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Cloudflare, a well-known Internet performance and security company, announced the launch of 1.1.1.1 —world's fastest and privacy-focused secure DNS service that not only speeds up your internet connection but also makes it harder for ISPs to track your web history. Domain Name System (DNS) resolver, or recursive DNS server, is an essential part of the internet that matches up human-readable web addresses with their actual location on the internet, called IP addresses. For example, when you try to open a website, say thehackernews.com, your DNS looks up for the IP address linked to this domain name and load the site. Since the default DNS services provided by ISPs are often slow and insecure, most people rely on alternative DNS providers—such as OpenDNS (208.67.222.222), Comodo DNS (8.26.56.26) and Google (8.8.8.8), to speed up their Internet. But if you use Cloudflare new 1.1.1.1 DNS service , your computer/smartphone/tablet will start resolving domain names within a bla

A Russian man accused of hacking LinkedIn , Dropbox , and Formspring in 2012 and possibly compromising personal details of over 100 million users, has pleaded not guilty in a U.S. federal court after being extradited from the Czech Republic. Yevgeniy Aleksandrovich Nikulin, 30, of Moscow was arrested in Prague on October 5, 2016, by Interpol agents working in collaboration with the FBI, but he was recently extradited to the United States from the Czech Republic on Thursday for his first appearance in federal court. Nikulin's arrest started an extradition battle between the United States and Russia, where he faces significantly lesser criminal charges of stealing $3,450 via Webmoney in 2009. But the Czech Republic ruled in favor of the United States. In the U.S., Nikulin is facing: 3 counts of computer intrusion 2 counts of intentional transmission of information, code, or command causing damage to a protected computer 2 counts of aggravated identity theft 1 count

Meltdown CPU vulnerability was bad, and Microsoft somehow made the flaw even worse on its Windows 7, allowing any unprivileged, user-level application to read content from and even write data to the operating system's kernel memory. For those unaware, Spectre and Meltdown were security flaws disclosed by researchers earlier this year in processors from Intel, ARM, and AMD, leaving nearly every PC, server, and mobile phone on the planet vulnerable to data theft. Shortly after the researchers disclosed the Spectre and Meltdown exploits , software vendors, including Microsoft, started releasing patches for their systems running a vulnerable version of processors. However, an independent Swedish security researcher Ulf Frisk found that Microsoft's security fixes to Windows 7 PCs for the Meltdown flaw—which could allow attackers to read kernel memory at a speed of 120 KBps—is now allowing attackers to read the same kernel memory at a speed of Gbps, making the issue even wo

Permissions in SaaS platforms like Salesforce, Workday, and Microsoft 365 are remarkably precise. They spell out exactly which users have access to which data sets. The terminology differs between apps, but each user's base permission is determined by their role, while additional permissions may be granted based on tasks or projects they are involved with. Layered on top of that are custom permissions required by an individual user.  For example, look at a sales rep who is involved in a tiger team investigating churn while also training two new employees. The sales rep's role would grant her one set of permissions to access prospect data, while the tiger team project would grant access to existing customer data. Meanwhile, special permissions are set up, providing the sales rep with visibility into the accounts of the two new employees. While these permissions are precise, however, they are also very complex. Application admins don't have a single screen within these applications th

A severe programming bug has been found in APFS file system for macOS High Sierra operating system that exposes passwords of encrypted external drives in plain text. Introduced two years ago, APFS ( Apple File System ) is an optimized file system for flash and SSD-based storage solutions running MacOS, iOS, tvOS or WatchOS, and promises strong encryption and better performance. Discovered by forensic analyst Sarah Edwards, the bug leaves encryption password for a newly created APFS volume (e.g., encrypting USB drive using Disk Utility) in the unified logs in plaintext, as well as while encrypting previously created but unencrypted volumes. "Why is this a big deal? Well, passwords stored in plaintext can be discovered by anyone with unauthorized access to your machine, and malware can collect log files as well and send them off to someone with malicious intent," Edwards said. The password for an encrypted APFS volume can easily be retrieved by running following sim

