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

A security researcher on New Year's eve made public the details of an unpatched security vulnerability in Apple's macOS operating system that can be exploited to take complete control of a system. On the first day of 2018, a researcher using the online moniker Siguza released the details of the unpatched zero-day macOS vulnerability, which he suggests is at least 15 years old, and proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code on GitHub . The bug is a serious local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability that could enable an unprivileged user (attacker) to gain root access on the targeted system and execute malicious code. Malware designed to exploit this flaw could fully install itself deep within the system. From looking at the source, Siguza believes this vulnerability has been around since at least 2002, but some clues suggest the flaw could actually be ten years older than that. "One tiny, ugly bug. Fifteen years. Full system compromise," he wrote. This local p

First notified in November of a data breach incident, popular clothing retailer Forever 21 has now confirmed that hackers stole credit card information from its stores throughout the country for several months during 2017. Although the company did not yet specify the total number of its customers affected by the breach, it did confirm that malware was installed on some point of sale (POS) systems in stores across the U.S. at varying times between April 3, 2017, and November 18, 2017. According to the company's investigation, which is still ongoing, the malware was designed to search for and likely steal sensitive customer credit card data, including credit card numbers, expiration dates, verification codes and, in some cases, cardholder names. Forever 21 has been using encryption technology since 2015 to protect its payment processing systems, but during the investigation, the company found that some POS terminals at certain stores had their encryption switched off, whic

Identities now transcend human boundaries. Within each line of code and every API call lies a non-human identity. These entities act as programmatic access keys, enabling authentication and facilitating interactions among systems and services, which are essential for every API call, database query, or storage account access. As we depend on multi-factor authentication and passwords to safeguard human identities, a pressing question arises: How do we guarantee the security and integrity of these non-human counterparts? How do we authenticate, authorize, and regulate access for entities devoid of life but crucial for the functioning of critical systems? Let's break it down. The challenge Imagine a cloud-native application as a bustling metropolis of tiny neighborhoods known as microservices, all neatly packed into containers. These microservices function akin to diligent worker bees, each diligently performing its designated task, be it processing data, verifying credentials, or

A critical vulnerability has been discovered in the browser app comes pre-installed on hundreds of millions of Samsung Android devices that could allow an attacker to steal data from browser tabs if the user visits an attacker-controlled site. Identified as CVE-2017-17692 , the vulnerability is Same Origin Policy (SOP) bypass issue that resides in the popular Samsung Internet Browser version 5.4.02.3 and earlier. The Same Origin Policy or SOP is a security feature applied in modern browsers that is designed to make it possible for web pages from the same website to interact while preventing unrelated sites from interfering with each other. In other words, the SOP makes sure that the JavaScript code from one origin should not be able to access the properties of a website on another origin. The SOP bypass vulnerability in the Samsung Internet Browser, discovered by Dhiraj Mishra , could allow a malicious website to steal data, such as passwords or cookies, from the sites ope

Remember how some cybercriminals shut down most of Washington D.C. police's security cameras for four days ahead of President Donald Trump's inauguration earlier this year? Just a few days after the incident, British authorities arrested two people in the United Kingdom, identified as a British man and a Swedish woman, both 50-year-old, on request of U.S. officials. But now US federal court affidavit  has revealed that two Romanian nationals were behind the attack that hacked into 70% of the computers that control Washington DC Metropolitan Police Department's surveillance camera network in January this year, CNN reports. The two suspects—Mihai Alexandru Isvanca, 25, and Eveline Cismaru, 28—were arrested in Bucharest on December 15 on charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and various forms of computer fraud. According to the criminal complaint unsealed in Washington, the pair hacked 123 of the Metropolitan Police Department's 187 outdoor surveillance c

