Shellshock bug could threaten millions as Compared to Heartbleed ~ Hack4friends

A programming flaw dubbed the “Bash Bug,” or more ominously “Shellshock,” is being described as potential threat to millions of computers, servers, medical devices, power plants and municipal water systems and even common objects such as refrigerators and cameras.

                                                              Image: just representation of shellshock                                    It is being compared to Heartbleed, a flaw in security software used by most of the Internet which allowed hackers to steal data such as passwords. Shellshock is similarly widespread and can be used to wreak more havoc. It allows hackers to take control of a vulnerable machine, steal data, shut down networks and cause other problems.

It was discovered Sep. 12 by Unix specialist Stéphane Chazelas and revealed on Wednesday.

According to Ars Technica, the bug is already being used to exploit Web servers. The initial fix for the bug was incomplete. Hours after news of the bug went public, security researchers detected evidence of hackers trying to exploit it.

The flaw affects a commonly used, free software system called Bash that has been around since 1989. According to the New York Times, it is built into 70 percent of machines that connect to the Internet.

Software-savvy people call it a “command shell.” It interprets instructions from users and programs so the computer knows what to do.

According to reports, it could affect your computer even if you’ve never heard of it. Bash is used in most Linux or Unix-based operating systems, including Apple’s Mac OS X, according to an alert from the Department of Homeland Security’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT).

The National Institute of Standards and Technology rated Shellshock a 10 on a 10-point severity scale. Heartbleed was rated five. Both flaws were rated low in terms of complexity, which means they can be easily exploited.

Discovered last spring, Heartbleed was a flaw in security technology used by thousands of Web sites that exposed passwords and other personal data to hackers for two years before it was discovered.

Shellshock has existed for 22 years, the Times noted. It doesn’t just expose your password — hackers can exploit the flaw to hijack your computer. Heartbleed only affected servers, while Shellshock affects many Internet-connected devices.

However, Shellshock could be harder to exploit, Christopher Budd, global threat communications manager at security firm Trend Micro, told theAssociated Press. Not all machines running Bash can be exploited. It’s not enough for Bash to be installed on your system; you have to be using it for a hacker to exploit the bug.

An Apple spokesman told the Web site iMore OS X systems are safe unless the user configured advanced UNIX services, something only advanced users would know how to do. If your Mac is vulnerable, you only have to worry if you are on a public WiFi network, according to the Times.

According to cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs, the flaw does not affect Microsoft Windows. But the Times said it can affect Android phones.

The flaw affects embedded devices and systems. That includes things like digital watches, MP3 players and traffic lights. “In some areas this will be a challenge to fix, as many embedded devices are not designed with regular updates in mind and will never be able to be patched,” Joe Hancock, a cybersecurity expert with insurer AEGIS in London said in a statement reported by Reuters.

The bug could be exploited to take control of a Web server and steal passwords, Joe Siegrist, CEO of LastPass, a service that stores and protects passwords, told the AP. Though he said the threat of that happening is lower than with Heartbleed.

Shellshock is particularly dangerous because its “wormable,” a term that refers to self-replicating attacks that spread across devices and systems like a viral pandemic.

Power plants and water systems are less threatened if they have followed the advice of security experts and remain disconnected from the internet to avoid such risks, the AP reported.

“Who is at risk” is an open question, however. “Bash is embedded and accessed in so many ways that we cannot fully understand its depth of use,”wrote Securosis analyst and CEO Rich Mogull. “We cannot possibly understand all the ways an attacker could interact with Bash to exploit this vulnerability.”

There’s reportedly not much you can do about it, except check for software updates on the Web sites of companies that make your computer, router and other Internet-connected equipment. An open-source software company called Red Hat released a partial patch for Linux. Apple iscurrently working on a fix.

Google is also working on a fix, Reuters reported.

Five years after Bash was created by a programmer named Brian J. Fox, another programmer named Chet Ramey took over the job of maintaining the software in his free time, when he wasn’t working at his day job as a senior technology architect at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, the Times reported.

Ramey told the Times he thinks he introduced the bug in a new Bash feature in 1992. After Chazelas, the security researcher that discovered it, contacted him on Sept. 12, they collaborated with other people who work with open-source security to create a patch within a few hours. They discreetly tipped off the major software makers so they could address the problem before hackers found out and exploited the bug.

Courtsey:WashingtonPost

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Microsoft pulls Patch Tuesday kernel update - MS14-045 can cause Blue Screen of Death

Microsoft has pulled one of its August 2014 Patch Tuesday updates.

MS14-045, which fixes various security holes in the Windows kernel, can cause a Blue Screen of Death (BSoD), thus forcing a reboot.

Apparently, the BSoD is caused by incorrect handling of the Windows font cache file - and because that happens during boot-up, you end up stuck in a reboot loop.

(Yes, MS14-045 requires a reboot after you've applied it.)

