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Researchers have found that even after having an advanced encryption scheme in place, more than 100 million Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices from thousands of vendors are vulnerable to a downgrade attack that could allow attackers to gain unauthorized access to your devices. The issue resides in the implementation of Z-Wave protocol —a wireless, radio frequency (RF) based communications technology that is primarily being used by home automation devices to communicate with each other. Z-Wave protocol has been designed to offer an easy process to set up pairing and remotely control appliances—such as lighting control, security systems, thermostats, windows, locks, swimming pools and garage door openers—over a distance of up to 100 meters (330 feet). The latest security standard for Z-Wave, called S2 security framework, uses an advanced key exchange mechanism, i.e., Elliptic-Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) anonymous key agreement protocol, to share unique network keys between the con

Pornhub wants you to keep your porn viewing activities private, and it is ready to help you out with its all-new safety and privacy free VPN service. Yes, you heard that right. Adult entertainment giant Pornhub that allows porn videos download has launched its very own free VPN service today with "unlimited bandwidth" to help you keep prying eyes away from your browsing activity. Dubbed VPNhub, the VPN service by Porn Hub and developed by AppAtomic, is available for both mobile as well as desktop platform, including Android, iOS, MacOS, and Windows. VPN, or Virtual Private Network, hides IP address, allows users to transmit data anonymously, avoids ISP-level website blocking or tracking and keeps your internet connections ans browsing activity private by encrypting your data, even when you are on public Wi-Fi connections. Isn't it the great reason to use a VPN? Of course, Yes. Pornhub App Launches Fast VPN Service Like Hotspot shield and others, Pornhub&#

Over the past two years, a shocking  51% of organizations surveyed in a leading industry report have been compromised by a cyberattack.  Yes, over half.  And this, in a world where enterprises deploy  an average of 53 different security solutions  to safeguard their digital domain.  Alarming? Absolutely. A recent survey of CISOs and CIOs, commissioned by Pentera and conducted by Global Surveyz Research, offers a quantifiable glimpse into this evolving battlefield, revealing a stark contrast between the growing risks and the tightening budget constraints under which cybersecurity professionals operate. With this report, Pentera has once again taken a magnifying glass to the state of pentesting to release its annual report about today's pentesting practices. Engaging with 450 security executives from North America, LATAM, APAC, and EMEA—all in VP or C-level positions at organizations with over 1,000 employees—the report paints a current picture of modern security validation prac

Apple is making it easier for its users to download their data the company has collected about them so far. On Wednesday, Apple just launched a new Data and Privacy website that allows you to download everything that the company knows about you, from Apple ID info, device info, App Store activity, AppleCare history, your online shopping habits to all of your data stored in its iCloud. A similar feature was recently offered by Facebook, enabling its users to download all of their data , not only what they have posted, but also information like facial recognition and location data, following the Cambridge Analytica scandal . Apple has currently made this feature only available for people having accounts in European Union (along with Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland), to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) act, which goes into effect on May 25. However, Apple is planning to roll out this feature worldwide in the coming months. "We inten

Shortly after Cisco's released its early report on a large-scale hacking campaign that infected over half a million routers and network storage devices worldwide, the United States government announced the takedown of a key internet domain used for the attack. Yesterday we reported about a piece of highly sophisticated IoT botnet malware that infected over 500,000 devices  in 54 countries and likely been designed by Russia-baked state-sponsored group in a possible effort to cause havoc in Ukraine, according to an early report published by Cisco's Talos cyber intelligence unit on Wednesday. Dubbed VPNFilter by the Talos researchers, the malware is a multi-stage, modular platform that targets small and home offices (SOHO) routers and storage devices from Linksys, MikroTik, NETGEAR, and TP-Link, as well as network-access storage (NAS) devices. Meanwhile, the court documents unsealed in Pittsburgh on the same day indicate that the FBI has seized a key web domain communic

More than half a million routers and storage devices in dozens of countries have been infected with a piece of highly sophisticated IoT botnet malware, likely designed by Russia-baked state-sponsored group. Cisco's Talos cyber intelligence unit have discovered an advanced piece of IoT botnet malware, dubbed VPNFilter , that has been designed with versatile capabilities to gather intelligence, interfere with internet communications, as well as conduct destructive cyber attack operations. The malware has already infected over 500,000 devices in at least 54 countries, most of which are small and home offices routers and internet-connected storage devices from Linksys, MikroTik, NETGEAR, and TP-Link. Some network-attached storage (NAS) devices known to have been targeted as well. VPNFilter is a multi-stage, modular malware that can steal website credentials and monitor industrial controls or SCADA systems, such as those used in electric grids, other infrastructure and factori

