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On Monday when the whole world was gearing up to celebrate New Year’s Eve hackers from The Dark Overlord group made astonishing claims that they stole a trove of data from Hiscox Syndicates Ltd, a law firm responsible for handling insurance files related to 9/11 terrorist attacks. This was reported by MotherBoard after a Pastebin […]
A school district in the United States has suffered a cyber attack in which unknown hackers managed to steal a trove of personal data belonging to over 500,000 staff and students. The targeted school was San Diego Unified School District in California whose database was accessed by hackers just before Christmas allowing them to steal 10 years […]
Authorities have seized and shut down 15 popular DDoS-for-hire websites used by cybercriminals for revenge and DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks on private individuals as well as businesses including online gaming giants, email service providers and hosting sites. The operation against the DDoS-for-hire websites was a result of joint cooperation between the FBI ‘Federal Bureau of […]
The US Department of Justice on Thursday charged two Chinese hackers associated with the Chinese government for hacking numerous companies and government agencies in a dozen countries. The Chinese nationals, Zhu Hua (known online as Afwar, CVNX, Alayos and Godkiller) and Zhang Shilong (known online as Baobeilong, Zhang Jianguo and Atreexp), are believed to be […]
The FBI just saved the Christmas. The U.S. Justice Department announced earlier today that the FBI has seized domains of 15 “DDoS-for-hire” websites and charged three individuals running some of these services. DDoS-for-hire, or “Booter” or “Stresser,” services rent out access to a network of infected devices, which then can be used by anyone, even […]
A security researcher with Twitter alias SandboxEscaper today released proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for a new zero-day vulnerability affecting Microsoft’s Windows operating system. SandboxEscaper is the same researcher who previously publicly dropped exploits for two Windows zero-day vulnerabilities, leaving all Windows users vulnerable to the hackers until Microsoft patched them. The newly disclosed unpatched Windows zero-day […]
In a new extortion scam, a cybercriminal is sending threatening emails to unsuspecting users asking them to pay a whopping $4,000 in Bitcoin or wait to be executed by a hitman. The email extortion scam surfaced on the Internet a few days ago and is currently arriving in victim’s inbox with the subject line “Pretty significant […]
Microsoft today issued an out-of-band security update to patch a critical zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer (IE) Web browser that attackers are already exploiting in the wild to hack into Windows computers. Discovered by security researcher Clement Lecigne of Google’s Threat Analysis Group, the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-8653, is a remote code execution (RCE) flaw […]
Another day, another data breach. This time it’s the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) NASA today confirmed a data breach that may have compromised personal information of some of its current and former employees after at least one of the agency’s servers was hacked. In an internal memo sent to all employees […]
Security researchers have discovered yet another example of how cybercriminals disguise their malware activities as regular traffic by using legitimate cloud-based services. Trend Micro researchers have uncovered a new piece of malware that retrieves commands from memes posted on a Twitter account controlled by the attackers. Most malware relies on communication with their command-and-control server […]
Twitter has been hit with a minor data breach incident that the social networking site believes linked to a suspected state-sponsored attack. In a blog post published on Monday, Twitter revealed that while investigating a vulnerability affecting one of its support forms, the company discovered evidence of the bug being misused to access and steal […]
Another day, another email scam – This time, wicked scammers have stolen over $1,000,000 from Save the Children, an international non-governmental organization based in London, United Kingdom. This happened after scammers compromised email address of one of the Save the Children employees and generated fake invoices and other documents to trick the charity organization into sending 1 million […]
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a critical vulnerability in widely used SQLite database software that exposes billions of deployments to hackers. Dubbed as ‘Magellan‘ by Tencent’s Blade security team, the newly discovered SQLite flaw could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary or malicious code on affected devices, leak program memory or crash applications. SQLite is a […]
Shamoon is back… one of the most destructive malware families that caused damage to Saudi Arabia’s largest oil producer in 2012 and this time it has targeted energy sector organizations primarily operating in the Middle East. Earlier this week, Italian oil drilling company Saipem was attacked and sensitive files on about 10 percent of its […]
Facebook’s latest screw-up — a programming bug in Facebook website accidentally gave 1,500 third-party apps access to the unposted Facebook photos of as many as 6.8 million users. Facebook today quietly announced that it discovered a new API bug in its photo-sharing system that let 876 developers access users’ private photos which they never shared […]
“Pay $20,000 worth of bitcoin, or a bomb will detonate in your building” A massive number of businesses, schools, government offices and individuals across the US, New Zealand and Canada on Thursday received bomb threats via emails that caused nationwide chaos, forcing widespread evacuations and police response. The bomb threat emails were apparently sent by […]
Ransomware has become a persistent threat to users globally but for cybercriminals, it is a lucrative business. Recently, IT security researchers at Check Point unearthed a sophisticated ransomware decryption scam in which a Russian IT consultant company has been caught scamming ransomware victims. The company according to Check Point researchers calls itself ‘Dr. Shifro’ and claims to provide […]
Adobe is closing out this year with its December Patch Tuesday update to address a massive number of security vulnerabilities for just its two PDF apps—more than double the number of what Microsoft patched this month for its several products. Adobe today released patches for 87 vulnerabilities affecting its Acrobat and Reader software products for […]
Developers of phpMyAdmin, one of the most popular and widely used MySQL database management systems, today released an updated version 4.8.4 of its software to patch several important vulnerabilities that could eventually allow remote attackers to take control of the affected web servers. The phpMyAdmin project last Sunday gave an early heads-up about the latest […]
Google today revealed that Google+ has suffered another massive data breach, forcing the tech giant to shut down its struggling social network four months earlier than its actual scheduled date, i.e., in April 2019 instead of August 2019. Google said it discovered another critical security vulnerability in one of Google+’s People APIs that could have […]
Two hackers have been sent to prison for their roles in hacking TalkTalk, one of the biggest UK-based telecommunications company, in 2015 and stealing personal information, banking, and credit card details belonging to more than 156,000 customers. Matthew Hanley, 23, and Connor Allsopp, 21, both from Tamworth in Staffordshire, were sentenced Monday to 12 months […]