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A 21-year-old Kentucky man who previously pleaded guilty to developing, marketing, and selling an infamous remote access trojan (RAT) called LuminosityLink has now been sentenced to 30 months in prison. According to a press release published Monday by U.S. Attorney's Office, Colton Grubbs, who used online moniker 'KFC Watermelon,' was pleaded guilty for three counts--unlawfully accessing computers in furtherance of a criminal act, money laundering, and illegal removal of property to prevent its lawful seizure. First surfaced in April 2015, the  LuminosityLink RAT  (Remote Access Trojan), also known as Luminosity, was a hacking tool that was sold for $40, marketing itself as a legitimate tool for Windows administrators to "manage a large number of computers concurrently." However, in reality, LuminosityLink was designed to be a dangerous, remote access trojan that among other malicious features, allowed Grubbs' customers to: Record the keys that victims

A four-year-old severe vulnerability has been discovered in the Secure Shell (SSH) implementation library known as Libssh that could allow anyone to completely bypass authentication and gain unfettered administrative control over a vulnerable server without requiring a password. The security vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-10933 , is an authentication-bypass issue that was introduced in Libssh version 0.6 released earlier 2014, leaving thousands of enterprise servers open to hackers for the last four years. But before you get frightened, you should know that neither the widely used OpenSSH nor Github's implementation of libssh was affected by the vulnerability. The vulnerability resides due to a coding error in Libssh and is "ridiculously simple" to exploit. According to a security advisory published Tuesday, all an attacker needs to do is sending an "SSH2_MSG_USERAUTH_SUCCESS" message to a server with an SSH connection enabled when it expects an &

Super Low RPO with Continuous Data Protection: Dial Back to Just Seconds Before an Attack Zerto , a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, can help you detect and recover from ransomware in near real-time. This solution leverages continuous data protection (CDP) to ensure all workloads have the lowest recovery point objective (RPO) possible. The most valuable thing about CDP is that it does not use snapshots, agents, or any other periodic data protection methodology. Zerto has no impact on production workloads and can achieve RPOs in the region of 5-15 seconds across thousands of virtual machines simultaneously. For example, the environment in the image below has nearly 1,000 VMs being protected with an average RPO of just six seconds! Application-Centric Protection: Group Your VMs to Gain Application-Level Control   You can protect your VMs with the Zerto application-centric approach using Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs). This logical grouping of VMs ensures that your whole applica

Would you prefer purchasing an Android device that doesn't have any apps or services from Google? No Google Maps, No Gmail, No YouTube! And NOT even the Google Play Store—from where you could have installed any Android apps you want Because if you live in Europe, from now on, you have to spend some extra cash on a smartphone with built-in Google services, which were otherwise until now freely available and already included in the cost of your smartphone. For the very first time, Google has announced its plans to charge a fee to European Android phone manufacturers who want to include a free version of Google apps on their Android handsets. In short, Android phone makers will now have to pay Google for installing the Play store, Gmail, YouTube, Maps, and Chrome, that are usually considered to be core parts of the Android operating system, but are actually Google services. "Since the pre-installation of Google Search and Chrome together with our other apps helped us

A security enthusiast who discovered a passcode bypass vulnerability in Apple's iOS 12 late last month has now dropped another passcode bypass bug that works on the latest iOS 12.0.1 that was released last week. Jose Rodriguez, a Spanish amateur security researcher, discovered a bug in iOS 12 in late September that allows attackers with physical access to your iPhone to access your contacts and photos. The bug was patched in iOS 12.0.1, but he now discovered a similar iPhone passcode bypass hack that works in 12.0.1 and is easier to execute than the bug Rodriguez discovered and reported two weeks ago. The new hack allows anyone with physical access to your locked iPhone to access your photo album, select photos and send them to anyone using Apple Messages. Since the new hack requires much less effort than the previous one, it leaves any iPhone user vulnerable to a skeptic or distrustful partner, curious college, friend or roommate who could access your iPhone's photo

All major web browsers, including Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, and Mozilla Firefox, altogether today announced to soon remove support for TLS 1.0 (20-year-old) and TLS 1.1 (12-year-old) communication encryption protocols. Developed initially as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol, Transport Layer Security (TLS) is an updated cryptographic protocol used to establish a secure and encrypted communications channel between clients and servers. There are currently four versions of the TLS protocol—TLS 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 ( latest )—but older versions, TLS 1.0 and 1.1, are known to be vulnerable to a number of critical attacks, such as  POODLE  and  BEAST . Since TLS implementation in all major web browsers and applications supports downgrade negotiation process, it leaves an opportunity for attackers to exploit weaker protocols even if a server supports the latest version. All Major Web Browsers Will Remove TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 Support in 2020

In an effort to secure users' data while maintaining privacy, Google has announced a new security measure for Android Backup Service that now encrypts all your backup data stored on its cloud servers in a way that even the company can't read it. Google allows Android users to automatically backup their essential app data and settings to their Google account, allowing them to simply restore it when required, instead of re-configuring all the apps after formatting or switching to a new phone. However, until now your backup data was not encrypted and visible to Google, and now the company is going to change its storage procedure. Starting with Android Pie, Google is going to encrypt your Android device backup data in the following way: Step 1: Your Android device will generate a random secret key (not known to Google), Step 2: The secret key will then get encrypted using your lockscreen PIN/pattern/passcode (not known to Google), Step 3: This passcode-protected

Late last month Facebook announced its worst-ever security breach that allowed an unknown group of hackers to steal secret access tokens for millions of accounts by taking advantage of a flaw in the 'View As' feature. At the time of the initial disclosure, Facebook estimated that the number of users affected by the breach could have been around 50 million, though a new update published today by the social media giant downgraded this number to 30 million. Out of those 30 million accounts, hackers successfully accessed personal information from 29 million Facebook users, though the company assured that the miscreants apparently didn't manage to access any third-party app data . Here's How Facebook Classified the Stolen Data: Facebook vice president of product management Guy Rosen published a new blog post  Friday morning to share further details on the massive security breach, informing that the hackers stole data from those affected accounts, as follows: For about 1

Yes, it is official. The massively popular battle royale video game from Epic Games, Fortnite: Battle Royale is finally available for Android devices. Epic announced Thursday that the Android version of Fortnite is now available for everyone to download for free, so you no longer require an invite to play the most popular battle royale game on your phone. Epic Games have provided a list of supported Android phones on its official website, from where you can directly download Fortnite for your compatible device. Initially available for a brief period as a Samsung Galaxy Note 9 exclusive title, Fortnite: Battle Royale for Android was later opened up to other Android devices, but users still needed an invitation for the beta to play. Thankfully, you no longer need an invitation. Now all Android users can download Fortnite, provided they have a compatible device. Fortnite for Android Not Available on Google App Store For those unaware, Fortnite is not available for download