A new vulnerability has been disclosed in iOS Camera App that could be exploited to redirect users to a malicious website without their knowledge. The vulnerability affects Apple's latest iOS 11 mobile operating system for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices and resides in the built-in QR code reader. With iOS 11, Apple introduced a new feature that gives users ability to automatically read QR codes using their iPhone's native camera app without requiring any third-party QR code reader app. You need to open the Camera app on your iPhone or iPad and point the device at a QR code. If the code contains any URL, it will give you a notification with the link address, asking you to tap to visit it in Safari browser. However, be careful — you may not be visiting the URL displayed to you, security researcher Roman Mueller discovered . According to Mueller, the URL parser of built-in QR code reader for iOS camera app fails to detect the hostname in the URL, which allows at

Spanish Police has arrested the alleged leader of an organised Russian cybercrime gang behind the Carbanak and Cobalt malware attacks, which stole over a billion euros from banks worldwide since 2013. In a coordinated operation with law enforcement agencies across the globe, including the FBI and Europol, Police detained the suspected leader of Carbanak hacking group in Alicante, Spain. Carbanak hacking group started its activities almost five years ago by launching a series of malware attack campaigns such as Anunak and Carbanak to compromise banks and ATM networks, from which they swiped millions of credit card details from US-based retailers. According to the Europol, the group later developed a sophisticated heist-ready banking malware known as Cobalt, based on the Cobalt Strike penetration testing software, which was in use until 2016. "The magnitude of the losses is significant: the Cobalt malware alone allowed criminals to steal up to EUR 10 million per heist,

Facebook knows a lot about you, your likes and dislikes—it's no surprise. But do you know, if you have installed Facebook Messenger app on your Android device, there are chances that the company had been collecting your contacts, SMS, and call history data at least until late last year. A tweet from Dylan McKay, a New Zealand-based programmer, which received more than 38,000 retweets (at the time of writing), showed how he found his year-old data—including complete logs of incoming and outgoing calls and SMS messages—in an archive he downloaded (as a ZIP file) from Facebook. Facebook was collecting this data on its users from last few years, which was even reported earlier in media, but the story did not get much attention at that time. Since Facebook had been embroiled into controversies over its data sharing practices after the Cambridge Analytica scandal last week, tweets from McKay went viral and has now fueled the never-ending privacy debate. A Facebook spokespe

The United States Department of Justice has announced criminal charges and sanctions against 9 Iranians involved in hacking universities, tech companies, and government organisations worldwide to steal scientific research resources and academic papers. According to the FBI officials, the individuals are connected to the Mabna Institute , an Iran-based company created in 2013 whose members were allegedly hired by the Iranian government for gathering intelligence. Though the content of the papers is not yet known, investigators believe it might have helped Iranian scientists to develop nuclear weapons. In past four years, the state-sponsored hacking group has allegedly infiltrated more than 320 universities in 22 countries—144 of which were in the United States—and stolen over 30 terabytes of academic data and intellectual property. The group used spear-phishing attacks to target more than 100,000 e-mail accounts and computer systems of the professors around the world, and suc

Top Story— Facebook has just lost over $60 billion in market value over the past two days—that's more than Tesla's entire market capitalisation and almost three times that of Snapchat. Facebook shares plunge over revelations that personal data of 50 million users was obtained and misused by British data analytics firm ' Cambridge Analytica ,' who reportedly helped Donald Trump win the US presidency in 2016. The privacy scandal that rocked the social media giant was revealed earlier this week when Chris Wylie , the 28-year-old data scientist who worked with a Cambridge University academic, turned into a whistleblower and leaked to the newspapers how poorly Facebook handles people's private information. Wylie claims Cambridge Analytica created " Steve Bannon's psychological warfare mindf**k tool " that profiles citizens to predict their voting patterns based on the personal information gathered from a variety of sources and then helps political