The euphemistically-named "bugcheck" number that you'll see if you are affected is: 0x50 PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA.
The reason this problem didn't show up in testing is because it only happens under rather specific circumstances,

You need to have one or more OpenType Font (OTF) files, installed in non-standard font directories, that are recorded in the registry with fully-qualified filenames.

A default Windows 8.1 install, for instance, includes only TTF (TrueType Font), TTC (TrueType font Collection) and FON (Windows bitmap FONt) files, recorded without pathnames:

Microsoft has published a workaround that will get you up and running again, but it involves a fair amount of fiddling.

You need to:

Boot from installation media or go into Recovery Mode.
Delete the crash-triggering file %WINDOWS%\system32\fntcache.dat.
Reboot normally, which should now succeed.
Save the registry key (see image above) that enumerates your fonts.
Remove from the registry all OTF font references with pathnames.
Delete %WINDOWS%\system32\fntcache.dat again. (It will have been rebuilt.)
Uninstall the MS14-045 update.
Restore the registry key that enumerates your fonts.
Reboot again.
The sort of font entry you need to remove from the registry, if you have any like it, is shown in an example on Microsoft's Knowledgebase page:

As well as MS14-045, three other Microsoft updates may provoke this problem, so any of the following updates should be removed, if you've installed them, in step 7 above:

• 2982791 MS14-045: security update for kernel-mode drivers
• 2970228 New currency symbol for RUB
• 2975719 Aug 2014 rollup for RT 8.1, 8.1, Server 2012 R2
• 2975331 Aug 2014 rollup for RT, 8, Windows Server 2012

Unfortunately, and understandably, Patch Tuesday aftershocks of this sortleave sysamdins wondering if they should approach future updates more cautiously.

We regularly urge you to "patch early, patch often," so let's hope Microsoft's patch for the broken patch goes smoothly, lest even those who weren't affected this time get cold feet next month.

Author - Hack4friends

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Russian PM's Twitter account hacked by Hackers ~ Hack4friends

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev's Twitter account was apparently hacked on Thursday and used to criticize the Russian government and President Vladimir Putin.

Russian PM - Dmitry Medvedev

The first tweet, published on Medvedev's official Twitter account @MedvedevRussia, said -- via translation by The Interpreter -- that he was "resigning," and added that he was "ashamed of the actions of the [Russian] government." Not long after, Medvedev's account put out a series of tweets criticizing Putin and retweets from anti-Russia protesters, including praise of Yale attorney and activist Alexei Navalny, an influential anti-Putin activist.

The tweets were scrubbed from Medvedev's Russian account, which has more than 2.5 million followers, within an hour after they appeared. No tweets have since been published acknowledging that the account was hacked. Medvedev's English language account, @MedvedevRussiaE, does not appear to have been affected.

The Russian government has not commented on the supposed hack.

As prime minister, some see Medvedev as little more than another mouthpiece for Putin. In 2012, Putin appointed Medvedev, who previously served as president of Russia, as the prime minister and the official leader of the United Russia Party. Medvedev also acts as the international face for Russia at meetings with foreign governments.

It's not clear at this point how his account was hacked. Russia has increasingly become a focus for activist hackers as the government continues to tighten its control of the Internet. So far, no activist groups have taken credit for the hack.

Source:BusinessInsider

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Google preferring HTTPS over HTTP in google ranking (SEO) ~ Hack4friends

Google announced that websites using HTTPS, the secure version of HTTP, will have a better chance of ranking well in Google searches than those that don't.

In the vernacular, HTTPS is now a ranking signal for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). It could be an inflection point for web security.

Security is a top priority ... over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We've seen positive results, so we're starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal.

By making HTTPS something that impacts search results Google are applying the stick to an enormous security push that's been all carrots up to now.

Everywhere you look, from better SSL to the tricky business of end-to-end email security, Google are busy rolling out encryption or giving people ways to encrypt things.

Anyone who doubts the energy and seriousness that Google applies to this kind of thing or the effect that it can have need only wind the clock back five years.

In 2009, Google announced they wanted to make the web faster.

Google HTTPSIt wasn't a soundbite, a speech, a project or a campaign - it was a sea change.

Since then Google has created, amongst many other things, a fast public DNS service, a faster web protocol, tools to speed up websites, tools to make code smaller, an image format to make images download faster and a global content distribution network for commonly used code.

They even built their own web browser with a very fast javascript engine and spent millions and millions of dollars banging on about how fast it was.

Most importantly of all they made speed a ranking signal for SEO.

Making speed a ranking signal punished slowness. It's what made organisations care.

To understand why, you need to understand a little of how search engines work and how companies approach getting their websites noticed.

Google uses computer programs (referred to as spiders) to read the world's web pages and index them. The spiders try to determine the subject and quality of each page by measuring a multitude of different factors, known as signals.

The strength of the signals determines where those pages will rank when somebody types a search into the Google search engine.

Good signals means high rankings, more traffic and more revenue. Poor signals can put you out of business.

There are hundreds of signals but they aren't all equally important - some have far more impact than others. To prevent people from gaming their system Google is deliberately vague about how many signals it cares about, what they are and how much each one matters.