Pavel Lerner , a prominent Russian blockchain expert and known managing director of one of the major crypto-exchanges EXMO, has allegedly been kidnapped by "unknown" criminals in the Ukranian capital of Kiev. According to Ukraine-based web publication Strana , Lerner, 40-year-old citizen of Russia, was kidnapped on December 26 when he was leaving his office in the center of town (located on the Stepan Bandera Avenue). Unknown kidnappers in dark clothes and balaclavas dragged Lerner in their black Mercedes-Benz Vito brand (state number AA 2063 MT) car and drove away in an unknown direction. The information comes from an anonymous source in Ukrainian law enforcement agencies, though multiple investigations are currently underway to find out why and by whom Lerner was kidnapped. Lerner is a recognized IT specialist in Ukraine who led a number of startups related to blockchain technology development and mining operations. Lerner is also the managing director of EXMO

Wishing you all a very 'belated' Merry Christmas. This holiday season Santa has a very special gift for all PlayStation gamers. Developer SpecterDev finally released a fully-functional much-awaited kernel exploit for PlayStation 4 (firmware 4.05) today—almost two months after Team Fail0verflow revealed the technical details of it. Now available on Github , dubbed "namedobj," the kernel exploit for the PlayStation 4 on 4.05FW allows users to run arbitrary code on the gaming console, enabling jailbreaking and kernel-level modifications to the system. Although PS4 kernel exploit does not include Jailbreak code, others can develop a full jailbreak exploit using it. Jailbreaking allows users to run custom code on the console and install mods, cheats, third-party applications, and games that are typically not possible because of the anti-piracy mechanisms implicated on the Sony PlayStation. "This release, however, does not contain any code related to def

Although the original creators of the infamous IoT malware Mirai have already been arrested and sent to jail, the variants of the notorious botnet are still in the game due to the availability of its source code on the Internet. Hackers have widely used the infamous IoT malware to quietly amass an army of unsecured internet-of-things devices , including home and office routers, that could be used at any time by hackers to launch Internet-paralyzing DDoS attacks . Another variant of Mirai has hit once again, propagating rapidly by exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in a Huawei home router model. Dubbed Satori (also known as Okiru), the Mirai variant has been targeting Huawei's router model HG532, as Check Point security researchers said they tracked hundreds of thousands of attempts to exploit a vulnerability in the router model in the wild. Identified initially by Check Point researchers late November, Satori was found infecting more than 200,000 IP addresses in just

While continuing its crackdown on services that help Chinese citizens to bypass Great Firewall, Chinese authorities have sentenced a man to five-and-a-half years in prison for selling a VPN service without obtaining a proper license from the government. Earlier this year, the Chinese government announced a ban on "unauthorized" VPN services , making it mandatory for companies to obtain an appropriate license from the government in order to operate in the country. Citizens in China usually make use of VPN and Proxy services to bypass the country's Great Firewall, also known as the Golden Shield project, which employs a variety of tricks to censor the Internet in the country. The Great Firewall project already blocked access to more than 150 out of the world's 1,000 top websites, which includes Google, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Tumblr, and The Pirate Bay in the country. VPN helps Chinese citizens encrypt their Internet traffic and route it through a distant c

If you receive a video file ( packed in zip archive ) sent by someone ( or your friends ) on your Facebook messenger — just don't click on it. Researchers from security firm Trend Micro are warning users of a new cryptocurrency mining bot which is spreading through Facebook Messenger and targeting Google Chrome desktop users to take advantage of the recent surge in cryptocurrency prices. Dubbed Digmine , the Monero-cryptocurrency mining bot disguises as a non-embedded video file, under the name "video_xxxx.zip" (as shown in the screenshot), but is actually contains an AutoIt executable script. Once clicked, the malware infects victim's computer and downloads its components and related configuration files from a remote command-and-control (C&C) server. Digimine primarily installs a cryptocurrency miner, i.e.  miner.exe—a modified version of an open-source Monero miner known as XMRig —which silently mines the Monero cryptocurrency in the background for h

It's the last month of this year, but possibly not the last data breach report. Nissan warns of a possible data breach of personal information on its customers who financed their vehicles through Nissan Canada Finance and INFINITI Financial Services Canada. Although the company says it does not know precisely how many customers were affected by the data breach, Nissan is contacting all of its roughly 1.13 million current and previous customers. In a statement released Thursday, Nissan Canada said the company became aware of an " unauthorized access to personal information " of some customers on December 11. " Nissan Canada Finance recently became aware it was the victim of a data breach that may have involved an unauthorized person(s) gaining access to the personal information of some customers that have financed their vehicles through Nissan Canada Finance and INFINITI Financial Services Canada, " the company said . It's believed that the unkno

