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Hackers Can Silently Control Siri, Alexa & Other Voice Assistants Using Ultrasound

Hackers Can Silently Control Siri, Alexa & Other Voice Assistants Using Ultrasound

Sep 07, 2017
What if your smartphone starts making calls, sending text messages, and browsing malicious websites on the Internet itself without even asking you? This is no imaginations, as hackers can make this possible using your smartphone's personal assistant like Siri or Google Now. A team of security researchers from China's Zhejiang University have discovered a clever way of activating your voice recognition systems without speaking a word by exploiting a security vulnerability that is apparently common across all major voice assistants. DolphinAttack (Demo): How It Works Dubbed DolphinAttack , the attack technique works by feeding the AI assistants commands in ultrasonic frequencies, which are too high for humans to hear but are perfectly audible to the microphones on your smart devices. With this technique, cyber criminals can "silently" whisper commands into your smartphones to hijack Siri and Alexa, and could force them to open malicious websites and even
Hackers Are Distributing Backdoored 'Cobian RAT' Hacking tool For Free

Hackers Are Distributing Backdoored 'Cobian RAT' Hacking tool For Free

Sep 06, 2017
Nothing is free in this world. If you are searching for free ready-made hacking tools on the Internet, then beware—most freely available tools, claiming to be the swiss army knife for hackers, are nothing but a hoax. Last year, we reported about one such Facebook hacking tool that actually had the capability to hack a Facebook account, but yours and not the one you desire to hack. Now, a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) builder kit that was recently spotted on multiple underground hacking forums for free found containing a backdoored module that aims to provide the kit's authors access to all of the victim's data. Dubbed Cobian RAT , the malware has been in circulation since February of this year and has some similarities with the njRAT and H-Worm family of malware, which has been around since at least 2013. According to ThreatLabZ researchers from Zscaler, who discovered the backdoored nature of the malware kit, the "free malware builder" is likely capable of
Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Mar 21, 2024Operational Technology / SCADA Security
When you read reports about cyber-attacks affecting operational technology (OT), it's easy to get caught up in the hype and assume every single one is sophisticated. But are OT environments all over the world really besieged by a constant barrage of complex cyber-attacks? Answering that would require breaking down the different types of OT cyber-attacks and then looking back on all the historical attacks to see how those types compare.  The Types of OT Cyber-Attacks Over the past few decades, there has been a growing awareness of the need for improved cybersecurity practices in IT's lesser-known counterpart, OT. In fact, the lines of what constitutes a cyber-attack on OT have never been well defined, and if anything, they have further blurred over time. Therefore, we'd like to begin this post with a discussion around the ways in which cyber-attacks can either target or just simply impact OT, and why it might be important for us to make the distinction going forward. Figure 1 The Pu
Incapsula Updated Review — New Security Options, Improved Delivery and Reliability

Incapsula Updated Review — New Security Options, Improved Delivery and Reliability

Sep 06, 2017
It's been close to five years since we last looked at Incapsula , a security-focused CDN service known for its DDoS mitigation and web application security features. As one would expect, during these five years the company has expanded and improved, introducing lots of new features and even several new products. Most recently, Incapsula underwent an extensive network expansion that includes new PoPs in Asia including two new data centers in New Delhi and Mumbai. This seems like an excellent opportunity to revisit the service and see how it has evolved. Acquisition, Award and Growth Before we jump into Incapsula's service upgrades, we want to mention the changes in the company itself briefly. The most notable of those is Incapsula's 2014 acquisition by Imperva—an authority in web application security and a four-time Gartner Magic Quadrant leader for web application firewalls. The acquisition boosted Incapsula's security capabilities, resulting in its own cloud
cyber security

Automated remediation solutions are crucial for security

websiteWing SecurityShadow IT / SaaS Security
Especially when it comes to securing employees' SaaS usage, don't settle for a longer to-do list. Auto-remediation is key to achieving SaaS security.
Mobile Bootloaders From Top Manufacturers Found Vulnerable to Persistent Threats

Mobile Bootloaders From Top Manufacturers Found Vulnerable to Persistent Threats

Sep 06, 2017
Security researchers have discovered several severe zero-day vulnerabilities in the mobile bootloaders from at least four popular device manufacturers that could allow an attacker to gain persistent root access on the device. A team of nine security researchers from the University of California Santa Barbara created a special static binary tool called BootStomp that automatically detects security vulnerabilities in bootloaders. Since bootloaders are usually closed source and hard to reverse-engineer, performing analysis on them is difficult, especially because hardware dependencies hinder dynamic analysis. Therefore, the researchers created BootStomp, which "uses a novel combination of static analysis techniques and underconstrained symbolic execution to build a multi-tag taint analysis capable of identifying bootloader vulnerabilities." The tool helped the researchers discover six previously-unknown critical security bugs across bootloaders from HiSilicon (Huawe
Critical Flaw in Apache Struts2 Lets Hackers Take Over Web Servers

