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January 14, 2020, is a day cybersecurity stakeholders should pay attention to, as it marks the end of Microsoft support in Windows 7. From a security perspective, both the routine monthly security patches as well as hotfixes for attacks in the wild will not be available, effectively making any newly discovered vulnerability a Windows 7 zero-day. Cynet 360 autonomous breach protection is a good example of a multilayered advanced protection solution that can enable organizations who run Windows 7 to remain secure despite the end of support ( to learn more click here ). Let's dig a bit deeper to understand the risk. The reality is that all software contains bugs. Ideally, these bugs are discovered during the development process. In practice, many of them surface only following the product release in the course of their interactions with real users. Bugs that can be exploited for malicious purposes are called vulnerabilities. Microsoft conducts rigorous and ongoing research

Internet-connected devices have been one of the most remarkable developments that have happened to humankind in the last decade. Although this development is a good thing, it also stipulates a high security and privacy risk to personal information. In one such recent privacy mishap, smart IP cameras manufactured by Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi found mistakenly sharing surveillance footage of Xiaomi users with other random users without any permission. The issue appears to affect Xiaomi IP cameras only when streamed through connected Google's Nest Hub, which came into light when a Reddit user claimed that his Google Nest Hub is apparently pulling random feeds from other users instead of his own Xiaomi Mijia cameras. The Reddit user also shared some photos showing other people's homes, an older adult sleeping on a chair, and a baby sleeping in its crib that appeared on his Nest Hub screen. It appears the issue doesn't reside in Google products; instead, it c

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

Landry's, a popular restaurant chain in the United States, has announced a malware attack on its point of sale (POS) systems that allowed cybercriminals to steal customers' payment card information. Landry's owns and operates more than 600 bars, restaurants, hotels, casinos, food and beverage outlets with over 60 different brands such as Landry's Seafood, Chart House, Saltgrass Steak House, Claim Jumper, Morton's The Steakhouse, Mastro's Restaurants, and Rainforest Cafe. According to the  breach notification published this week, 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. The PoS malware infected point-of-sale terminals at all Landry's owned locations, but, fortunately, due to end-to-end encryption technology used by the company, attackers failed to steal payment card data from cards swiped at its

Advanced persistent threats (APTs) have emerged to be legitimate concerns for all organizations. APTs are threat actors that breach networks and infrastructures and stealthily lurk within them over extended spans of time. They typically perform complex hacks that allow them to steal or destroy data and resources. According to Accenture , APTs have been organizing themselves into groups that enable them to share tactics and tools to carry out attacks at scale. Russian group Silence APT, for instance, has been reported to be actively targeting financial institutions and have successfully stolen millions of dollars from various banks worldwide. Smaller organizations also need to be wary of such threats. APT groups also use automated tools and botnets to gain access to networks, and these tactics don't discriminate based on size, industry, or value. Any vulnerable infrastructure can be breached. It is now critical for all organizations to understand how APTs operate and impleme

The cybersecurity of a company is heavily reliant upon the skills and knowledge of the people who install, manage, and operate its security products. This means that recruiting and nurturing the best security team possible should be a CISO's top priority. Cynet's Ultimate Cybersecurity Job Posting Templates ( download here ) provide a list of the main responsibilities and skills for typical security positions, built upon research and providing IT and security managers with pre-set template job descriptions so that there is no need to create them from scratch. Because of the fact that there are many different cybersecurity job titles, with much overlap between job descriptions and responsibilities, the creation of the inclusion criteria for these positions required significant review and consideration. Six positions are included in the following job templates, including all integral aspects of the responsibility cycle in product deployment, integration, and operation, p