Thanks to a lot of research and some vague pronouncements from Google we have a pretty good idea of what some of the signals are and some idea of their weighting.

According to their blog, HTTPS will start off as a weak signal:

For now it's only a very lightweight signal — affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content — while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.

In reality, in my experience at least, even low strength signals get plenty of attention.

Because Google is cagey about what signals are worth, because organisations can't easily test and isolate their website's signals and because there is intense competition for good Google rankings those that care about SEO will generally act on any ranking factors that are well defined, regardless of how small their effect.

Companies like nothing better than lists with ticks next to them so if a ranking factor comes down to a simple yes or no choice it gets done.

Before Google made site speed a ranking factor I hardly ever had conversations with organisations about how fast their websites were. Now we always talk about it.

From now on they'll have something else to talk about - a simple binary choice: "Does our website use HTTPS?"

Increasingly the answer will be yes.

Source: compiled from online sources

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Foursquare android app tracks your location by default everytime ~ Hack4friends

Foursquare, makers of the popular app that lets you "check in" wherever you go, unveiled a new version this week that the company hopes will make it the go-to service for local search.

In fact, Foursquare founder and CEO Dennis Crowley hopes the new Foursquare app will become indispensable, providing users with tips and recommendations - more like targeted ads - based on their location.

"To actually get an app to talk to you like a friend would talk to you. That's what we're going at here," Crowley tells Wired in an interview.

In order to make this vision become a reality, the Foursquare app tracks users' "background location" - using a combination of GPS, nearby Wi-Fi signals, and cell towers - even when the app is closed.

Gone is the old "check-in," which required you to tag yourself at a location (this formula has been shunted off to a separate app called Swarm).

Now the Foursquare app pushes out notifications based on where you are and what you like - if you've told the app you like vintage clothing, it will alert you to nearby thrift shops, for example.

Admittedly, this sounds kind of cool - an app that knows what you like and makes recommendations tailored to you and your location.

But there's a problem that should alarm anyone concerned about their privacy.

Giving up your location whenever your phone is on - even without the app running - is the default setting (versions of the app older than 8.0.0 required users to "opt in" to get this service).

If it makes you a little uncomfortable for Foursquare to track your every move, you have to "opt out" and disable the feature in the app's settings or in the privacy settings when you log into the Foursquare website.

Foursquare location settingsHow to opt out

When you download the Foursquare app or update to the new version, the app tells you that your phone's background location will be tracked, and points you to the settings to turn it off.

To opt out, open the app and go to  Settings | Location Settings and un-tick the box next to Location Services.

This screen tells you that the feature will be turned off automatically if your battery is running low, but it somewhat obscures the fact that the feature is otherwise always on.

Foursquare uses your phone’s background location to help you find great places, even when your phone is in your pocket. When you arrive at a place with interesting tips, we'll send you a notification. Your location is never shared.

To disable background location from the Foursquare website, go to Settings | Privacy settings.

Un-tick the box that says:

Allow Foursquare to use my device's background location, even when the app is closed, including for features like sending you notifications with local recommendations or tips.

Now that's pretty easy. So why not let users opt in instead of opting out?

Based on Foursquare's business model of giving businesses a way to share recommendations and deals with users, it's probably a good assumption that the answer is "money talks, [user] walks."

As Crowley told the Wall Street Journal, the constant collection of data on users can reveal trends that can be useful to advertisers, who "might be really excited about getting their hands on that data."

Opting in means having options

You might be thinking, "What's the big deal? Users of Foursquare choose to tell everyone their location anyway."

True. But in previous versions of the app, it was the user who made the choice to broadcast their location, and only when they wanted to check in.

Now, Foursquare assumes you want to share that information with the app all the time, and without asking for your permission.

In the current climate of government surveillance, data mining, and social media oversharing, there's a growing resistance to invasions of privacy - even among people who don't hesitate to share what they're doing and feeling at every possible moment.

Even if you're comfortable giving away your privacy for convenience, it's more than a little naive to assume your personal data is well-protected and only being used in your best interests.

Look at the current crop of mobile messaging apps like WhatsApp and Viber - both were storing your messages in unencrypted form, until security researchers discovered that anyone could use Wi-Fi sniffers to intercept messages and see everything that users shared via the apps.

Then there's the 800 pound gorilla of social networks, Facebook, which is under fire from regulators and the subject of lawsuits from users for its aggressive data mining.

Facebook even copped to an experiment on non-consenting users.

If we don't expect the apps and websites we've come to rely on to give us control over how our data is used, one day we may wake up and have no choice at all.

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CHINA charges Microsoft windows 8 for backdoor-spying

Microsoft and China are at odds over the issue of cyberspying, with Windows 8 caught in the crossfire.

State-run broadcaster China Central Television lashed out Wednesday at the latest version of Windows and charged that it's capable of collecting a huge amount of data on Chinese society. In a transcript of the CCTV interview published by the Wall Street Journal, an academic shared his opinion on the type of data that Microsoft can allegedly collect through its OS.

