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If your smartphones, tablets, smart refrigerators, smart TVs and other smart devices are smart enough to make your life easier, their smart behavior could also be leveraged by hackers to steal data, invade your privacy or spy on you, if not secured properly. One such experiment has recently been performed by a team of student hackers, demonstrating a new attack method to turn smart devices into spying tools that could track your every move, including inferring sexual activity. Dubbed CovertBand , the attack has been developed by four researchers at the University of Washington's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, and is so powerful that it can record what a person is doing through a wall. The CovertBand tracking system makes use of the built-in microphones and speakers—found in smartphones, laptops, tablets, smart assistant and other smart devices—as a receiver to pick up reflected sound waves, tracking the movements of anyone near the audio sourc

The infamous mobile banking trojan that recently added ransomware features to steal sensitive data and lock user files at the same time has now been modified to steal credentials from Uber and other booking apps as well. Security researchers at Kaspersky Lab have discovered a new variant of the Android banking Trojan called Faketoken that now has capabilities to detect and record an infected device's calls and display overlays on top of taxi booking apps to steal banking information. Dubbed Faketoken.q , the new variant of mobile banking trojan is being distributed using bulk SMS messages as their attack vector, prompting users to download an image file that actually downloads the malware. Malware Spy On Telephonic Conversations Once downloaded, the malware installs the necessary modules and the main payload, which hides its shortcut icon and begins monitoring everything—from every calls to launched apps—that happens on the infected Android device. When calls are m

In today's digital world, where connectivity is rules all, endpoints serve as the gateway to a business's digital kingdom. And because of this, endpoints are one of hackers' favorite targets.  According to the IDC,  70% of successful breaches start at the endpoint . Unprotected endpoints provide vulnerable entry points to launch devastating cyberattacks. With IT teams needing to protect more endpoints—and more kinds of endpoints—than ever before, that perimeter has become more challenging to defend. You need to improve your endpoint security, but where do you start? That's where this guide comes in.  We've curated the top 10 must-know endpoint security tips that every IT and security professional should have in their arsenal. From identifying entry points to implementing EDR solutions, we'll dive into the insights you need to defend your endpoints with confidence.  1. Know Thy Endpoints: Identifying and Understanding Your Entry Points Understanding your network's

Are you using Foxit PDF Reader? If yes, then you need to watch your back. Security researchers have discovered two critical zero-day security vulnerabilities in Foxit Reader software that could allow attackers to execute arbitrary code on a targeted computer, if not configured to open files in the Safe Reading Mode. The first vulnerability (CVE-2017-10951) is a command injection bug discovered by researcher Ariele Caltabiano working with Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), while the second bug (CVE-2017-10952) is a file write issue found by Offensive Security researcher Steven Seeley. An attacker can exploit these bugs by sending a specially crafted PDF file to a Foxit user and enticing them to open it. Foxit refused to patch both the vulnerabilities because they would not work with the "safe reading mode" feature that fortunately comes enabled by default in Foxit Reader. "Foxit Reader & PhantomPDF has a Safe Reading Mode which is enabled by d

Today, many automobiles companies are offering vehicles that run on the mostly drive-by-wire system, which means a majority of car's functions—from instrument cluster to steering, brakes, and accelerator—are electronically controlled. No doubt these auto-control systems make your driving experience much better, but at the same time, they also increase the risk of getting hacked. Car Hacking is a hot topic, though it is not new for security researchers who hack cars. A few of them have already demonstrated how to hijack a car remotely , how to disable car's crucial functions like airbags, and even how to remotely steal cars . Now, security researchers have discovered a new hacking trick that can allow attackers to disable airbags and other safety systems of the connected cars, affecting a large number of vendors and vehicle models. A team of researchers from Trend Micro's Forward-looking Threat Research (FTR) team, in collaboration with Politecnico di Milano and