A 22-year-old man who claimed to have access to over 300 million iCloud accounts and threatened to factory reset all accounts unless Apple pays ransom has pleaded guilty in London for trying to blackmail Apple. In March 2017, Kerem Albayrak from North London claimed to be a spokesman for a hacking group called the " Turkish Crime Family " and in possession of 319 million iCloud accounts. Albayrak gave Apple a deadline until April 7, 2017, to pay up $75,000 in crypto-currency or $100,000 worth of iTunes gift cards in return for deleting the copy of stolen database, the U.K. National Crime Agency said in a statement , calling the blackmailer a "fame-hungry cyber-criminal." However, if the company failed to meet his demands, Albayrak threatened that he would start remotely wiping the victim's Apple devices, factory reset iCloud accounts, and dump the stolen database online. In late March 2017, the NCA's National Cyber Crime Unit arrested Albayrak at

Three members of an international organized cybercrime group that was behind a multi-million dollar theft primarily against U.S. businesses and financial institutions have been sentenced to prison, the U.S. Justice Department announced. The criminals used the GozNym banking Trojan to break into more than 4,000 victim computers globally, primarily in the United States and Europe, between 2015 and 2016, and fraudulently steal nearly $100 million from their banking accounts. In May this year, Europol dismantled the cybercrime network behind GozNym, with the United States issuing charges against a total of ten members of the group, 5 of which were arrested at that time, while five others, including the developer of GozNym, remain at the run. In a federal court in Pittsburgh on Friday, Krasimir Nikolov , one of the group's members, was sentenced to a period of time served after having served over 39 months in prison for his role as an "account takeover specialist" i

As promised by Apple in August this year, the company today finally opened its bug bounty program to all security researchers, offering monetary rewards to anyone for reporting vulnerabilities in the iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, iPadOS, and iCloud to the company. Since its launch three years ago, Apple's bug bounty program was open only for selected security researchers based on invitation and was only rewarded for reporting vulnerabilities in the iOS mobile operating system. However, speaking at a hacking conference in August this year, Ivan Krstić, head of Apple Security Engineering and Architecture at Apple, announced the company's upcoming extended bug bounty program which included three main highlights: an enormous increase in the maximum reward from $200,000 to $1.5 million, accepting bug reports for all of its operating systems and latest hardware, opening the program for all researchers. Now starting from today, all security researchers and hackers are

Have you stopped at any Wawa convenience store and used your payment card to buy gas or snacks in the last nine months? If yes, your credit and debit card details may have been stolen by cybercriminals. Wawa, the Philadelphia-based gas and convenience store chain, disclosed a data breach incident that may have exposed payment card information of thousands of customers who used their cards at about any of its 850 stores since March 2019. What happened? According to a press release published on the company's website, on 4th March, attackers managed to install malware on its point-of-sale servers used to process customers' payments. By the time it was discovered by the Wawa information security team on 10th December, the malware had already infected in-store payment processing systems at "potentially all Wawa locations." That means attackers were potentially stealing Wawa customers' payment card information until the malware was entirely removed by its

If you haven't recently updated your Drupal-based blog or business website to the latest available versions, it's the time. Drupal development team yesterday released important security updates for its widely used open-source content management software that addresses a critical and three "moderately critical" vulnerabilities in its core system. Considering that Drupal-powered websites are among the all-time favorite targets for hackers, the website administrators are highly recommended to install the latest release Drupal 7.69, 8.7.11, or 8.8.1 to prevent remote hackers from compromising web servers. Critical Symlinks Vulnerability in Drupal The only advisory with critical severity includes patches for multiple vulnerabilities in a third-party library, called ' Archive_Tar ,' that Drupal Core uses for creating, listing, extracting, and adding files to tar archives. The vulnerability resides in the way the affected library untar archives with sym

There's hardly any business nowadays that don't use computers and connect to the Internet. Companies maintain an online presence through their official websites, blogs, and social media pages. People use online services to conduct day to day activities like banking. And of course, there are many businesses that are completely based on the web like online markets, e-Commerce websites and financial services. All of these activities create opportunities for cyber attacks. Various threats can affect websites, online services, API endpoints, and the applications used or provided by businesses. Such devastating attacks include privacy intrusion, DDoS attacks , data breaches, defacements of websites, online store shutdowns, scraping, payment fraud, abuse of online services, and backdoor installations. The 2019 Cost of Cybercrime Study by Accenture reports that there has been a 67% increase in cyber attacks over the last five years. The corresponding increase in financial ter

