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A growing number of enterprises are showing their interest in blockchains , but the underlying software fails to meet key enterprise requirements like performance, confidentiality, governance, and required processing power. However, Microsoft wants to help solve these issues and make it easier for the enterprises to build their networks using any distributed ledger. Microsoft has unveiled a framework called " Coco " — short for " Confidential Consortium " — a new open-source foundation for enterprise blockchain networks . Coco is an Ethereum-based protocol which has been designed to help commercial companies and large-scale enterprises process information on the Ethereum Blockchain with increased privacy. "Coco presents an alternative approach to Ledger construction, giving enterprises the scalability, distributed governance and enhanced confidentiality they need without sacrificing the inherent security and immutability they expect," Mark Russi

Hackers who recently hacked into HBO network and stole scripts, shows, and employee information documents, have now provided an email in which the United States cable channel offered them $250,000 . The company offered the payment as a "bounty payment" reward in which companies reward white-hat hackers for discovering cyber security vulnerabilities in their computer networks. Late last month, the HBO hackers claimed to have obtained around 1.5 terabytes of information from HBO and dropped upcoming episodes of "Ballers" and "Room 104," and a script of the fourth episode of "Game of Thrones." A week after that, the hackers released another half-gigabyte sample of its stolen HBO data, including company's emails, employment agreements, and financial balance sheets, along with the script of the upcoming episode of Game of Thrones, demanding a ransom—nearly $6 Million in Bitcoins . Now, according to a screenshot of an email obtained b

It comes as no surprise that today's cyber threats are orders of magnitude more complex than those of the past. And the ever-evolving tactics that attackers use demand the adoption of better, more holistic and consolidated ways to meet this non-stop challenge. Security teams constantly look for ways to reduce risk while improving security posture, but many approaches offer piecemeal solutions – zeroing in on one particular element of the evolving threat landscape challenge – missing the forest for the trees.  In the last few years, Exposure Management has become known as a comprehensive way of reigning in the chaos, giving organizations a true fighting chance to reduce risk and improve posture. In this article I'll cover what Exposure Management is, how it stacks up against some alternative approaches and why building an Exposure Management program should be on  your 2024 to-do list. What is Exposure Management?  Exposure Management is the systematic identification, evaluation,

An infamous Russian-linked cyber-espionage group has been found re-using the same leaked NSA hacking tool that was deployed in the WannaCry and NotPetya outbreaks—this time to target Wi-Fi networks to spy on hotel guests in several European countries. Security researchers at FireEye have uncovered an ongoing campaign that remotely steals credentials from high-value guests using Wi-Fi networks at European hotels and attributed it to the Fancy Bear hacking group. Fancy Bear —also known as APT28, Sofacy, Sednit, and Pawn Storm—has been operating since at least 2007 and also been accused of hacking the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Clinton Campaign in an attempt to influence the U.S. presidential election. The newly-discovered campaign is also exploiting the Windows SMB exploit (CVE-2017-0143), called EternalBlue , which was one of many exploits allegedly used by the NSA for surveillance and leaked by the Shadow Brokers in April. EternalBlue is a security vulnerabi

If you think you are downloading apps from Google Play Store and you are secure, then watch out! Someone has managed to flood third-party app stores and Google Play Store with more than a thousand malicious apps, which can monitor almost anything a user does on their mobile device from silently recording calls to make outbound calls without the user's interaction. Dubbed SonicSpy , the spyware has been spreading aggressively across Android app stores since at least February and is being distributed by pretending itself to be a messaging app—and it actually offers a messaging service. SonicSpy Can Perform a Whole Lots of Malicious Tasks At the same time, the SonicSpy spyware apps perform various malicious tasks, including silently recording calls and audio from the microphone, hijacking the device's camera and snap photos, making outbound calls without the user's permission, and sending text messages to numbers chosen by the attacker. Besides this, the SonicSpy sp

Ukrainian authorities have arrested a 51-year-old man accused of distributing the infamous Petya ransomware (Petya.A, also known as NotPetya) — the same computer virus that massively hit numerous businesses, organisations and banks in Ukraine as well as different parts of Europe around 45 days ago. However, the story is not as simple as it seems, which portrayed this man as a criminal. I recommend you to read complete article to understand the case better and then have an opinion accordingly. Sergey Neverov (Сергей Неверов), father of two sons and the resident of the southern city of Nikopol, is a video blogger and computer enthusiast who was arrested by the Ukrainian police on Monday, August 7 from his home. What Neverov Did? According to a press release published on Thursday by the Ukrainian cyber police department, Neverov uploaded a video, showing how to infect a computer with Petya.A ransomware—and also shared a download link for NotPetya malware to his social media