Even after being aware of various active cyber attacks against the GPON Wi-Fi routers, if you haven't yet taken them off the Internet, then be careful—because a new botnet has joined the GPON party, which is exploiting an undisclosed zero-day vulnerability in the wild. Security researchers from Qihoo 360 Netlab have warned of at least one botnet operator exploiting a new zero-day vulnerability in the Gigabit-capable Passive Optical Network (GPON) routers, manufactured by South Korea-based DASAN Zhone Solutions. The botnet, dubbed TheMoon, which was first seen in 2014 and has added at least 6 IoT device exploits to its successor versions since 2017, now exploits a newly undisclosed zero-day flaw for Dasan GPON routers. Netlab researchers successfully tested the new attack payload on two different versions of GPON home router, though they didn't disclose details of the payload or release any further details of the new zero-day vulnerability to prevent more attacks. Th

Chinese security researchers have discovered more than a dozen vulnerabilities in the onboard compute units of BMW cars, some of which can be exploited remotely to compromise a vehicle. The security flaws have been discovered during a year-long security audit conducted by researchers from Keen Security Lab, a cybersecurity research unit of Chinese firm Tencent, between January 2017 and February 2018. In March 2018, the team responsibly disclosed 14 different vulnerabilities directly to the BMW Group, which affects its vehicles since at least 2012. These are the same group of researchers who have previously found multiple vulnerabilities in various in-car modules used by Tesla , that could have been exploited to achieve remote controls on a target car. Now that BMW started rolling out patches for the vulnerabilities to car owners, the researchers have gone public with a 26-page technical report [ PDF ] describing their findings, though they avoided publishing some important t

Security researchers from Microsoft and Google have discovered a fourth variant of the data-leaking Meltdown-Spectre security flaws impacting modern CPUs in millions of computers, including those marketed by Apple. Variant 4 comes weeks after German computer magazine Heise reported about a set of eight Spectre-class vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs and a small number of ARM processors, which may also impact AMD processor architecture as well. Variants 1 and 2 (CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5715), known as Spectre, and Variant 3 (CVE-2017-5754), known as Meltdown, are three processor vulnerabilities disclosed by Google Project Zero researchers in January this year. Now, Microsoft and Google researchers have disclosed Variant 4 (CVE-2018-3639), dubbed Speculative Store Bypass , which is a similar Spectre variant that takes advantage of speculative execution that modern CPUs use to potentially expose sensitive data through a side channel. Speculative execution is a core component

Widespread routers' DNS hijacking malware that recently found targeting Android devices has now been upgraded its capabilities to target iOS devices as well as desktop users. Dubbed Roaming Mantis , the malware was initially found hijacking Internet routers last month to distribute Android banking malware designed to steal users' login credentials and the secret code for two-factor authentication. According to security researchers at Kaspersky Lab s, the criminal group behind the Roaming Mantis campaign has broadened their targets by adding phishing attacks for iOS devices, and cryptocurrency mining script for PC users. Moreover, while the initial attacks were designed to target users from South East Asia–including South Korea, China Bangladesh, and Japan–the new campaign now support 27 languages to expand its operations to infect people across Europe and the Middle East. How the Roaming Mantis Malware Works Similar to the previous version, the new Roaming Mantis

Last week, we reported about the first network-based remote Rowhammer attack, dubbed Throwhammer , which involves the exploitation a known vulnerability in DRAM through network cards using remote direct memory access (RDMA) channels. However, a separate team of security researchers has now demonstrated a second network-based remote Rowhammer technique that can be used to attack systems using uncached memory or flush instruction while processing the network requests. The research was carried out by researchers who discovered Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerabilities, which is independent of the Amsterdam researchers who presented a series of Rowhammer attacks, including Throwhammer published last week. If you are unaware, Rowhammer is a critical issue with recent generation dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips in which repeatedly accessing a row of memory can cause "bit flipping" in an adjacent row, allowing attackers to change the contents of the memory. The

For the second time in less than a week, users of the popular end-to-end encrypted Signal messaging app have to update their desktop applications once again to patch another severe code injection vulnerability. Discovered Monday by the same team of security researchers, the newly discovered vulnerability poses the same threat as the previous one, allowing remote attackers to inject malicious code on the recipients' Signal desktop app just by sending them a message—without requiring any user interaction. To understand more about the first code injection vulnerability ( CVE-2018-10994 ), you can read our previous article covering how researchers find the Signal flaw and how it works. The only difference between the two is that the previous flaw resides in the function that handles links shared in the chat, whereas the new vulnerability (CVE-2018-11101) exists in a different function that handles the validation of quoted messages, i.e., quoting a previous message in a reply