AMD has finally acknowledged 13 critical vulnerabilities, and exploitable backdoors in its Ryzen and EPYC processors disclosed earlier this month by Israel-based CTS Labs and promised to roll out firmware patches for millions of affected devices 'in the coming weeks.' According to CTS-Labs researchers, critical vulnerabilities ( RyzenFall, MasterKey, Fallout, and Chimera ) that affect AMD's Platform Security Processor (PSP) could allow attackers to access sensitive data, install persistent malware inside the chip, and gain full access to the compromised systems. Although exploiting AMD vulnerabilities require admin access, it could help attackers defeat important security features like Windows Credential Guard, TPMs, and virtualization that are responsible for preventing access to the sensitive data from even an admin or root account. In a press release published by AMD on Tuesday, the company downplays the threat by saying that, "any attacker gaining unauthorised ad

Chicago-based online travel booking company Orbitz, a subsidiary of Expedia.com , reveals that one of its old websites has been hacked, exposing nearly 880,000 payment card numbers of the people who made purchases online. Orbitz.com is a travel fare aggregator website and travel metasearch engine, allowing customers to quickly and easily search and book flights, hotels, rental cars, vacation packages, travel deals, cruises and more. The data breach incident, which was detected earlier this month, likely took place somewhere between October 2016 and December 2017, potentially exposing customers' information from the travel site to hackers. According to the company, hackers may have accessed payment card information stored on a consumer and business partner platform, along with customers' personal information, including name, address, date of birth, phone number, email address and gender. However, the company said its services such as Expedia flights, Expedia hotels, E

You have always been warned not to share remote access to your computer with untrusted people for any reason—it's a basic cybersecurity advice, and common sense, right? But what if, I say you should not even trust anyone who invites or offer you full remote access to their computers. A critical vulnerability has been discovered in Microsoft's Windows Remote Assistanc e (Quick Assist) feature that affects all versions of Windows to date, including Windows 10, 8.1, RT 8.1, and 7, and allows remote attackers to steal sensitive files on the targeted machine. Windows Remote Assistance is a built-in tool that allows someone you trust to take over your PC (or you to take remote control of others) so they can help you fix a problem from anywhere around the world. The feature relies on the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to establish a secure connection with the person in need. However, Nabeel Ahmed of Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative discovered and reported an information di

If you are unaware, the security standard HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) can be abused as a 'supercookie' to surreptitiously track users of almost every modern web browser online without their knowledge even when they use "private browsing." Apple has now added mitigations to its open-source browser infrastructure WebKit that underpins its Safari web browser to prevent HSTS abuse after discovering that theoretical attacks demonstrated in 2015 were recently deployed in the wild against Safari users. HSTS—HTTP Strict Transport Security—is a great feature that allows websites to automatically redirects user's web traffic to secure page connections over HTTPS if the user accidentally opens an insecure URL and then remembers to route that user to the secure connection always. Since HSTS does not allow websites to store any information/value on users web browser except remembering the redirect information about turning it on/off for future use, using

Adrian Lamo, the hacker who tipped off the FBI about Wikileaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning, dies at the age of 37, according to a Facebook post by his father Mario Lamo-Jiménez. "With great sadness and a broken heart I have to let know all of Adrian's friends and acquaintances that he is dead. A bright mind and compassionate soul is gone, he was my beloved son..."  he posted. At this moment the cause of death is unknown, though reportedly Adrian was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome in July 2010 and briefly hospitalized. Adrian was a former hacker, threat analyst, and writer, who had previously been behind several high-profile security breaches but gained headlines after breaking into The New York Times computer systems in 2002. Adrian was given the appellation " Homeless Hacker " by the media because once when he was unemployed he wandered the country by Greyhound bus and hacked corporations from inside abandoned buildings. He spent almost six mont