"It's very easy for providers of operating systems to obtain various types of sensitive user information," Ni Guangnan, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, told the interviewer. "They can find out your identity, your account information, your contact list, your mobile phone number. With all that data together, using big data analysis, a party can understand the conditions and activities of our national economy and society."

Adding fuel to the fire, Guangnan pointed to the classified documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden as proof that Microsoft has worked with the US government to obtain encrypted data over the Internet.

In response, Microsoft used its own Weibo account to refute the charges and deny all allegations of backdoor spying in collaboration with the US government. As translated in a story by Neowin, Microsoft's denials break down into five points. According to Neowin, Microsoft said it has:

• Never "assisted any government in an attack of another government or clients."
• Never "provided any government the authority to directly visit...products or services."
• Never provided a "backdoor" to products or services.
• Never provided client data or information to the US government or the NSA.
• Never "concealed any requests from any government for information about its clients."

Microsoft's war of words with China is part of a larger skirmish between the US and Chinese governments. Charges of cyberspying between the two countries is nothing new. But since the revelations of NSA spying activities were leaked last year, China has used the opportunity to accuse such companies as Microsoft, Google, and Apple of cooperating with the NSA to gather data and steal state secrets. Tech companies have acknowledged that they are required to share certain customer data at the request of the government but have denied that they collaborate with the government or build backdoors into their products and services to allow data to be siphoned.

Such charges can damage a company's reputation and bottom line. In the case of Microsoft, China last month announced a ban on Windows 8 for government computers. At the time, China's state-run Xinhua news agency said simply that the ban was designed to improve security. However, China likely has another motive for wanting to put the kibosh on Windows 8 beyond security fears.

Microsoft has long accused China of widespread piracy of Windows. In 2011, former CEO Steve Ballmer told employees that Microsoft's revenue in China represented only 5 percent of sales in the US although the two markets were about the same size, according to the Journal. As such, a significant number of the PCs in China still running the now-unsupported Windows XP may be using illegal copies.

Microsoft wants to implement a server-based licensing system in China as one way to fight software piracy, the Journal added. And since the software giant no longer sells or supports Windows XP, Chinese consumers would be forced to upgrade to a more modern operating system, such as Windows 8.

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Bing servers more worst search engine services than Google

An independent testing lab in Germany has found that search engines are not 100 per cent effective at removing malicious sites from results — and Microsoft's Bing is much less effective than Google.

Although most search engines have measures in place to protect users against trojans, malicious sites still manage to crop up from time to time — even in the top search results. An independent testing lab in Germany by the name of AV-Test has just completed an 18-month survey (PDF) to find out which search engines are the worst offenders.

The lab tested 40 million websites across seven search engines — Google and Bing, the world's two most popular search engines; Yandex, Russia's biggest search engine; Blekko; peer-to-peer search engine Faroo; Teoma, better known as Ask.com; and Chinese search engine Baidu — and found only a very small number of malicious results returned: about 5000, or around 0.000125 per cent.

Google and Bing were both tested with around 10 million websites, and were the best at weeding out malware. However, it should be noted that there was quite a gap between the two: Bing turned up 1285 malicious sites to Google's 272.

AV-Test also cautioned that malware developers are getting sneaky, using search engine optimisation (SEO) to slip malicious websites into the top search results, since users tend to trust top results more.

Generally speaking, your chances of catching a trojan from a search engine are very low, but it never hurts to be prepared. Make sure your computer's operating system, your browser and your anti-virus software are up to date, and, if you're really worried, use AVG's Linkscanner to check URLs before you visit them.

Source : cnet news

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MTGOX world's largest bitcoin trading website turned OFFLINE ~ Hack4friends

MTGOX world's largest bitcoin trading website turned OFFLINE ~ Hack4friends

As we all know in recent days the virtual currency-Bitcoins gained much popularity among all countries's people. And its exchange value to US Dollars raised to 1200$. But now its going to smashed because its exchange values is also decreasing day by day and today its value downed to 425.304$(Biggest fall).

MTGOX got much popularity in few months and ranked as No. 1 online bitcoin trading website.But now website is disappeared from internet and a blank page is left on their website. People from all countries have invested so millions of Dollars($) for online trading with Bitcoins but MTGOX disappeared with all money.
Mark Karpeles, CEO of the pioneering but troubled Bitcoin exchange MtGox, has resigned his seat on the board of the Bitcoin Foundation, the organization that standardizes and promotes the cryptocurrency.

MtGox, which handled the bulk of Bitcoin transactions until fraudulent hacking forced it to freeze withdrawals earlier this month, has had serious liquidity problems since last year. Though others were subsequently hit too, Bitcoin Foundation chief scientist Gavin Andresen blamed the exchange rather than the core protocol for the episode, and MtGox’s systems have struggled to recover.
                                   