After disclosing CIA's strategies to hijack and manipulate webcams and microphones to corrupt or delete recordings, WikiLeaks has now published another Vault 7 leak , revealing CIA's ability to spy on video streams remotely in real-time. Dubbed ' CouchPotato ,' document leaked from the CIA details how the CIA agents use a remote tool to stealthy collect RTSP/H.264 video streams. Real Time Streaming Protocol, or RTSP, is a network control protocol designed for use in entertainment and communication systems for controlling streaming media servers. CouchPotato gives CIA hackers ability to "collect either the stream as a video file (AVI) or capture still images (JPG) of frames from the stream that are of significant change from a previously captured frame," a leaked CIA manual reads. The tool utilises FFmpeg for video and image encoding and decoding and Real Time Streaming Protocol connectivity. The CouchPotato tool works stealthily without leaving

In what appears to be the world's first quantum satellite transmission, China has successfully sent an "unbreakable" code over a long distance from an orbiting satellite to the Earth, achieving a milestone in the next generation encryption based on "quantum cryptography." In August last year, China launched the world's first quantum communication satellite into the Earth's orbit aboard a Long March-2D rocket to test the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics at space. Dubbed Quantum Science Satellite , nicknamed Micius or Mozi (Chinese: 墨子), the satellite was designed to establish a 'Hack-Proof' communications system in this age of global surveillance by transmitting unbreakable encryption keys from space to the ground. Now, it has been reported that using this satellite, the Chinese scientists at the Quantum Experiments at Space Scale (QUESS) project were able to send secret "quantum key distribution" (QKD) data by beaming photons

Do you know — 1 Gram of DNA Can Store 1,000,000,000 Terabyte of Data for 1000+ Years? Even in March this year, a team of researchers successfully stored digital data — an entire operating system, a movie, an Amazon gift card, a study and a computer virus — in the strands of DNA. But what if someone stores a malicious program into the DNA, just like an infected USB storage, to hijack the computer that reads it. A team of researchers from the University of Washington in Seattle have demonstrated the first successful DNA-based exploit of a computer system that executes the malicious code written into the synthesised DNA strands while reading it. To carry out the hack, the researchers created biological malware and encoded it in a short stretch of DNA, which allowed them to gain "full control" of a computer that tried to process the genetic data when read by a DNA sequencing machine. The DNA-based hack becomes possible due to lack of security in multiple DNA proces

An anti-malware detection service provider and premium security firm has been accused of leaking terabytes of confidential data from several Fortune 1000 companies, including customer credentials, financial records, network intelligence and other sensitive data. However, in response to the accusations, the security firm confirmed that they are not pulling sensitive files from its customers; instead, it's up to companies—who are accidentally (but explicitly) sharing their sensitive data to leverage an optional cloud-based anti-malware service. On Wednesday, Information security firm DirectDefense published a blog post, claiming that they found a major issue with endpoint detection and response (EDR) solution offered by US-based company Carbon Black, alleging that the company is leaking hundreds of thousands of sensitive files from its customers. Carbon Black is a leading incident response and threat hunting company that offers security products to nearly thirty of the larg

Car Hacking is a hot topic, though it's not new for researchers to hack cars. Previously they had demonstrated how to hijack a car remotely , how to disable car's crucial functions like airbags, and even how to steal cars . But the latest car hacking trick doesn't require any extra ordinary skills to accomplished. All it takes is a simple sticker onto a sign board to confuse any self-driving car and cause accident. Isn't this so dangerous? A team of researchers from the University of Washington demonstrated how anyone could print stickers off at home and put them on a few road signs to convince "most" autonomous cars into misidentifying road signs and cause accidents. According to the researchers, image recognition system used by most autonomous cars fails to read road sign boards if they are altered by placing stickers or posters over part or the whole road sign board. In a research paper , titled " Robust Physical-World Attacks on Machine

Over the past few years, massive data breaches have become more frequent and so common that pretty much every week we heard about some organisation being hacked or hacker dumping tens of millions of users records. But even after this wide range of data breach incidents, many organisations fail to grasp the importance of data protection, leaving its users' sensitive data vulnerable to hackers and cyber criminals. Not now! At least for organisations in Britain, as the UK government has committed to updating and strengthening its data protection laws through a new Data Protection Bill. The British government has warned businesses that if they fail to take measures to protect themselves adequately from cyber attacks, they could face fines of up to £17 Million (more than $22 Million), or 4% of their global turnover—whichever amount is higher. However, the financial penalties would be a last resort, and will not be applied to those organisations taking proper security measures

Here we go again… As part of its August Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has today released a large batch of 48 security updates for all supported versions Windows systems and other products. The latest security update addresses a range of vulnerabilities including 25 critical, 21 important and 2 moderate in severity. These vulnerabilities impact various versions of Microsoft's Windows operating systems, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft SharePoint, the Windows Subsystem for Linux, Adobe Flash Player, Windows Hyper-V and Microsoft SQL Server. CVE-2017-8620: Windows Search Remote Code Execution Vulnerability The most interesting and critical vulnerability of this month is Windows Search Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2017-8620), affects all versions of Windows 7 and Windows 10, which could be used as a wormable attack like the one used in WannaCry ransomware , as it utilises the SMBv1 connection. An attacker could remotely exploit the vulnerability thro