Critical Flaw in Apache Struts2 Lets Hackers Take Over Web Servers

Sep 05, 2017
Security researchers have discovered a critical remote code execution vulnerability in the popular Apache Struts web application framework, allowing a remote attacker to run malicious code on the affected servers. Apache Struts is a free, open-source, Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework for developing web applications in the Java programming language, which supports REST, AJAX, and JSON. The vulnerability (CVE-2017-9805) is a programming blunder that resides in the way Struts processes data from an untrusted source. Specifically, Struts REST plugin fails to handle XML payloads while deserializing them properly. All versions of Apache Struts since 2008 (Struts 2.1.2 - Struts 2.3.33, Struts 2.5 - Struts 2.5.12) are affected, leaving all web applications using the framework's REST plugin vulnerable to remote attackers. According to one of the security researchers at LGTM, who discovered this flaw, the Struts framework is being used by "an incredibly large number and va
European Companies Must Tell Employees If Their Work Emails Are Being Monitored

European Companies Must Tell Employees If Their Work Emails Are Being Monitored

Sep 05, 2017
Finally, European companies must inform employees in advance if their work email accounts are being monitored. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on Tuesday gave a landmark judgement concerning privacy in the workplace by overturning an earlier ruling that gave employers the right to spy on workplace communications. The new ruling came in judging the case of Romanian engineer Bogdan Barbulescu, who was fired ten years ago for sending messages to his fianceé and brother using his workplace Yahoo Messenger account. Earlier Romanian courts had rejected Barbulescu's complaint that his employer had violated his right to correspondence—including in January last year when it was ruled that it was not " unreasonable for an employer to want to verify that the employees are completing their professional tasks during working hours. " But now, the European court ruled by an 11-6 majority that Romanian judges failed to protect Barbulescu's right to private life and cor
Chinese Man Jailed For Selling VPNs that Bypass Great Firewall

Chinese Man Jailed For Selling VPNs that Bypass Great Firewall

Sep 05, 2017
Image source: goldenfrog In an effort to continue its crackdown on VPNs, Chinese authorities have arrested a 26-year-old man for selling VPN software on the Internet. China's Supreme Court has sentenced Deng Jiewei from Dongguan in Guangdong province, close to Hong Kong, to nine months in prison for selling virtual private network (VPN) software through his own small independent website. VPN encrypts users' Internet traffic and routes it through a distant connection so that web surfers can hide their identities and location data while accessing websites that are usually restricted or censored by any country. Chinese citizens usually make use of VPNs to bypass the Great Firewall of China , also known as the Golden Shield project, which employs a variety of tricks to censor the Internet in the country. The project already blocked access to some 171 out of the world's 1,000 top websites, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Dropbox, and The Pirate Bay in
China Bans Fundraising Through Initial Coin Offering (ICO)

China Bans Fundraising Through Initial Coin Offering (ICO)

Sep 04, 2017
China's central bank today announced an immediate ban on all ICO—Initial Coin Offering—fundraising, to prevent fraud and illegal fundraising. ICO is the hottest new thing in the blockchain world, which is an alternative to crowdfunding that lets a firm raise funding from multiple sources. The People's Bank of China (PBoC), the country's central bank and financial regulator, has issued an official notice on Monday, forbidding "all types of currency issuance financing activities" that have "seriously disrupted the economic and financial order." This PBoC's bold move has been backed by many other Chinese government administrators and regulators including the China Securities Regulatory Commission, China Insurance Regulatory Commission and the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, and China Banking Regulatory Commission. This move marks the end of an era of ICO fundraising in China. The regulator claims that ICOs are being misused for "
Taringa: Over 28 Million Users' Data Exposed in Massive Data Breach

Taringa: Over 28 Million Users' Data Exposed in Massive Data Breach

Sep 04, 2017
Exclusive — If you have an account on Taringa , also known as "The Latin American Reddit," your account details may have compromised in a massive data breach that leaked login details of almost all of its over 28 million users. Taringa is a popluar social network geared toward Latin American users, who create and share thousands of posts every day on general interest topics like life hacks, tutorials, recipes, reviews, and art. The Hacker News has been informed by LeakBase , a breach notification service, who has obtained a copy of the hacked database containing details on 28,722,877 accounts, which includes usernames, email addresses and hashed passwords for Taringa users. The hashed passwords use an ageing algorithm called MD5 – which has been considered outdated even before 2012 – that can easily be cracked, making Taringa users open to hackers. Wanna know how weak is MD5?, LeakBase team has already cracked 93.79 percent (nearly 27 Million) of hashed passwords s
Instagram Hacker Puts 6 Million Celebrities Personal Data Up For Sale On DoxaGram

Instagram Hacker Puts 6 Million Celebrities Personal Data Up For Sale On DoxaGram

Sep 01, 2017
It's now official, Instagram has suffered a massive data breach , and reportedly an unknown hacker has stolen personal details of more than 6 million Instagram accounts. Just yesterday, we reported that Instagram had patched a critical API vulnerability that allowed the attacker to access phone numbers and email addresses for high-profile verified accounts. However, Instagram hack now appears to be more serious than initially reported. Not just a few thousands of high-profile users—it's more than 6 million Instagram users, including politicians, sports stars, and media companies, who have had their Instagram profile information, including email addresses and phone numbers, available for sale on a website, called Doxagram . The suspected Instagram hacker has launched Doxagram, an Instagram lookup service, where anyone can search for stolen information only for $10 per account. A security researcher from Kaspersky Labs, who also found the same vulnerability and rep
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