A British man suspected to be a member of ' The Dark Overlord ,' an infamous international hacking group, has finally been extradited to the United States after being held for over two years in the United Kingdom. Nathan Francis Wyatt , 39, appeared in federal court in St. Louis, Missouri, on Wednesday to face charges related to his role in hacking healthcare and accounting companies in the U.S. and then threatening to publish stolen information unless victims paid a ransom in Bitcoin. According to a court indictment unsealed yesterday, Wyatt faces one count of conspiracy, two counts of aggravated identity theft and three counts of threatening to damage a protected computer. However, the suspect has not yet pledged guilty to any of the charges in the U.S. federal court, where he appeared after fighting for 11 months to avoid being extradited from Britain. Cyber Attacks by The Dark Overlord Group British police first arrested Wyatt in September 2016 during an inves

Besides rewarding ethical hackers from its pocket for responsibly reporting vulnerabilities in third-party open-source projects, Google today announced financial support for open source developers to help them arrange additional resources, prioritizing the security of their products. The initiative, called " Patch Rewards Program ," was launched nearly 6 years ago, under which Google rewards hackers for reporting severe flaws in many widely used open source software, including OpenSSH, OpenSSL, Linux kernel, Apache, Nginx, jQuery, and OpenVPN. So far, Google has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars as bounty to hackers across the world who helped improve the overall security of many crucial open source software and technologies that power the Internet, operating systems, and networks. The company has now also decided to motivate volunteer work done by the open source community by providing upfront financial help to project teams, using which they can acquire addition

LifeLabs, the largest provider of healthcare laboratory testing services in Canada, has suffered a massive data breach that exposed the personal and medical information of nearly 15 million Canadians customers. The company announced the breach in a press release posted on its website, revealing that an unknown attacker unauthorizedly accessed its computer systems last month and stole customers' information, including their: Names Addresses Email addresses Login information Passwords, for their LifeLabs account Dates of birth Health card numbers Lab test results The Toronto-based company discovered the data breach at the end of October, but the press release does not say anything about the identity of the attacker(s) and how they managed to infiltrate its systems. However, LifeLabs admitted it paid an undisclosed amount of ransom to the hackers to retrieve the stolen data, which indicates that the attack might have been carried out using a ransomware style malwa

Cybercriminals are busy innovators, adapting their weapons and attack strategies, and ruthlessly roaming the web in search of their next big score. Every manner of sensitive information, such as confidential employee records, customers' financial data, protected medical documents, and government files, are all subject to their relentless threats to cybersecurity . Solutions span a broad spectrum, from training email users to ensuring a VPN kill switch is in place, to adding extensive advanced layers of network protection. To successfully guard against severe threats from hackers, worm viruses to malware, such as botnet attacks, network managers need to use all tools and methods that fit well into a comprehensive cyber defense strategy. Of all the menaces mentioned above to a website owner's peace of mind, botnets arguably present the most unsettling form of security risk. They're not the mere achievements of malicious amateur cybercriminals. They're state

2010-2019 decade will be remembered as the time in which cybersecurity became acknowledged as a critical concern for all organizations. With rapidly growing security needs and respective budgets, it is now more essential than ever for security decision-makers to zoom out of the 'products' mindset and assess their security stack in light of the overall breach protection value that their investments return. The 2020 State of Breach Protection Survey ( click here to participate ) attempts to map out for the first time how breach protection is practiced and maintained globally – what are the common products, services, concerns, and challenges that are most common amongst organizations. Any security professional filling the anonymous salary survey questionnaire , organised by The Hacker News in partnership with Cynet, will get a free copy of the survey report once it is released in January 2020. You can complete the questionnaire here . Why is that important? Because unli

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