Why is my iPhone slow? Do you also ask this question again and again? Well, the biggest conspiracy theory floating around from years that Apple deliberately slows down performance on your older iPhones whenever the company is about to launch the next version of its flagship to push its sale is TRUE ( at least partially ). Apple has finally admitted that it does indeed intentionally slow down older iPhone models, without notifying its customers, though the company claims the move is not intended to encourage customers to upgrade to newer iPhone models. Instead, Apple says it is a feature—implemented on the iPhone 6, 6S and SE last year during a software update, and on the iPhone 7 in December with the release of iOS 11.2—to protect against unexpectedly shutting down of older iPhones due to aging batteries and prolong their lifespan. " Last year we released a feature for iPhone 6, iPhone 6s and iPhone SE to smooth out the instantaneous peaks only when needed to prevent

Security researchers have discovered multiple attack campaigns conducted by an established Chinese criminal group that operates worldwide, targeting database servers for mining cryptocurrencies, exfiltrating sensitive data and building a DDoS botnet. The researchers from security firm GuardiCore Labs have analyzed thousands of attacks launched in recent months and identified at least three attack variants— Hex, Hanako, and Taylor —targeting different MS SQL and MySQL servers for both Windows and Linux. The goals of all the three variants are different—Hex installs cryptocurrency miners and remote access trojans (RATs) on infected machines, Taylor installs a keylogger and a backdoor, and Hanako uses infected devices to build a DDoS botnet. So far, researchers have recorded hundreds of Hex and Hanako attacks and tens of thousands of Taylor attacks each month and found that most compromised machines are based in China, and some in Thailand, the United States, Japan and others.

Romanian police have arrested five individuals suspected of infecting tens of thousands of computers across Europe and the United States in recent years by spreading two infamous ransomware families—Cerber and CTB Locker. Under Operation Bakovia —a major global police operation conducted by Europol, the FBI and law enforcement agencies from Romanian, Dutch, and the UK—raided six houses in East Romania and made five arrests, Europol said on Wednesday. Authorities have seized a significant amount of hard drives, external storage, laptops, cryptocurrency mining devices, numerous documents and hundreds of SIM cards during the raid. One thing to note is that all of the five suspects were not arrested for developing or maintaining the infamous ransomware strains, but for allegedly spreading CTB Locker and Cerber. Based on CryptoLocker, CTB Locker , aka Critroni, was the most widely spread ransomware families in 2016 and was the first ransomware to use the Tor anonymizing network

The North Korean hacking group has turned greedy. Security researchers have uncovered a new widespread malware campaign targeting cryptocurrency users, believed to be originated from Lazarus Group , a state-sponsored hacking group linked to the North Korean government. Active since 2009, Lazarus Group has been attributed to many high profile attacks, including Sony Pictures Hack , $81 million heists from the Bangladesh Bank , and the latest — WannaCry . The United States has officially blamed North Korea for global WannaCry ransomware attack that infected hundreds of thousands of computers across more than 150 countries earlier this year. In separate news, security experts have blamed Lazarus group for stealing bitcoins worth millions from the South Korean exchange Youbit , forcing it to shut down and file for bankruptcy after losing 17% of its assets. Researchers from security firm Proofpoint have published a new report, revealing a connection between Lazarus Group and a

Buying popular plugins with a large user-base and using it for effortless malicious campaigns have become a new trend for bad actors. One such incident happened recently when the renowned developer BestWebSoft sold a popular Captcha WordPress plugin to an undisclosed buyer, who then modified the plugin to download and install a hidden backdoor. In a blog post published on Tuesday, WordFence security firm revealed why WordPress recently kicked a popular Captcha plugin with more than 300,000 active installations out of its official plugin store. While reviewing the source code of the Captcha plugin, WordFence folks found a severe backdoor that could allow the plugin author or attackers to remotely gain administrative access to WordPress websites without requiring any authentication. The plugin was configured to automatically pull an updated "backdoored" version from a remote URL — https[://]simplywordpress[dot]net/captcha/captcha_pro_update.php — after installati

