CIA director John Brennan told US senators they shouldn't worry about mandatory encryption backdoors hurting American businesses.
And that's because, according to Brennan, there's no one else for people to turn to: if they don't want to use US-based technology because it's been forced to use weakened cryptography, they'll be out of luck because non-American solutions are simply "theoretical."
On June 14, someone using what appears to have been a list of e-mail addresses and passwords obtained from the breach of "other online services" made a massive number of login attempts to GitHub's repository service. A review of logins by GitHub's administrators found that the attacker had gained access to a number of accounts, according to a blog post by Shawn Davenport, Vice President of Security at GitHub.
Twitter accounts belonging to supporters of Isis have been hacked in the wake of the Orlando shooting, with jihadist content replaced with gay pride messages and links to gay pornography.
A hacker affiliated with the hacktivist collective Anonymous, who uses the online moniker WauchulaGhost, first began hijacking pro-Isis Twitter accounts several months ago. Following the mass shooting at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, on 13 June, the hacker decided to replace Isis imagery posted to the accounts with rainbow flags and pro-LGBT messages.
In an intriguing follow-up to Tuesday's report that Russian hackers gained access to Democratic National Committee servers, an anonymous blogger has claimed he alone was responsible for the breach and backed up the claim by publishing what purport to be authentic DNC documents taken during the online heist.
Attackers are infecting computers with a new ransomware program called RAA that's written entirely in JavaScript and locks users' files by using strong encryption.
Most malware programs for Windows are written in compiled programming languages like C or C++ and take the form of portable executable files such as .exe or .dll. Others use command-line scripting such as Windows batch or PowerShell.
Imagine a corporate bookkeeper gets an email from his CEO that says, “Hey, I need the W-2s for everybody in the company.” The diligent bookkeeper gathers the requested tax documents and sends them off to the executive. But the initial email wasn’t really penned by the CEO—it was written by a crook who broke into the executive’s email account. The goal: to carry out a new type of cybercrime called “business email compromise” or BEC, which hackers have used to try to steal billions of dollars in recent years.
In the world of cyberespionage, the Chinese are king. More nation-state attacks are attributed to it than any other country. Though the assumption has been that the motive behind most of this spying was to gain a competitive advantage for Chinese companies, there had not been much proof. Until now. A new espionage campaign attributed to China shows an almost one-to-one correlation between the breaches and China’s economic interests.
The US Democratic National Committee (DNC) has confirmed that hackers thought to be part of Russian state intelligence have had access to their servers for nearly a year. They have read emails, chat logs, and opposition research documents.
The attack was uncovered six weeks ago, after IT admins noticed something strange was going on in the DNC's servers. All the computers in the opposition research department had been accessed and two files had been stolen.
Adobe will take two days to push a critical patch to Flash, which is currently being used to launch attacks by hackers.
The company said in a security advisory on Tuesday that it was "aware" of a report for an exploit in the wild, which the company said hackers could use for "limited, targeted attacks." A successful exploitation of the flaw could let an attacker full access to the affected system, it read.
As part of a years-long cyber attack, North Korean hackers have allegedly stolen 42,000 materials from South Korean organizations and government agencies, including blueprints for F-15 fighter jet wings.
The hacking began in 2014 and was first detected in February, according to South Korea's police cyber investigation unit. Reuters reports that more than 40,000 of the materials stolen were defense-related.