The Game of Thrones hacking saga continues, but this time it's the HBO's and GOT's official Twitter and Facebook accounts got compromised, rather than upcoming episodes. As if the leak of episodes by hackers and the accidental airing of an upcoming episode of Game of Thrones by HBO itself were not enough, a notorious group of hackers took over the official Twitter and Facebook accounts for HBO as well as Game of Thrones Wednesday night. The hacker group from Saudi Arabia, dubbed OurMine , claimed responsibility for the hack, posting a message on both HBO's official Twitter and Facebook accounts, which read: "Hi, OurMine are here, we are just testing your security, HBO team, please contact us to upgrade the security," followed by a contact link for the group. This message was followed by another one, wherein hackers asked people to make the hashtag #HBOhacked trending on Twitter, which it did. Ourmine is the same group of hackers from Saudi Arabia

HBO doesn't need hackers to leak its widely watched " Game of Thrones " episodes, as it is sufficient enough to leak them by its own. In what seems to be a terrible blunder, HBO Spain appeared to have accidentally broadcast the next episode— Episode 6 —of Game of Thrones season 7 five days before its official premiere. And as expected, the GoT episode 6 quickly began circulating online. HBO has recently been facing trouble from a hacker or group of hackers who claimed to have obtained nearly 1.5 terabytes of information from the entertainment company. Late last month, the unknown hackers dropped upcoming episodes of "Ballers" as well as "Room 104," along with a script of the fourth episode of "Game of Thrones" on the internet. The leak was followed by another dump of a half-gigabyte sample of stolen HBO data, including HBO's emails, employment agreements, and balance sheets, along with the script of the upcoming Game of Thro

A former the United States Secret Service agent who stole hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Bitcoins during an investigation into then-largest underground marketplace Silk Road has now pleaded guilty to money laundering. Shaun W. Bridges is one of two former US undercover agents who pleaded guilty in 2015 to one count of money laundering and one count of obstruction and was sentenced in December same year to almost six years in prison for stealing over $800,000 in Bitcoin while investigating Silk Road. 35-years-old Bridges, who had been a Special Agent with the U.S. Secret Service for almost 6 years, along with his partner stole money from Silk Road accounts and framed someone else for the laundering, which even led the Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht to plan a murder. Ulbricht was convicted in February 2015 of running the Silk Road underground black market and is now serving life in prison sentence . According to the Department of Justice, Bridges is believed to

Google's Chrome web browser Extensions are under attack with a series of developers being hacked within last one month. Almost two weeks ago, we reported how unknown attackers managed to compromise the Chrome Web Store account of a developer team and hijacked Copyfish extension , and then modified it to distribute spam correspondence to users. Just two days after that incident, some unknown attackers then hijacked another popular extension ' Web Developer ' and then updated it to directly inject advertisements into the web browser of over its 1 million users. After Chris Pederick, the creator of 'Web Developer' Chrome extension that offers various web development tools to its users, reported to Proofpoint that his extension had been compromised, the security vendor analysed the issue and found further add-ons in the Chrome Store that had also been altered. According to the latest report published by the researchers at Proofpoint on Monday, the expanded

Cyber criminals are becoming more adept, innovative, and stealthy with each passing day. They are now adopting more clandestine techniques that come with limitless attack vectors and are harder to detect. Recently, cyber crooks managed to infiltrate the update mechanism for a popular server management software package and altered it to include an advanced backdoor, which lasts for at least 17 days until researchers discovered it. Dubbed ShadowPad , the secret backdoor gave attackers complete control over networks hidden behind legit cryptographically signed software sold by NetSarang —used by hundreds of banks, media firms, energy companies, and pharmaceutical firms, telecommunication providers, transportation and logistics and other industries—for 17 days starting last month. Important Note — If you are using any of the affected product (listed below), we highly recommend you stop using it until you update them. Hacker Injected Backdoor Through Software Update Mechanism

More features, more problems! Today, we are living in a digital age that is creating a digital headache for people by connecting every other unnecessary home appliance to the Internet. Last week, nearly hundreds of Internet-connected locks became inoperable after a faulty software update hit some models. Users of remotely accessible smart locks made by Colorado-based company LockState have taken to social media platforms including Twitter to complain that their $469 Lockstate 6000i locks started to fail from last Monday, leaving the keypad entirely useless. LockState's RemoteLock 6i (6000i) is an Internet-connected smart lock that connects to your home Wi-Fi network for remote control and monitoring as well as firmware updates. LockState is even a partner with Airbnb, allowing Airbnb hosts' to give their guests entry code in order to get into hotel properties without having to share physical keys. However, last week many Airbnb customers were unable to use the bu