Whether you're a developer, designer or a writer, a good text editor always help you save time and make you work more efficiently. For example, I use Sublime a lot while programming because it includes some useful tools like 'syntax highlighting' and 'autocomplete' that every advanced text editor should have. Moreover, these advanced text editors also offer users extensibility, allowing users to install and run third-party plugins to extend the editor's functionality and most importantly its scope. However, it's a known fact that third-party plugins always pose a significant risk of hacking, whether it's about WordPress plugins or Windows' extensions for Chrome , Firefox or Photoshop. SafeBreach researcher Dor Azouri analyzed several popular extensible text editors for Unix and Linux systems, including Sublime, Vim, Emacs, Gedit, and pico/nano, and found that except for pico/nano, all of them are vulnerable to a critical privilege escala

Security researchers have discovered a massive continuously growing malware campaign that has already infected nearly 5 million mobile devices worldwide. Dubbed RottenSys , the malware that disguised as a 'System Wi-Fi service' app came pre-installed on millions of brand new smartphones manufactured by Honor, Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, Vivo, Samsung and GIONEE—added somewhere along the supply chain. All these affected devices were shipped through Tian Pai, a Hangzhou-based mobile phone distributor, but researchers are not sure if the company has direct involvement in this campaign. According to Check Point Mobile Security Team, who uncovered this campaign, RottenSys is an advanced piece of malware that doesn't provide any secure Wi-Fi related service but takes almost all sensitive Android permissions to enable its malicious activities. "According to our findings, the RottenSys malware began propagating in September 2016. By March 12, 2018, 4,964,460 devices were

Researchers found critical vulnerabilities in three popular VPN services that could leak users' real IP addresses and other sensitive data. VPN, or Virtual Private Network , is a great way to protect your daily online activities that work by encrypting your data and boosting security, as well as useful to obscure your actual IP address. While some choose VPN services for online anonymity and data security, one major reason many people use VPN is to hide their real IP addresses to bypass online censorship and access websites that are blocked by their ISPs. But what if when the VPN you thought is protecting your privacy is actually leaking your sensitive data and real location? A team of three ethical hackers hired by privacy advocate firm VPN Mentor revealed that three popular VPN service providers—HotSpot Shield, PureVPN, and Zenmate—with millions of customers worldwide were found vulnerable to flaws that could compromise user's privacy. The team includes applicat

A massive malware outbreak that last week infected nearly half a million computers with cryptocurrency mining malware in just a few hours was caused by a backdoored version of popular BitTorrent client called MediaGet . Dubbed Dofoil (also known as Smoke Loader), the malware was found dropping a cryptocurrency miner program as payload on infected Windows computers that mine Electroneum digital coins for attackers using victims' CPU cycles. Dofoil campaign that hit PCs in Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine on 6th March was discovered by Microsoft Windows Defender research department and blocked the attack before it could have done any severe damages. At the time when Windows Defender researchers detected this attack, they did not mention how the malware was delivered to such a massive audience in just 12 hours. However, after investigation Microsoft today revealed that the attackers targeted the update mechanism of MediaGet BitTorrent software to push its trojanized version (m

A critical vulnerability has been discovered in Credential Security Support Provider protocol (CredSSP) that affects all versions of Windows to date and could allow remote attackers to exploit RDP and WinRM to steal data and run malicious code. CredSSP protocol has been designed to be used by RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) and Windows Remote Management (WinRM) that takes care of securely forwarding credentials encrypted from the Windows client to the target servers for remote authentication. Discovered by researchers at Cybersecurity firm Preempt Security, the issue (CVE-2018-0886) is a logical cryptographic flaw in CredSSP that can be exploited by a man-in-the-middle attacker with Wi-Fi or physical access to the network to steal session authentication data and perform a Remote Procedure Call attack. When a client and server authenticate over RDP and WinRM connection protocols, a man-in-the-middle attacker can execute remote commands to compromise enterprise networks. "A