                              
                                           All tweets are deleted by MTGOX

The Tokyo-based company has repeatedly promised a fix but failed to deliver. Its most recent communication was on Thursday, claiming that “security problems” had forced it to relocate, slowing down its progress in fixing its records after the attack. It’s not clear whether this is a reference to the couple of angry bitcoiners who were camped outside the MtGox offices, demanding their money.

In a statement on Sunday, the Bitcoin Foundation said it was “grateful for [MtGox's] early and valuable contributions as a founding member in launching the Bitcoin Foundation.” A request for comment from MtGox itself had gone unanswered at the time of writing, though as many have noted the company has deleted its entire tweet history, so take from that what you will.

We also contacted to MTGOX via their old email addresses but till now we have not got any response from their side about it all.

Team Hack4Friends,
@E-Hackers

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Biggest DDos attack of the world with 400Gbps ~ Hack4Friends

Biggest DDos attack of the world with 400Gbps ~ Hack4Friends

A massive distributed-denial-of-service attack Monday reached more than 400Gbps at its peak, about 33 percent greater than last year's Spamhaus attack, the previous DDoS record-holder.
The attack was apparently directed at one of the customers of content delivery network and security provider CloudFlare, which first reported the attack. The company said it appeared that attackers leveraged a flaw in the Network Time Protocol (NTP), a network protocol used to synchronize computer clock times.

"Very big NTP reflection attack hitting us right now. Appears to be bigger than the #Spamhaus attack from last year. Mitigating," Cloudflare CEO Matthew Price said in a tweet. "Someone's got a big, new cannon. Start of ugly things to come," he wrote in a follow-up tweet.
Price did not identify the customer targeted by the attack but did say it was directed at servers in Europe, adding that "these NTP reflection attacks are getting really nasty."
The frequency of NTP reflection attacks has grown in recent months. After an NTP attack was used to take down game servers hosting EA's Origin service, Blizzard's Battle.net, and League of Legends, among others, US-CERT issued an alert warning companies of the attack technique's growing popularity.
The basic attack technique consists of attackers querying vulnerable NTP servers for traffic counts using the victim's spoofed address.
"Due to the spoofed source address, when the NTP server sends the response it is sent instead to the victim," CERT warned. "Because the size of the response is typically considerably larger than the request, the attacker is able to amplify the volume of traffic directed at the victim."

"Because the responses are legitimate data coming from valid servers, it is especially difficult to block these types of attacks," US-CERT said in its January advisory, which included suggestions on how administrators could mitigate vulnerability.
The technique's popularity has grown since the emergence of toolkits such as DNS Flooder v1.1, according to security vendor Prolexic, which said Tuesday it has observed the attack used on several clients during the past six months, sometimes with amplification factors of 50 times the originating bandwidth.
"This toolkit uses a unique method where attackers assign DNS servers with arbitrary names and utilize them as reflectors," according to Prolexic's report. "This new technique allows malicious actors to purchase, set up, and use their own DNS servers to launch reflection attacks, without the need to find open and vulnerable DNS servers on the Internet."
Monday's DDoS surpassed the attack last March that peaked with a 300Gbps torrent of traffic flooding spam fighter Spamhaus, CloudFlare, and key Internet switching stations in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and London. That onslaught resulted, according to some reports, service slowdowns across the Internet.

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Flappy Bird fakes are hatching Android malware ~ Hack4friends

Flappy Bird fakes are hatching Android malware ~ Hack4friends

Flappy Bird's takedown by its creator has given malware creators a new outlet to exploit unsuspecting users.
According to security firm Sophos, it has discovered several applications claiming to be Flappy Bird in third-party Android app marketplaces. The trouble, however, is that the games in some cases contain malware and in others force users to send a text message to a given number, effectively giving the malware creators all they need to potentially exploit users.

Another security firm, Trend Micro, also chimed in on the issue, saying that it has discovered "a bunch of fake Android Flappy Bird apps spreading online." Every one of those it has discovered so far are "apps that send messages to premium numbers, thus causing unwanted changes to victims' phone billing statements."
Flappy Bird has become a hot-button issue in the mobile world after the game soared to popularity and was subsequently taken down by its creator, Dong Nguyen. That was the opening malware creators needed, the security firms say, to take advantage of users who didn't have a chance to try out the game and want to see what all the hype is about.
Both Trend Micro and Sophos said that users shouldn't attempt to download anything calling itself Flappy Bird, since the original version is "dead." They also warned users to "be wary of apps from alternative markets."

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Snapchat hack spams users with smoothie photos ~ Hack4Friends

Snapchat hack spams users with smoothie photos ~ Hack4Friends

Snapchat is combating yet another security issue, and it's a juicy one.
In a story posted late Tuesday, Wired editor Joe Brown said his Snapchat friends were asking why he was sending them messages with photos of fruit smoothies. That was a surprise to Brown because he hadn't sent any such messages. Other Snapchatters have since complained about receiving these same messages, according to a Twitter search.
The messages serve up a URL for a company called Snapfroot, which then redirects the recipient to an AllRecipes.com page for a "Berry Delicious" smoothie. The spam outbreak so far seems innocuous, albeit annoying, but it does point to yet another vulnerability for the photo-sharing site.

