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Showing posts from October, 2014

Samsung 'Find My Mobile' Flaw Allows Hacker to Remotely Lock Your Device

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is warning users of a newly discovered Zero-Day flaw in the Samsung Find My Mobile service, which fails to validate the sender of a lock-code data received over a network. The Find My Mobile feature implemented by Samsung in their devices is a mobile web-service that provides samsung users a bunch of features to locate their lost device, to play an alert on a remote device and to lock remotely the mobile phone so that no one else can get the access to the lost device. The vulnerability in Samsung’s Find My Mobile feature was discovered by Mohamed Abdelbaset Elnoby (@SymbianSyMoh), an Information Security Evangelist from Egypt. The flaw is a Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) that could allow an attacker to remotely lock or unlock the device and even make the device rings too. Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF or XSRF) is an attack that tricks the victim into loading a page that contains a specially crafted HTML exploit page

Google Launches User-Friendly 'Inbox' App, Alternative To Gmail

Google is offering its users a completely new and better experience of its mailing service. And in an effort to do this, the company has launched a new email service, an alternative to Gmail, called "Inbox" on Wednesday that aims to make email more useful and preview next-generation capabilities. Inbox will not replace Gmail, the company's popular 10-year-old email product, instead it will sit next to its Gmail service and will provide users' better organize their emails with live alerts for appointments, flight bookings and package deliveries in a more user-friendly way. "Years in the making, Inbox is by the same people who brought you Gmail, but it's not Gmail: it's a completely different type of inbox, designed to focus on what really matters," wrote Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president of Android , Chrome and apps, in a blog post . According to the company, the Inbox service was designed to deal with the problem of getting too much

Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite Sends User Location and Safari Search Data to Apple

Apple's latest desktop operating system, known as Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite, sends location and search data of users without their knowledge to Apple's remote servers by default whenever a user queries the desktop search tool Spotlight, which questions users' privacy once again. The technology firm faced criticism on Monday when users came to know about the company's About Spotlight & Privacy which clearly states that anyone who uses the Spotlight feature in either Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite or its newly launched mobile operating system iOS 8 will have their location and search information passed back to Apple's servers to process. APPLE COLLECTS USERS' DATA AND FORWARDS IT TO MICROSOFT AS WELL On one hand, where Apple decided to enable hard drive encryption by default, despite the FBI requests not to do so. But on the other, the company is itself putting its users' privacy on risk. The same data Apple collects from the users' searched term on Spotligh

Google Launches USB-Based "Security Key" To Strengthen 2-Step Verification

Google is taking its users’ privacy very serious and making every possible effort for its users just to make them feel secure when they are online. Today, the tech giant has announced its enhanced two-step verification service that is based on a physical USB key, adding yet another layer of security to protect its users from hackers and other forms of online theft. SECURITY KEY- 2 STEP VERIFICATION USING USB DRIVES The "Security Key" feature will currently work on Chrome and will be free for Google users, but the company also notes that the Security Key is supporting the open Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) protocol from the FIDO Alliance, which will allow users to log in to Google Accounts by inserting a USB device into their systems. By letting users protect their accounts using two-factor authentication based on physical USB keys, it will be no longer any compulsion for you to type in the six-digit authentication code in Google's Gmail or your Google Account. The Security

Microsoft Windows Zero-Day Vulnerability "CVE-2014-4114" Used to Hack NATO

                                                  Once again a Russian cyber espionage group has gained media attention by exploiting a Zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft’s Windows operating system to spy on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Ukrainian and Polish government agencies, and a variety of sensitive European industries over the last year. ZERO-DAY VULNERABILITY IN MICROSOFT WINDOWS Researchers at cyber intelligence firm iSight Partners have discovered a zero-day vulnerability that impacts desktop and server versions of Windows, from Vista and Server 2008 to current versions. They also uncovered a latest cyber-spying campaign - suspected to be based in Russia - that uses this Zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2014-4114) to target government leaders and institutions for nearly five years. The recently detected Russian hacking group is dubbed as "Sandworm Team" by iSIGHT Partners because it found references to the Frank Herbert's "Dune" scie

Core Secrets — NSA Used ‘Undercover Agents’ In Foreign Companies

Sometimes we wonder that how the  National Security Agency ( NSA )  reached such a wide range of its Surveillance  operation across the world – which you can measure from several secret documents released by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. This hell parameter of the NSA’s operation was not reached by its agents sitting in the NSA headquarter in United States, but by its undercover agents working in foreign companies based in China, Germany, and South Korea to infiltrate and compromise foreign networks and devices, according to documents obtained by The Intercept . NSA INTERCEPTING FOREIGN NETWORKS AND DATA CENTRES The latest document from the Snowden’s desk talks about a program called “ physical subversion ,” under which the NSA’s undercover operatives were infiltrating foreign networks to acquire sensitive data and access to systems in the global communications industry and possibly even some American firms. REVELATION OF VARIOUS PROGRAMS Accordin

Authentication Flaw in PayPal mobile API Allows Access to Blocked Accounts

Payment services provider PayPal is vulnerable to an authentication restriction bypass vulnerability, which could allow an attacker to bypass a filter or restriction of the online-service to get unauthorized access to a blocked users’ PayPal account. The security vulnerability actually resides in the mobile API authentication procedure of the PayPal online-service, which doesn’t check for the blocked and restricted PayPal accounts. HOW THE VULNERABILITY WORKS In case if a PayPal user enters a wrong username or password combination several times in an effort to access the account, then for the security reasons, PayPal will restrict the user from opening or accessing his/her account on a computer until the answers to a number of security questions is provided. However, if the same user, at the same time switches to a mobile device and tries accessing the temporarily closed PayPal account with the right credentials via an official PayPal mobile app client through the A

iOS 8 'Date Trick' Loophole Allows Play Nintendo Games Using Emulators

If you are a retro games lover and want to play it on your iPhone, a security loop in  iOS 8  makes it possible for you to play classic SNES games on your iPhone, without the need to jailbreak your Apple devices. Since Apple doesn’t allow emulators on the App Store for copyright reasons, making it difficult to install third-party emulators and other unapproved applications. But, the latest upcoming beta version iOS 8.1 patched the famous " Date Trick " that had allowed iOS emulator makers to bypass App Store restrictions and run unofficial emulators on iPhones and iPads. The loophole called the " Date Trick ," found by Dario Sepulveda of the  GBA4iOS  team , is currently being used in the wild by the makers of emulators like GBA4iOS and SNES emulator since last year, allowing iOS users to downloaded and installed unapproved apps through the built-in Safari browser. Technically, by changing the device's date and time back at least two

Windows 10 Preview Has A Keylogger to Watch Your Every Move

This week Microsoft announced the next version of its Operating system, dubbed Windows 10, providing Windows 10 Technical Preview release under its "Insider Program" in order to collect feedback from users and help shape the final version of the operating system, but something really went  WRONG!!! “Inside Microsoft’s Insider Program you'll get all the latest Windows preview builds as soon as they're available. In return, we want to know what you think. You’ll get an easy-to-use app to give us your feedback, which will help guide us along the way.” Microsoft website reads. Well, how many of you actually read the “Terms of Service” and “Privacy Policy” documents before downloading the Preview release of Windows 10? I guess none of you, because most computer users have habit of ignoring that lengthy paragraphs and simply click "I Agree" and then "next", which is not at all a good practise. Do you really know what permissions you have grante