Ransomware has been around for a few years but has become an albatross around everyone's neck—from big businesses and financial institutions to hospitals and individuals worldwide—with cyber criminals making millions of dollars. In just past few months, we saw a scary strain of ransomware attacks including WannaCry , Petya and LeakerLocker , which made chaos worldwide by shutting down hospitals, vehicle manufacturing, telecommunications, banks and many businesses. Before WannaCry and Petya , the infamous Mamba full-disk-encrypting ransomware and the Locky ransomware had made chaos across the world last year, and the bad news is—they are back with their new and more damaging variants than ever before. Diablo6: New Variant of Locky Ransomware First surfaced in early 2016, Locky has been one of the largest distributed ransomware infections, infecting organisations across the globe. By tricking victims into clicking on a malicious attachment, Locky ransomware encrypt

A few months back we reported how opening a simple MS Word file could compromise your computer using a critical vulnerability in Microsoft Office . The Microsoft Office remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2017-0199) resided in the Windows Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) interface for which a patch was issued in April this year, but threat actors are still abusing the flaw through the different mediums. Security researchers have spotted a new malware campaign that is leveraging the same exploit, but for the first time, hidden behind a specially crafted PowerPoint (PPSX) Presentation file. According to the researchers at Trend Micro, who spotted the malware campaign, the targeted attack starts with a convincing spear-phishing email attachment, purportedly from a cable manufacturing provider and mainly targets companies involved in the electronics manufacturing industry. Researchers believe this attack involves the use of a sender address disguised as a legitimate ema

Phishing — is an older style of cyber-attack but remains one of the most common and efficient attack vectors for attackers, as a majority of banking malware and various ransomware attacks begin with a user clicking on a malicious link or opening a dangerous attachment in an email. Phishing has evolved than ever before in the past few years – which is why it remains one of those threats that we have been combating for many years. We have seen phishing campaigns that are so convincing and effective that even tech-savvy people can be tricked into giving away their credentials to hackers. And some that are " almost impossible to detect " and used to trick even the most careful users on the Internet. To help combat this issue, Google has introduced a security defence for it's over a billion users that will help users weed out phishing emails from their Gmail inbox. Google has rolled out new anti-phishing security checks for its Gmail app for iPhone users that will

The Chinese market is no doubt a pot of gold for big technology giants with over 700 million internet users, but the Chinese government heavily controls the Internet within its borders through its Golden Shield project – the Great Firewall of China . The Great Firewall has blocked some 171 out of the world's leading websites, including Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Dropbox, and The Pirate Bay in the country. But tech giants like Facebook and Google always try alternative ways to infiltrate the market. Now it seems like Facebook is trying to secretly enter the largest populous market by releasing an all new social networking app in China that does not carry its brand. Dubbed Colorful Balloons , the photo-sharing app appears to mimic the look and feel of Facebook's Moments, an app that allows its users to share photos with their friends and family members. According to The New York Times, Facebook approved the release of Colorful Balloons back in M

One of the most devastating aspects of the recent WannaCry ransomware attack was its self-propagating capability exploiting a vulnerability in the file access protocol, SMB v1. Most enterprises defences are externally-facing, focused on stopping incoming email and web attacks. But, once attackers gain a foothold inside the network through malware, there are very few security controls that would prevent the spread of the attack between enterprise locations in the Wide Area Network (WAN). This is partly due to the way enterprises deploy security tools, such as IPS appliances, and the effort needed to maintain those tools across multiple locations. It's for those reasons Cato Networks recently introduced a context-aware Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) as part of its secure SD-WAN service . There are several highlights in this announcement that challenge the basic concept of how IT security maintains an IPS device and sustains the effectiveness of its protection. Cato Network

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

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