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WhatsApp, the world's most popular end-to-end encrypted messaging application, patched an incredibly frustrating software bug that could have allowed a malicious group member to crash the messaging app for all members of the same group, The Hacker News learned. Just by sending a maliciously crafted message to a targeted group, an attacker can trigger a fully-destructive WhatsApp crash-loop, forcing all group members to completely uninstall the app, reinstall it, and remove the group to regain normal function. Since the group members can't selectively delete the malicious message without opening the group window and re-triggering the crash-loop, they have to lose the entire group chat history, indefinitely, to get rid of it. Discovered by researchers at Israeli cybersecurity firm Check Point , the latest bug resided in the WhatsApp's implementation of XMPP communication protocol that crashes the app when a member with invalid phone number drops a message in the grou

Programming has five main steps: the identification and definition of the problem, the planning of the solution for the problem, coding of the program, testing, and documentation. It's a meticulous process that cannot be completed without going through all the essential points. In all of these, security must be taken into account. As you come up with a solution to the problem and write the code for it, you need to make sure security is kept intact. Cyber attacks are becoming more and more prevalent, and the trend is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. As individuals, businesses, organizations, and governments become more reliant on technology, cybercrime is expected to only grow. Most of what people do in contemporary society involves the internet, computers, and apps/software. It's only logical for programmers to be mindful of the security aspect of making applications or software. It's not enough for programmers to produce something that works. After

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

Attention WordPress users! Your website could easily get hacked if you are using " Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder ," or " Ultimate Addons for Elementor " and haven't recently updated them to the latest available versions. Security researchers have discovered a critical yet easy-to-exploit authentication bypass vulnerability in both widely-used premium WordPress plugins that could allow remote attackers to gain administrative access to sites without requiring any password. What's more worrisome is that opportunistic attackers have already started exploiting this vulnerability in the wild within 2 days of its discovery in order to compromise vulnerable WordPress websites and install a malicious backdoor for later access. Both vulnerable plugins, made by software development company Brainstorm Force, are currently powering over hundreds of thousands of WordPress websites using Elementor and Beaver Builder frameworks, helping website admins and de

Russian law enforcement officers have raided the Moscow offices of Nginx—the company behind the world's second most popular web server software—over a copyright infringement complaint filed by Rambler, a Russian Internet portal and email service provider. According to multiple reports from local media and social media, the police conducted searches and has also detained several employees of the company, including Igor Sysoev , the original developer of Nginx and Maxim Konovalov , another co-founder of the company. Over 30% of the websites on the Internet today, including many of the world's most popular sites like Netflix and Twitch, run on the Nginx server. Igor Sysoev created the Nginx web server in the early 2000s and open-sourced it in 2004, after which he founded the company Nginx in 2015 that has now been acquired by F5 Networks , an American technology company, for $ 670 million. According to a copy of the complaint shared on Twitter, Rambler accused that Sys

A new variant of Vega ransomware family, dubbed Zeppelin , has recently been spotted in the wild targeting technology and healthcare companies across Europe, the United States, and Canada. However, if you reside in Russia or some other ex-USSR countries like Ukraine, Belorussia, and Kazakhstan, breathe a sigh of relief, as the ransomware terminates its operations if found itself on machines located in these regions. It's notable and interesting because all previous variants of the Vega family, also known as VegaLocker, were primarily targeting Russian speaking users, which indicates Zeppelin is not the work of the same hacking group behind the previous attacks. Since Vega ransomware and its previous variants were offered as a service on underground forums, researchers at BlackBerry Cylance believes either Zeppelin "ended up in the hands of different threat actors" or "redeveloped from bought/stolen/leaked sources." According to a report BlackBerry Cyl

A team of cybersecurity researchers demonstrated a novel yet another technique to hijack Intel SGX, a hardware-isolated trusted space on modern Intel CPUs that encrypts extremely sensitive data to shield it from attackers even when a system gets compromised. Dubbed Plundervolt and tracked as CVE-2019-11157, the attack relies on the fact that modern processors allow frequency and voltage to be adjusted when needed, which, according to researchers, can be modified in a controlled way to induce errors in the memory by flipping bits. Bit flip is a phenomenon widely known for the Rowhammer attack wherein attackers hijack vulnerable memory cells by changing their value from 1 to a 0, or vice versa—all by tweaking the electrical charge of neighboring memory cells. However, since the Software Guard Extensions (SGX) enclave memory is encrypted, the Plundervolt attack leverages the same idea of flipping bits by injecting faults in the CPU before they are written to the memory. Plundervo

With its latest and last Patch Tuesday for 2019, Microsoft is warning billions of its users of a new Windows zero-day vulnerability that attackers are actively exploiting in the wild in combination with a Chrome exploit to take remote control over vulnerable computers. Microsoft's December security updates include patches for a total of 36 vulnerabilities, where 7 are critical, 27 important, 1 moderate, and one is low in severity—brief information on which you can find later in this article. Tracked as CVE-2019-1458 and rated as Important, the newly patched zero-day Win32k privilege escalation vulnerability, reported by Kaspersky, was used in Operation WizardOpium attacks to gain higher privileges on targeted systems by escaping the Chrome sandbox. Although Google addressed the flaw in Chrome 78.0.3904.87 with the release of an emergency update last month after Kaspersky disclosed it to the tech giant, hackers are still targeting users who are using vulnerable versions of th