Snapchat

Snapchat told Brown that these messages have been bouncing around the past couple of days.
"It's mostly cases where someone has your e-mail address and password and gets in on the first try," an anonymous Snapchat spokesperson told Wired. "We're not seeing any evidence of brute-force tactics."
Snapchat is trying to plug the leak. In the meantime, site users may want to change their passwords. The spokesperson also advised people to stay away from third-party apps that ask for your Snapchat username and password.
"Yesterday a small number of our users experienced a spam incident where unwanted photos were sent from their accounts," a Snapchat representative told Reuters. "Our security team deployed additional measures to secure accounts. We recommend using unique and strong passwords to prevent abuse."

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Adobe issues emergency Update for flash (Windows & MAC)

Adobe issues emergency Update for flash (Windows & MAC)

Adobe is recommending that users update their Flash Players immediately -- especially those who frequent Google Chrome and Internet Explorer. The company released an emergency security bulletin on Tuesday that addresses vulnerabilities in Flash, which could be exploited by hackers.

hack4friends, flash player

"This vulnerability could allow an attacker to remotely take control of the affected system," Adobe wrote in a blog post. "Adobe is aware of reports that an exploit for this vulnerability exists in the wild, and recommends users apply the updates referenced in the security bulletin."
Adobe assigned a Priority 1 rating to the vulnerabilities being exploited on Windows and Macintosh and advised users of both operating systems to install the update. That rating -- Adobe's highest threat level -- identifies "vulnerabilities being targeted, or which have a higher risk of being targeted, by exploit(s) in the wild." The bulletin also said that the Flash vulnerability faced by Linux users rated a Priority 3, which refers to "a product that has historically not been a target for attackers."
Adobe recommends users update to the latest versions:
Users of Adobe Flash Player 12.0.0.43 and earlier versions for Windows and Macintosh should update to Adobe Flash Player 12.0.0.44.
Users of Adobe Flash Player 11.2.202.335 and earlier versions for Linux should update to Adobe Flash Player 11.2.202.336.
Adobe Flash Player 12.0.0.41 installed with Google Chrome will automatically be updated to the latest Google Chrome version, which will include Adobe Flash Player 12.0.0.44 for Windows, Macintosh and Linux.
Adobe Flash Player 12.0.0.38 installed with Internet Explorer 10 will automatically be updated to the latest Internet Explorer 10 version, which will include Adobe Flash Player 12.0.0.44 for Windows 8.0.
Adobe Flash Player 12.0.0.38 installed with Internet Explorer 11 will automatically be updated to the latest Internet Explorer 11 version, which will include Adobe Flash Player 12.0.0.44 for Windows 8.1.

You can update your flash player from here Officially 

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France Govt. fined Google,Over data privacy

France's privacy regulatory organization served up a fine and a dose of embarrassment to Google on Wednesday.
As expected, the national committee on information and liberty (CNIL) served up a 150,000 euros fine (approximately $200,000). The amount won't mean much to Google financially. But in addition to the fine, the group demanded that Google post a warning on its French home page, Google.fr.

The warning must state that the company's unified privacy policy from March 1, 2012 does not comply with French law.
CNIL justified its demand that Google post the warning because of "the extent of Google's data collection, as well as by the necessity to inform the persons concerned who are not in a capacity to exercise their rights."
CNIL's Sanctions Committee said that while it did not have a problem with Google's intent to streamline its privacy policies into one, it found that the new policy had violated several provisions of the French Data Protection Act.
Google was found at fault for not sufficiently protecting its customers' personal data in four instances:
The company does not sufficiently inform its users of the conditions in which their personal data are processed, nor of the purposes of this processing. They may therefore neither understand the purposes for which their data are collected, which are not specific as the law requires, nor the ambit of the data collected through the different services concerned. Consequently, they are not able to exercise their rights, in particular their right of access, objection or deletion.
The company does not comply with its obligation to obtain user consent prior to the storage of cookies on their terminals.
It fails to define retention periods applicable to the data which it processes.
Finally, it permits itself to combine all the data it collects about its users across all of its services without any legal basis.
CNIL's announcement also noted that data protection regulatory groups in Spain and the Netherlands came to similar conclusions in November and December of last year.
Google took a noncommittal stance in its response to CNIL's demands. "We've engaged fully with the CNIL throughout this process to explain our privacy policy and how it allows us to create simpler, more effective services. We'll be reading their report closely to determine next steps," said a Google spokesperson.

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Researchers report security flaw in Samsung's Galaxy S4

Researchers report security flaw in Samsung's Galaxy S4

 Here's some Grinchy news for those of you who put Samsung's Galaxy S4 on your holiday wish list: Israeli researchers have identified a vulnerability in the smartphone that allegedly allows a hacker to easily intercept secure data.

