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

Since the Internet is filled with hackers and cyber criminals keen on hacking networks for valuable information, ethical hackers are in huge demand and being hired by almost every industry to help them keep their networks protected. These ethical hackers, penetration testers, and information security analysts not only gain reputation in the IT industry but are also one of the most well-paid employees in the IT workforce today. But if you lack behind in this field, you required a good computer hacking course to sharpen up your knowledge. This week's THN Deals brings Become an Ethical Hacker Bonus Bundle that let you get started regardless of your tech background. This bundle will walk you through the very basic skills you need to start your journey towards becoming a professional ethical hacker. This package of 9-lifetime courses that includes total 340 in-depth lectures usually cost $681, but you can exclusively get this 9-in-1 online training course for just $49 (after 92

Last weekend when outdoor emergency sirens in Dallas cried loudly for over 90 minutes, many researchers concluded that some hackers hijacked the alarm system by exploiting an issue in a vulnerable computer network. But it turns out that the hackers did not breach Dallas' emergency services computer systems to trigger the city's outdoor sirens for tornado warnings and other emergencies, rather they did it entirely on radio. According to a statement issued on Monday, Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax clarified the cause of the last Friday's chaos, saying the "hack" used a radio signal that spoofed the system used to control the siren network centrally. "I don't want someone to understand how it was done so that they could try to do it again," Broadnax said without going much into details. "It was not a system software issue; it was a radio issue." First installed in 2007, the Dallas outdoor emergency warning system powers 156 sire

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

Recently we reported about a critical code execution vulnerability in Microsoft Word that was being exploited in the wild by cyber criminal groups to distribute malware like Dridex banking trojans and Latentbot. Now, it turns out that the same previously undisclosed vulnerability in Word (CVE-2017-0199) was also actively being exploited by the government-sponsored hackers to spy on Russian targets since at least this January. The news comes after security firm FireEye, that independently discovered this flaw last month, published a blog post , revealing that FinSpy spyware was installed as early as January using the same vulnerability in Word that was patched on Tuesday by Microsoft. For those unaware, the vulnerability (CVE-2017-0199) is a code execution flaw in Word that could allow an attacker to take over a fully patched and up to date computer when the victim opens a Word document containing a booby-trapped OLE2link object, which downloads a malicious HTML app from a

Can you imagine your world without the Internet? I know it's hard to imagine your life without the Internet, and the same was the case of two Ohio prisoners who built personal computers from parts from e-waste, hid them in the ceiling, and connected those PCs to the Internet via the prison's network. The incident occurred in 2015 but has now been made public by the State of Ohio's Office of the Inspector General, which published a 50-page report [ PDF ] on Tuesday, following almost a year-long investigation. According to the report, a prison work program has backfired two inmates of Marion Correctional Institution in Ohio, Florida, who smuggled computer parts from an e-waste recycling workshop and built two clandestine computers out of them. The unsupervised inmates later hid the computers behind a plywood board in the ceiling of a training room, and then connected those working PCs to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (ODRC) network to access

Besides a previously undisclosed code-execution flaw in Microsoft Word, the tech giant patches two more zero-day vulnerabilities that attackers had been exploiting in the wild for months, as part of this month's Patch Tuesday . In total, Microsoft patches 45 unique vulnerabilities in its nine products, including three previously undisclosed vulnerabilities under active attack. The first vulnerability ( CVE-2017-0199 ) under attack is a remote-code execution flaw that could allow an attacker to remotely take over a fully patched and up to date computer when the victim opens a Word document containing a booby-trapped OLE2link object. The attack can bypass most exploit mitigations developed by Microsoft, and according to Ryan Hanson of security firm Optiv, in some cases, exploits can execute malicious code even when Protected View is enabled. As The Hacker News reported Monday, this code-execution flaw in Microsoft Word was being exploited by hackers to spread a version

Do you know how many kinds of sensors your smartphone has inbuilt? And what data they gather about your physical and digital activities? An average smartphone these days is packed with a wide array of sensors such as GPS, Camera, microphone, accelerometer, magnetometer, proximity, gyroscope, pedometer, and NFC, to name a few. Now, according to a team of scientists from Newcastle University in the UK, hackers can potentially guess PINs and passwords – that you enter either on a bank website, app, your lock screen – to a surprising degree of accuracy by monitoring your phone's sensors, like the angle and motion of your phone while you are typing. The danger comes due to the way malicious websites and apps access most of a smartphone's internal sensors without requesting any permission to access them – doesn't matter even if you are accessing a secure website over HTTPS to enter your password. Your Phone doesn't Restrict Apps from Accessing Sensors' Data

