Hacks

WhatsApp Hacking The recent controversies surrounding the  WhatsApp hacking  haven't yet settled, and the world's most popular messaging platform could be in the choppy waters once again. The vulnerability — tracked as  CVE-2019-11931  — is a stack-based buffer overflow issue that resided in the way previous WhatsApp versions parse the elementary stream metadata of an MP4 file, resulting in denial-of-service or remote code execution attacks. To remotely exploit the vulnerability, all an attacker needs is the phone number of targeted users and send them a maliciously crafted MP4 file over WhatsApp, which eventually can be programmed to install a malicious backdoor or spyware app on the compromised devices silently. The vulnerability affects both consumers as well as enterprise apps of WhatsApp for all major platforms, including Google Android, Apple iOS, and Microsoft Windows. According to an  advisory  published by Facebook, which owns WhatsApp,...

Researchers discovered a mass malware distribution campaign that utilizing the well-known political figures in the U.S. including President Donald Trump, former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton with a series of ransomware, screen lockers, RATs and other malicious applications. A variety of malicious applications uncovered with this campaign, and it was developed to infect the victims with ransomware, implant a backdoor in organization networks with political motivation. Researchers believe that the malware authors are motivated by their political beliefs and turned into malware distribution in different forms. Malware Infection Process Initially, attackers deliver the malware via malspam email campaigns with fake body content related to banking fraud alerts, and it comes from the director of Global Risk for credit card company Visa. The malspam emails come with a malicious attachment that contains RTF files, once it opened, RTF documents retrieve a malicious PE32 e...

Facebook today revealed yet another security incident admitting that roughly 100 app developers may have improperly accessed its users' data in certain Facebook groups, including their names and profile pictures. In a  blog post  published Tuesday, Facebook said the app developers that unauthorizedly access this information were primarily social media management and video streaming apps that let group admins manage their groups more effectively and help members share videos to the groups, respectively. For those unaware, Facebook made some changes to its Group API in April 2018, a month after the revelation of the  Cambridge Analytica scandal , limiting apps integrated with a group to only access information, like the group's name, the number of members and the posts' content. To get access to additional information like names and profile pictures of members in connection with group activities, group members had to opt-in. However, it seems like Facebook once again...

A team of cybersecurity researchers has discovered a clever technique to remotely inject inaudible and invisible commands into voice-controlled devices — all just by shining a laser at the targeted device instead of using spoken words. Dubbed ' Light Commands ,' the hack relies on a vulnerability in MEMS microphones embedded in widely-used popular voice-controllable systems that unintentionally respond to light as if it were sound. According to experiments done by a team of researchers from Japanese and Michigan Universities, a remote attacker standing at a distance of several meters away from a device can covertly trigger the attack by simply modulating the amplitude of laser light to produce an acoustic pressure wave. "By modulating an electrical signal in the intensity of a light beam, attackers can trick microphones into producing electrical signals as if they are receiving genuine audio," the researchers said in their paper [ PDF ]. Doesn't this s...

Cybersecurity researchers have spotted a new cyberattack that is believed to be the very first but an amateur attempt to weaponize the infamous BlueKeep RDP vulnerability in the wild to mass compromise vulnerable systems for cryptocurrency mining. In May this year, Microsoft released a patch for a highly-critical remote code execution flaw, dubbed  BlueKeep , in its Windows Remote Desktop Services that could be exploited remotely to take full control over vulnerable systems just by sending specially crafted requests over RDP. BlueKeep, tracked as  CVE-2019-0708 , is a wormable vulnerability because it can be weaponized by potential malware to propagate itself from one vulnerable computer to another automatically without requiring victims' interaction. BlueKeep has been considered to be such a serious threat that since its discovery,  Microsoft  and even government agencies [ NSA  and  GCHQ ] had continuously been encouraging Windows users and...

Two grey hat hackers have pleaded guilty to  blackmailing Uber , LinkedIn, and other U.S. corporations for money in exchange for promises to delete data of millions of customers they had stolen in late 2016. In a San Jose courthouse in California on Wednesday,  Brandon Charles Glover  (26) of Florida and  Vasile Mereacre  (23) of Toronto admitted they accessed and downloaded confidential corporate databases on Amazon Web Services using stolen credentials. After downloading the data, the duo contacted affected companies to report security vulnerabilities and demanded money in exchange for the deletion of the data, according to a press release published by the US Justice Department. "I was able to access backups upon backups, me and my team would like a huge reward for this," the hackers said to the victim company in an email. "Please keep in mind, we expect a big payment as this was hard work for us, we already helped a big corp which paid close to 7 dig...