We did not immediately hear back from Samsung with a response to the reported flaw, but the company has told The Wall Street Journal and other news outlets that it's looking into the issues and thus far doesn't believe the problem is as serious as the researchers present in their findings.

The report comes not only as many Galaxy S4 phones sit wrapped up under Christmas trees, but also as Samsung pitches its new Knox security platform, used in the device, to federal agencies like the Department of Defense.

 The Knox software offers high-level encryption, a VPN feature, and a way to separate personal data from work data. It also enables IT administrators to manage a mobile device through specific policies, and Samsung hopes it will appeal to security-sensitive clients as a replacement for BlackBerry devices. Knox-enabled devices have already been approved by the Pentagon for government use.

The alleged vulnerability was discovered earlier this month by researchers at Ben-Gurion University's Cyber Security Labs. Specifically, they say while the Knox is the most advanced security-driven infrastructure for mobile phones, the alleged flaw enables malicious software to track e-mails and record data communications. The flaw was uncovered by Ph.D. student Mordechai Guri during an unrelated research task.

"Knox has been widely adopted by many organizations and government agencies and this weakness has to be addressed immediately before it falls into the wrong hands," he said. "We are also contacting Samsung in order to provide them with the full technical details of the breach so it can be fixed immediately." 

via Online Sources

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Wickr 2.0 makes self-destructing SMS -- Care about Privacy

Wickr 2.0 makes self-destructing SMS -- Care about Privacy

Wickr 2.0's debut on Friday makes it much easier to invite friends to use the app, thanks to a new address-book scanning feature that prevents Wickr from learning who you're inviting. That's a big difference from just about every other service out there, which accesses your address book -- usually with your permission -- and then holds on to that data like the digital gold that it is.

Nico Sell, co-founder of Wickr, said that it was important to the company to avoid holding any sensitive information about its customers on its servers
 "Unlike other apps, Wickr does not upload your contact book to our servers; your contacts never leave your device," she said. "We create a cryptographic representation of your contacts that we store on our servers to match with your friends."

Available now on iOS and on Android in the next few days, the Wickr update still uses some of the toughest standards for major encryption protocol available. It uses ECDH-512 encryption to protect your data; ECDH-512 for the security key exchange; RSA-4096 both as a backup and in legacy versions of the app; and SHA-256 for Transport Later Security and hashing. Once it encrypts a message, the keys are used only once then destroyed by the sender's phone. Since Wickr's servers don't have the decryption keys, there's no way for Wickr to access your messages.

Whit Diffie, co-inventor of the ECDH standard, is a Wickr adviser. The company boasts a veritable who's who roster of privacy bona fides on its advisory board, including Cory Doctorow, Paul Kocher, and Brian Behlendorf.

On top of all that, the service deletes attachment metadata to ensure that the company knows even less about you.

Sell thinks that her free app is at the forefront of a new movement to protect people from government intrusion, no small effort in the wake of the NSA leaks by Edward Snowden.
 "I believe this is the first bacterial growth app ever invented," she said, explaining "bacterial" as being "beneficial to society."

"We plan to license this piece of tech to all the messaging apps in trouble with regulators for abusing users' contact books," Sell said of Wickr's business model.

Wickr 2.0 ditches the mostly-red interface for a streamlined white one with red accents. While the interface makes the app easier to use, the company has invested in other usability features to compete more directly with its competition.

You can now finally reset your password without it being as big a hassle as before; customize your avatar, contact names, and group names; invite multiple friends at once; and send insecure e-mail or SMS from Wickr. For the last one, it warns you when you're about to send a message to a non-Wickr recipient.

Wickr still may not be for everyone, but for people who value sending private messages privately that are authentically difficult -- if not impossible -- to be read by anyone but the intended recipient -- then Wickr is one of the best messaging apps around. 

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Target data stolen in hack showing up on black market --

Target data stolen in hack showing up on black market

As if the Target hack ordeal couldn't get any worse -- data from the retail chain's massive security breach stolen between November 27 and December 15 is popping up in huge quantities on the black market, The New York Times reported Friday.

After Target conceded Thursday that its in-store point-of-sale systems were indeed hacked, compromising as many as 40 million debit and credit card accounts, fraud industry experts are seeing the information flood online card-selling markets to the tune of a "ten- to twentyfold increase" in high-value cards.

The hack, which affected only shoppers who made purchases physically at Target stores and not online customers, was a sophisticated operation. It allowed the hackers to glean customer names, credit and debit card numbers, expiration dates, and three-digit security codes from customers, data that can then be burned onto counterfeit cards and sold on the black market typically for $20 to $45 apiece.

However, Brian Krebs, the security blogger who broke the story of the breach, reported Friday that batches of up to 1 million cards were selling for anywhere from $20 to as high as $100 per card.

 Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel released a statement assuring customers that no one will be held responsible for fraudulent charges and that only a few instances of fraud had since been reported. That echoes a sentiment by Visa yesterday in a statement to CNET in which a company spokesperson said, "Because of advanced fraud-monitoring capabilities, the incidence of fraud involving compromised accounts is actually rare, and Visa fraud rates remain near historic lows."

