the-hacker-news

Turkish Hackers Are Giving Away Prizes For Participating In DDoS Attacks DDoS has become a game now that could knock any service offline. A Turkish hacking group is encouraging individuals to join its DDoS-for-Points platform that features points and prizes for carrying out distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against a list of predetermined targets. The points earned can later be redeemed for various online click-fraud and hacking tools. Dubbed  Sath-ı Müdafaa , translated as Surface Defense in English, this DDoS-for-Points platform is advertised via local Turkish hacking forums, including Turkhackteam and Root Developer. Surface Defense prompts other hackers in Turkey to sign up and asks them to attack political websites using a DDoS tool known as  Balyoz , translated as Sledgehammer. According to Forcepoint security researchers, who  discovered  this program, Balyoz works via Tor and requires a username and password to log in. The tool then uses a DoS tech...

Yahoo Flaw Allowed Hackers to Read Anyone's Emails Yahoo has patched a critical security vulnerability in its Mail service that could have allowed an attacker to spy on any Yahoo user's inbox. Jouko Pynnönen, a Finnish Security researcher from security firm Klikki Oy, reported a DOM based persistent XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) in Yahoo mail, which if exploited, allows an attacker to send emails embedded with malicious code. In his  blog post  published today, the researcher demonstrated how a malicious attacker could have sent the victim's inbox to an external site, and created a virus that attached itself to all outgoing emails by secretly adding a malicious script to message signatures. Since the malicious code is in the message's body, the code will get executed as soon as the victim opens the boobytrapped email and its hidden payload script will covertly submit victim's inbox content to an external website controlled by the attacker. This issue is because Yahoo ...

Spammers using Facebook Messenger to Spread Locky Ransomware If you came across any Facebook Message with an image file (exactly .SVG file format) send by any of your Facebook friends, just avoid clicking it. An ongoing Facebook spam campaign is spreading malware downloader among Facebook users by taking advantage of innocent-looking SVG image file to infect computers. If clicked, the file would eventually infect your PC with the nasty Locky Ransomware, a family of malware that has quickly become one of the favorite tools among criminals due to its infecting capabilities. Discovered by malware researcher  Bart Blaze , the attack campaign uses Facebook Messenger to spread a malware downloader called Nemucod that takes the form of .SVG image files. Why SVG file?  Hackers considered SVG (or Scalable Vector Graphics) files for spreading the malware downloader, because SVG has the ability to contain embedded content such as JavaScript, and can be opened in a modern w...

Hacker who stole Celebrity Emails, Sex Tapes, Movie Scripts Gets 5 Years in Prison A hacker who was arrested last year for hacking into celebrities' email accounts to steal the unreleased movie and television scripts, their private messages, and sex tapes to sell them has finally been sentenced five years in prison. Alonzo Knowles , a 24-year-old Bahamian man, was convicted by U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer in Manhattan on Tuesday. Knowles, who maintained a list of emails and phone numbers of 130 celebrities, pleaded guilty in May to charges of identity theft and criminal copyright infringement. The sentence is twice longer than the amount of years the federal sentencing guidelines suggested, as the judge felt that Knowles  "would be a clear and present danger to commit the very same crime again,"  the New York Times  reports . The hacker expressed remorse in court and had already handed over unreleased scripts, songs, and $1,900 in cash. The authorities arrested ...

recover your account Facebook  through friend The only time when my Facebook's password was reset, it was back 2012, when few of trusted friends exploited Facebook's Trusted Friends password reset feature in order to compromise my account and defame me. Though i managed to stop them in achieving their malicious goals.  But, a lesson was learned not to trust anyone with your confidential stuff. if you expect loyalty get a dog.

New Drammer Android Hack lets Apps take Full control (root) of Earlier last year, security researchers from Google's Project Zero outlined a way to hijack the computers running Linux by abusing a design flaw in the memory and gaining higher kernel privileges on the system. Now, the same previously found designing weakness has been exploited to gain unfettered "root" access to millions of Android smartphones, allowing potentially anyone to take control of affected devices. Researchers in the VUSec Lab at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam have discovered a vulnerability that targets a device's dynamic random access memory (DRAM) using an attack called Rowhammer. Although we are already aware of the Rowhammer attack, this is the very first time when researchers have successfully used this attack to target mobile devices. What is DRAM Rowhammer Attack? The Rowhammer attack against mobile devices is equally dangerous because it potentially puts all critical data on millions of ...

Hacking Millions with Just an Image — Recipe: Pixels, Ads & Exploit Kit If you have visited any popular mainstream website over the past two months, your computer may have been infected — Thanks to a new exploit kit discovered by security researchers. Researchers from antivirus provider ESET released a  report  on Tuesday stating that they have discovered an exploit kit, dubbed  Stegano , hiding malicious code in the pixels of banner advertisements that are currently in rotation on several high profile news websites. Stegano originally dates back to 2014, but since early October this year, cyber crooks had managed to get the malicious ads displayed on a variety of unnamed reputable news websites, each with Millions of daily visitors. Stegano derived from the word  Steganography , which is a technique of hiding messages and content inside a digital graphic image, making the content impossible to spot with the naked eye. In this particular malvertising campaign, op...