A Google security researcher has discovered a critical remote command injection vulnerability in the DHCP client implementation of Red Hat Linux and its derivatives like Fedora operating system. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-1111 , could allow attackers to execute arbitrary commands with root privileges on targeted systems. Whenever your system joins a network, it's the DHCP client application which allows your system to automatically receive network configuration parameters, such as an IP address and DNS servers, from the DHCP (Dynamic Host Control Protocol) server. The vulnerability resides in the NetworkManager integration script included in the DHCP client packages which is configured to obtain network configuration using the DHCP protocol. Felix Wilhelm from the Google security team found that attackers with a malicious DHCP server, or connected to the same network as the victim, can exploit this flaw by spoofing DHCP responses, eventually allowing them to run

After the revelation of the eFail attack details, it's time to reveal how the recently reported code injection vulnerability in the popular end-to-end encrypted Signal messaging app works. As we reported last weekend, Signal has patched its messaging app for Windows and Linux that suffered a code injection vulnerability discovered and reported by a team of white-hat hackers from Argentina. The vulnerability could have been exploited by remote attackers to inject a malicious payload inside the Signal desktop app running on the recipients' system just by sending them a specially crafted link—without requiring any user interaction. According to a blog post published today, the vulnerability was accidentally discovered while researchers–Iván Ariel Barrera Oro, Alfredo Ortega and Juliano Rizzo–were chatting on Signal messenger and one of them shared a link of a vulnerable site with an XSS payload in its URL. However, the XSS payload unexpectedly got executed on the Sig

Adobe has just released new versions of its Acrobat DC, Reader and Photoshop CC for Windows and macOS users that patch 48 vulnerabilities in its software. A total of 47 vulnerabilities affect Adobe Acrobat and Reader applications, and one critical remote code execution flaw has been patched in Adobe Photoshop CC. Out of 47, Adobe Acrobat and Reader affect with 24 critical vulnerabilities —categorized as Double Free, Heap Overflow, Use-after-free, Out-of-bounds write, Type Confusion, and Untrusted pointer dereference—which if exploited, could allow arbitrary code execution in the context of the targeted user. Rest of the 23 flaws, including Security Bypass, Out-of-bounds read, Memory Corruption, NTLM SSO hash theft, and HTTP POST newline injection via XFA submission, are marked as important and can lead to information disclosure or security bypass. The above-listed vulnerabilities impact the Windows and macOS versions of Acrobat DC (Consumer and Classic 2015), Acrobat Rea

With a heavy heart, security researchers have early released the details of a set of vulnerabilities discovered in email clients for two widely used email encryption standards—PGP and S/MIME—after someone leaked their paper on the Internet, which was actually scheduled for tomorrow. PGP and S/MIME are popular end-to-end encryption standards used to encrypt emails in a way that no one, not even the company, government, or cyber criminals, can spy on your communication. Before explaining how the vulnerability works, it should be noted that the flaw doesn't reside in the email encryption standards itself; instead, it affects a few email clients/plugins that incorrectly implemented the technologies. Dubbed eFail by the researchers, the vulnerabilities, as described in our previous early-warning article , could allow potential attackers to decrypt the content of your end-to-end encrypted emails in plaintext, even for messages sent in the past. According to the paper released

A critical remote code execution vulnerability has been discovered in the popular Electron web application framework that could allow attackers to execute malicious code on victims' computers. Electron is an open source app development framework that powers thousands of widely-used desktop applications including WhatsApp, Skype, Signal, Wordpress, Slack, GitHub Desktop, Atom, Visual Studio Code, and Discord. Besides its own modules, Electron framework also allows developers to create hybrid desktop applications by integrating Chromium and Node.js framework through APIs. Since Node.js is a robust framework for server-side applications, having access to its APIs indirectly gives Electron-based apps more control over the operating system installed on the server. To prevent unauthorised or unnecessary access to Node.js APIs, Electron framework by default sets the value of "webviewTag" to false in its "webPreferences" configuration file, which then sets &

Note— the technical details of the vulnerabilities introduced in this article has now been released, so you should also read our latest article to learn how the eFail attack works and what users can do to prevent themselves. An important warning for people using widely used email encryption tools—PGP and S/MIME—for sensitive communication. A team of European security researchers has released a warning about a set of critical vulnerabilities discovered in PGP and S/Mime encryption tools that could reveal your encrypted emails in plaintext. What's worse? The vulnerabilities also impact encrypted emails you sent in the past. PGP, or Pretty Good Privacy, is an open source end-to-end encryption standard used to encrypt emails in a way that no one, not even the company, government, or cyber criminals, can spy on your communication. S/MIME, Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, is an asymmetric cryptography-based technology that allows users to send digitally signed