft Windows operating systems, starting from Windows XP to the latest release of Windows 10. What's worse? DoubleAgent exploits a 15-years-old undocumented legitimate feature of Windows called " Application Verifier ," which cannot be patched. Application Verifier is a runtime verification tool that loads DLLs (dynamic link library) into processes for testing purpose, allowing developers quickly detect and fix programming errors in their applications. Unpatchable Microsoft Application Verifier Exploit The vulnerability resides in how this Application Verifier tool handles DLLs. According to the researchers, as part of the process, DLLs are bound to the target processes in a Windows Regist

Are you curiously googling or searching torrents for photos or videos of Emma Watson, Amanda Seyfried, Rose McGowan, or any other celebrities leaked in The Fappenning 2.0 ? If yes, then beware, you should not click any link promising Fappenning celebrity photos . Cybercriminals often take advantage of news headlines in order to trap victims and trick them into following links that may lead to websites containing malware or survey scams. Last week, a few private photos of Emma Watson and Amanda Seyfried — ranging from regular selfies to explicitly sexual photos — were circulating on the Internet forums, including Reddit and 4chan, with UK's TV presenter Holly Willoughby and US actor Rose McGowan among the latest alleged victims. Now, according to the security researchers from MalwareBytes, scammers are exploiting this new batch of leaked celebrity photos and videos by using their stolen selfies to lure victims on social media sites and making dollars. Also Read: Hacke

You may be aware of the fact that a local Windows user with system rights and permissions can reset the password for other users, but did you know that a local user can also hijack other users' session, including domain admin/system user, without knowing their passwords? Alexander Korznikov, an Israeli security researcher, has recently demonstrated that a local privileged user can even hijack the session of any logged-in Windows user who has higher privileges without knowing that user's password, using built-in command line tools. This trick works on almost all versions of Windows operating system and does not require any special privileges. Korznikov is himself unable to figure out if it is a Windows feature or a security flaw. The issue discovered by Korznikov is not entirely new, as a French security researcher, namely Benjamin Delpy, detailed a similar user session hijacking technique on his blog some six years ago. Korznikov calls the attack a "privilege

You might have heard the latest news about Microsoft blocking new security patches and updates for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users running the latest processors from Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and others. Don't panic, this new policy doesn't mean that all Windows 7 and 8.1 users will not be able to receive latest updates in general because Microsoft has promised to support Windows 7 until 2020 , and Windows 8.1 until 2023. But those who have upgraded their machines running older versions of Windows to the latest processors, or manually downgraded their new laptops to run Windows 7/8.1 would be out of luck. A recently published Microsoft Knowledge Base article suggests that if you are running the older version of operating systems on your computers that feature new processors, including Intel's 7th generation Core i3, i5 and i7 ("Kaby Lake"), AMD Ryzen ("Bristol Ridge") and Qualcomm 8996 chips or later, the security updates will not install. Inste

Cisco is warning of a new critical zero-day IOS / IOS XE vulnerability that affects more than 300 of its switch models. The company identified this highest level of vulnerability in its product while analyzing " Vault 7 " — a roughly 8,761 documents and files leaked by Wikileaks last week, claiming to detail hacking tools and tactics of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The vulnerability resides in the Cluster Management Protocol (CMP) processing code in Cisco IOS and Cisco IOS XE Software. If exploited, the flaw ( CVE-2017-3881 ) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a reboot of an affected device or remotely execute malicious code on the device with elevated privileges to take full control of the device, Cisco says in its  advisory . The CMP protocol has been designed to pass around information about switch clusters between cluster members using Telnet or SSH. The vulnerability is in the default configuration of affected Cisco devices,

It's been over a week since Wikileaks promised to hand over more information on hacking tools and tactics of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to the affected tech companies, following a leak of a roughly 8,761 documents that Wikileaks claimed belonged to CIA hacking units. "We have decided to work with them, to give them some exclusive access to some of the technical details we have, so that fixes can be pushed out," WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange said during a Facebook Live press conference last week. However, it looks like the things aren't that easier for tech companies as they look. After days of waiting, Assange made its first contact with Apple, Microsoft, and Google this week and finally made his intentions clear – no sharing of bugs and vulnerabilities the CIA is or was allegedly taking advantage of until certain demands are met. Multiple anonymous sources familiar with the matter told Motherboard that Assange sent an email to Apple,