If you are a regular reader of The Hacker News, you might be aware of an ongoing cyber attack — detected in the wild by McAfee and FireEye — that silently installs malware on fully-patched computers by exploiting an unpatched Microsoft Word vulnerability in all current versions of Microsoft Office. Now, according to security firm Proofpoint, the operators of the Dridex malware started exploiting the unpatched Microsoft Word vulnerability to spread a version of their infamous Dridex banking trojan . Dridex is currently one of the most dangerous banking trojans on the Internet that exhibits the typical behavior of monitoring a victim's traffic to bank sites by infiltrating PCs and stealing victim's online banking credentials and financial data. The Dridex actors usually relied on macro-laden Word files to distribute the malware through spam messages or emails. However, this is the first time when researchers found the Dridex operators using an unpatched zero-day flaw

A Russian computer hacker arrested over the weekend in Barcelona was apparently detained for his role in a massive computer botnet, and not for last year's US presidential election hack as reported by the Russian media. Peter Yuryevich Levashov, 32-years-old Russian computer programmer, suspected of operating the Kelihos botnet — a global network of over 100,000 infected computers that was used to deliver spam, steal login passwords, and infect computers with ransomware and other types of malware since approximately 2010, the U.S. Justice Department announced Monday. As suspected earlier, Levashov, also known as Peter Severa, is the same man who has also been listed in the World's Top 10 Worst Spammers maintained by anti-spam group Spamhaus , which has given him the 7th position in the list. The arrest was made possible after the FBI learned just last month that Levashov was traveling with his family to Spain from his home in Russia, a country without any extraditi

Security researchers have confirmed that the alleged CIA hacking tools recently exposed by WikiLeaks have been used against at least 40 governments and private organizations across 16 countries. Since March, as part of its " Vault 7 " series, Wikileaks has published over 8,761 documents and other confidential information that the whistleblower group claims came from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Now, researchers at cybersecurity company Symantec reportedly managed to link those CIA hacking tools to numerous real cyber attacks in recent years that have been carried out against the government and private sectors across the world. Those 40 cyber attacks were conducted by Longhorn — a North American hacking group that has been active since at least 2011 and has used backdoor trojans and zero-day attacks to target government, financial, energy, telecommunications, education, aerospace, and natural resources sectors. Although the group's targets were a

We have seen hackers flooding 911 emergency service with rogue requests to knock the service offline for an entire state, but some hacking incidents are worse than others. One such incident took place in Dallas on Friday night when hacker triggered a network of 156 emergency warning sirens for about two hours, waking up residents and sparking fears of a disaster. The emergency warning sirens — designed to warn citizens of the Texas about dangerous weather conditions, such as severe storms and tornados — were activated around 11:40 p.m. Friday and lasted until 1:20 a.m. Saturday. The city officials tried to inform residents not to call 911 as there was not any emergency situation in the city, but the 911 system was nevertheless flooded with over 4,400 calls from panicked residents. Rocky Vaz, director of Dallas Office of Emergency Management (OEM), told the Dallas Morning News that the alarms blasted about 15 times for 90-second durations. You can even watch video footage o

Update (Tuesday, April 11):  The arrest of a Russian man in Spain was apparently for his role in Kelihos botnet responsible for sending hundreds of millions of spam emails worldwide. A Russian computer hacker and alleged spam kingpin was arrested in Barcelona, Spain, on Friday reportedly over suspicion of being involved in hacking attacks linked to alleged interference in last year's United States presidential election process . 36-year-old Peter Yuryevich Levashov  from St. Petersburg was detained by police in Barcelona after US authorities issued an international arrest warrant for his arrest. While the Russian embassy in Madrid announced Levashov's arrest on Sunday, it did not confirm the reason for his arrest. This is the second arrest made by the Spanish authorities since the US 2016 election. In January, the police detained Stanislav Lisov , 32, on suspicion of creating and operating the NeverQuest Banking Trojan and possibly influencing the presidential elec

It's 2017, and opening a simple MS Word file could compromise your system. Security researchers are warning of a new in-the-wild attack that silently installs malware on fully-patched computers by exploiting a serious — and yet unpatched — zero-day vulnerability in all current versions of Microsoft Office. The Microsoft Office zero-day attack, uncovered by researchers from security firms McAfee and FireEye, starts simply with an email that attaches a malicious Word file containing a booby-trapped OLE2link object. When opened, the exploit code gets executed and makes a connection to a remote server controlled by the attacker, from where it downloads a malicious HTML application file (HTA) that's disguised as a document created in Microsoft's RTF (Rich Text Format). The HTA file then gets executed automatically with attackers gaining full code execution on the victim's machine, downloading additional payloads from "different well-known malware families"