Steinhafel also said that no PINs had been compromised, a grave concern for those potentially affected as compromised PINs would allow one in possession of a counterfeit card to withdraw cash from an ATM. He added that Target had no reason to believe that customers' Social Security numbers or dates of birth were scooped up in the hack.

Target expects to have notified all 40 million of those affected via e-mail by the end of the weekend. In an attempt to save itself for what will inevitably be a disastrous hit to its holiday sales, Steinhafel also announced a promotion: 

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Snowden's Christmas message about Privacy of ordinary person

 Snowden's Christmas message about Privacy of ordinary person

Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency whistleblower, delivered a video message on Christmas Day via UK's Channel 4 with a simple theme: "privacy matters."

"A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They'll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves -- an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought," Snowden said in the 1-minute, 43-second message. "And that's a problem because privacy matters. Privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be."

          Must watch this video if you care about your privacy

Snowden referenced George Orwell's "1984" and noted the book's dystopian visions of microphones, video cameras, and televisions that watch people "are nothing compared to what we have available today. We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go." 

 He also used the message as an appeal to people everywhere to rally against widespread surveillance.

"The conversation occurring today will determine the amount of trust we can place both in the technology that surrounds us and the government that regulates it. Together, we can find a better balance," he said. "End mass surveillance. And remind the government that if it really wants to know how we feel, asking is always cheaper than spying."

UK's Channel 4 chose Snowden for its annual alternative message and response to Queen Elizabeth's annual Christmas address.

Snowden has temporary asylum in Russia following his leaks earlier this year about the National Security Agency's extensive electronic surveillance programs. The US Justice Department's charges against him include violations of the Espionage Act. 

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MacBook Webcams can be used to covertly spy on people -- With proof

MacBook Webcams can be used to covertly spy on people -- With proof

Imagine going about your daily life and then one day receiving photos of yourself from inside your home. Sound spooky? Well, this really happened to a woman named Cassidy Wolf, according to the Washington Post. And, to make matters worse, she was nude in the photos.

How did this happen?
Apparently, there's a way for hackers to spy on people via their iSight Webcams in older Apple MacBooks. Typically, when the camera is on a little light is also set off. But, in a newly discovered workaround, this light can be deactivated -- meaning unsuspecting victims have no clue they're being watched.
The Washington Post revealed this new research by Johns Hopkins computer scientist Stephen Checkoway, which shows how people can be spied on with MacBooks and iMacs released before 2008. Using proof-of-concept software, called Remote Administration Tool or RAT, Checkoway was able to reprogram the iSight camera's micro-controller chip so that the light doesn't turn on.

While it could be feasible to do this trick on newer Apple computers or laptops by other brands, it hasn't yet been proven possible.
In the case of Wolf, who was Miss Teen USA, the person spying on her was her high school classmate Jared Abrahams. The FBI was able to nab Abrahams, who pleaded guilty to extortion in October.
In another report by the Washington Post, the former assistant director of the FBI's Operational Technology Division Marcus Thomas said the FBI has been activating computer cameras without turning on the warning lights for years.

This is not the first time someone has been remotely spied on with a Webcam, but it is the first known time that it's been done without the warning light being triggered.

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Google upgraded its web security certificate to 2048-bit encryption

Google upgraded its web security certificate to 2048-bit encryption

Never again are you going to get a Google Web site whose security certificate is protected with comparatively weak 1,024-bit encryption.

The Net giant has secured all its certificates with 2,048-bit RSA encryption keys or better, Google security engineer Dan Dulay said in a blog post Monday. Certificates are used to set up encrypted communications between a Web server and Web browser.

That means two things. First, traffic will be harder to decrypt since 1,024-bit keys aren't in use at Google anymore. Second, retiring the 1,024-bit keys means the computing industry can retire the technology altogether by declaring such keys untrustworthy.

Click to enlarge this image

Google has been aggressively moving to stronger encryption because of U.S. government surveillance by the National Security Agency. According to documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the agency gathered bulk data off Internet taps, including unencrypted data sent between company data centers on its own network, and actively worked to undermine encryption.

Google said it beat its internal end-of-year deadline for the 2,048-bit move. It's also moved to encrypt its internal data transfer between data centers, a move that Yahoo also is making.

In other words, the Net's technology giants are working actively to make surveillance, authorized or not, significantly harder.

"Worry in Silicon Valley/Puget Sound: furor over NSA will cost billions cuz foreign customers fear US companies can't guarantee security," tweeted Strobe Talbott, president of analyst firm Brookings Institution, referring to the geographic regions where tech powers such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, Twitter, Apple, LinkedIn, and Amazon are located.

There's a lot of work to be done yet, though.Google also supports a standard called "forward secrecy," which uses different keys for different sessions so that decrypting a single message doesn't mean previous messages can likewise be decrypted using the same key. But many other Net giants don't support forward secrecy -- though that's changing, too.

Source -Online media

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