So you are in a party with your friends, and your phone is running low on battery. Oops! The ideal solution is to charge your phone using a charger or a power bank, but not everyone carries power banks or chargers with them all the time, especially in a party. What if you can charge your phone wirelessly using another phone when it runs out of battery? Isn't that great? Well, thanks to Sony, you might soon be able to use your friends' phones to charge your own device. According to a recently published patent application, Sony is working on a new futuristic technique that enables wireless power exchange between various nearby consumer electronic devices, including smartphones, computers, microwave, washing machine, fridges, and TVs, without cords. Wireless charging isn't a new concept at all, but this is the first time when the Near Field Communications (NFC) technology is being used for power transfer wirelessly between two devices, that too over considerable distanc

Another dangerous vulnerability has been discovered in Linux kernel that dates back to 2009 and affects a large number of Linux distros, including Red Hat, Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE, and Ubuntu. The latest Linux kernel flaw ( CVE-2017-2636 ), which existed in the Linux kernel for the past seven years, allows a local unprivileged user to gain root privileges on affected systems or cause a denial of service (system crash). Positive Technologies researcher Alexander Popov discovered a race condition issue in the N_HLDC Linux kernel driver – which is responsible for dealing with High-Level Data Link Control (HDLC) data – that leads to double-free vulnerability. " Double Free " is one of the most common memory corruption bug that occurs when the application releases same memory location twice by calling the free() function on the same allocated memory. An unauthenticated attacker may leverage this vulnerability to inject and execute arbitrary code in the security context of curren

In the digital world, it just takes one click to get the keys to the kingdom. Do you know spear-phishing was the only secret weapon behind the biggest data breach in the history? It's true, as one of the Yahoo employees fell victim to a simple phishing attack and clicked one wrong link that let the hackers gain a foothold in the company's internal networks. You may be familiar with phishing attacks — an attempt to steal user credentials or financial data — while, Spear-phishing is a targeted form of phishing in which attackers trick employees or vendors into providing remote-access credentials or opening a malicious attachment containing an exploit or payload. Here's how the Yahoo's massive data breach was traced back to human error and who were the alleged masterminds behind this hack. On Wednesday, the US government charged two Russian spies (Dmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Sushchin) and two criminal hackers (Alexsey Belan and Karim Baratov) in connection with the 20

Are you clicking selfies? That is fine and not any criminal act, but this act can land you in trouble — here's how! Almost three years after a wave of private photographs of celebrities leaked online, "The Fappening 2.0" appears to be underway with the circulation of alleged naked pictures of female celebrities, including Emma Watson and Amanda Seyfried on Reddit and 4chan. Back in 2014, anonymous hackers flooded the Internet with private photographs of major celebrities, including Jennifer Lawrence , Kim Kardashian , Kate Upton and Kirsten Dunst by hacking thousands of Apple's iCloud accounts . The Fappening hackers have since been sent to prison . The Fappening 2.0: It's Happening Again! However, in the latest leak, which has been heralded online as "The Fappening 2.0," the personal photographs of Amanda Seyfried and Emma Watson — ranging from regular selfies to explicitly sexual photos — have been leaking online since Tuesday night.

The 2014 Yahoo hack disclosed late last year that compromised over 500 million Yahoo user accounts was believed to be carried out by a state-sponsored hacking group. Now, two Russian intelligence officers and two criminal hackers have been charged by the US government in connection with the 2014 Yahoo hack that compromised about 500 million Yahoo user accounts, the Department of Justice announced Wednesday. According to the prosecutors, at least 30 million accounts were accessed as part of a spam campaign to access the email contents of thousands of people, including journalists, government officials, and technology company employees. The four defendants — Two officers from the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and two other hackers — are identified as: Dmitry Aleksandrovich Dokuchaev, 33 — an officer in the FSB Center for Information Security at the time of the hack, and now Russian national and resident. Igor Anatolyevich Sushchin, 43 — an FSB officer, a superior

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

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