Due to the recent surge in cryptocurrency prices, not only hackers but also legitimate website administrators are increasingly using JavaScript-based cryptocurrency miners to monetize by levying the CPU power of your PC to mine Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. Just last week, researchers from AdGuard discovered that some popular video streaming and ripper sites including openload, Streamango, Rapidvideo, and OnlineVideoConverter hijacks CPU cycles from their over hundreds of millions of visitors for mining Monero cryptocurrency. Now, researchers from Moscow-based cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab have uncovered a new strain of Android malware lurking in fake anti-virus and porn applications, which is capable of performing a plethora of nefarious activities—from mining cryptocurrencies to launching Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Dubbed Loapi , the new Android Trojan can perform so many more malicious activities at a time that can exploit a handset to the e

Moscow-based cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab has taken the United States government to a U.S. federal court for its decision to ban the use of Kaspersky products in federal agencies and departments. In September 2017, the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a Binding Operational Directive (BOD) ordering civilian government agencies to remove Kaspersky Lab software from their computers and networks within 90 days. The order came amid mounting concern among United States officials that the Kaspersky antivirus software could be helping Russian government spy on their activities, which may threaten the U.S. national security. U.S. President Donald Trump also signed into law last week legislation that bans the use of Kaspersky products within the U.S. government, capping a months-long effort to purge Kaspersky from federal agencies amid concerns it's vulnerable to Kremlin influence. The Kaspersky's appeal is part of an ongoing campaign by the c

One of the most common network security solutions is the branch firewall. Branch firewall appliances can pack into a single device a wide range of security capabilities including a stateful or next-generation firewall, anti-virus, URL filtering, and IDS/IPS. But the reality is that most of these edge devices lack the processing power to apply the full scope of capabilities on all of the necessary traffic. If the firewall deployed in the branch cannot scale to address critical security needs, an alternative strategy must be used. Wholesale appliance upgrades are easy but expensive. Regional security hubs are complex and also costly. A new approach, called firewall bursting , leverages cloud scalability to offer an easier, more cost-effective alternative to branch office security. (You can find a great table comparing the different Firewall approaches here .) Costly Appliance Upgrades and Secure Hub Architectures The existing methods of evolving branch security force IT int

Security researchers have discovered and disclosed details of two unpatched critical vulnerabilities in a popular internet forum software—vBulletin—one of which could allow a remote attacker to execute malicious code on the latest version of vBulletin application server. vBulletin is a widely used proprietary Internet forum software package based on PHP and MySQL database server. It powers more than 100,000 websites on the Internet, including Fortune 500 and Alexa Top 1 million companies websites and forums. The vulnerabilities were discovered by a security researcher from Italy-based security firm TRUEL IT and an unknown independent security researcher, who disclosed the details of the vulnerabilities by Beyond Security's SecuriTeam Secure Disclosure program. The vulnerabilities affect version 5 of the vBulletin forum software and are currently unpatched. Beyond Security claims, it tried to contact vBulletin since November 21, 2017, but received no response from the compa

If you are running Windows 10 on your PC, then there are chances that your computer contains a pre-installed 3rd-party password manager app that lets attackers steal all your credentials remotely. Starting from Windows 10 Anniversary Update (Version 1607), Microsoft added a new feature called Content Delivery Manager that silently installs new "suggested apps" without asking for users' permission. According to a blog post published Friday on Chromium Blog, Google Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy said he found a pre-installed famous password manager, called "Keeper," on his freshly installed Windows 10 system which he downloaded directly from the Microsoft Developer Network. Ormandy was not the only one who noticed the Keeper Password Manager. Some Reddit users complained about the hidden password manager about six months ago, one of which reported Keeper being installed on a virtual machine created with Windows 10 Pro. Critical Flaw In Keeper Pas