Articles for November 2016

Researchers detect barrage of exploits targeting potentially millions of devices.

Source: Newly discovered router flaw being hammered by in-the-wild attacks | Ars Technica

The new report details increased risks to Android and Apple products and the top 10 Windows malware programs of 2016. Here’s what your business needs to know to stay safe.

Source: The state of malware: 4 big takeaways from AV-TEST’s 2016 report – TechRepublic

Remember Steubenville High School Rape Case?

In 2012, Steubenville (Ohio) high school’s football team players gang-raped an unconscious teenage girl from West Virginia and took photographs of the sexual assault.

In December 2012, a member of the hacker collective Anonymous hacked into the Steubenville High School football fan website Roll Red Roll and leaked some evidence of the rape, including a video taken and shared by the crime’s perpetrators in which they joked about the sexual assault.

The hack exposed information about the gang rape by two football team players — Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond, both 16 at the time of the crime — who were eventually convicted and sentenced in 2013 to 2 and one years behind bars, respectively, but have since been released.

Source: Hacker who exposed Steubenville Rape Faces longer Prison term than Rapists

We’ve done plenty of reporting on tech support scams, be they online or by phone, but how about the sort where you walk into a huge, supposedly legit gizmo box store and they try to sell you the same load?

Seattle station KIRO-TV, tipped off by a whistleblower and bolstered by confirming employees, is accusing Office Depot staffers of doing just that: diagnosing brand-new, just out of the box computers with malware infections that some stores suggested would cost up to $200 to clean up.

According to Shane Barnett, an ex-Office Depot employee turned whistleblower, staffers need to sell fixes to keep their jobs.

Source: Office Depot allegedly running in-store tech support scams – Naked Security

Security experts predict that Mirai is far from the end of social media disruption due to botnets.

Source: Catastrophic botnet to smash social media networks in 2017 | ZDNet

How soon after plugging in an internet-connected security camera can it be infected with malware? 98 seconds!

Source: IoT security camera infected within 98 seconds of plugging it in | Network World

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.

Source: Spammers using Facebook Messenger to Spread Locky Ransomware

The security glitch has been discovered by EverythingApplePro and iDeviceHelps and now that they have gone public with a video demonstration, you can expect Apple to fix this issue in the next iOS beta version.

All an attacker need is to find out the phone number of the target’s iPhone and access to the phone for a few minutes.

Source: New Hack: How to Bypass iPhone Passcode to Access Photos and Messages

You need to be more careful next time while leaving your computer unattended at your office, as it cost hackers just $5 and only 30 seconds to hack into any computer.

Well-known hardware hacker Samy Kamkar has once again devised a cheap exploit tool, this time that takes just 30 seconds to install a privacy-invading backdoor into your computer, even if it is locked with a strong password.

Dubbed PoisonTap, the new exploit tool runs freely available software on a tiny $5/£4 Raspberry Pi Zero microcomputer, which is attached to a USB adapter.

Source: This $5 Device Can Hack your Password-Protected Computers in Just One Minute

At its 2016 Connect developer event in New York today, Microsoft announced that the company is joining the Linux Foundation as a Platinum member – the highest level of membership, which costs $500,000 annually.

Besides this, Microsoft also announced that tech giant Google has also joined on with the independent .NET Foundation.

The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit organization that oversees the development of the very popular free operating system Linux, alongside advances open technology development as well as commercial adoption.

Microsoft has already contributed to a number of its open source projects, including Node.js Foundation, Open Container Initiative, OpenDaylight, R Consortium, and Open API Initiative.

However, today’s announcement from Microsoft still comes as a surprise to many, as Former Microsoft Chief Steve Ballmer once said, “Linux is a cancer,” in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times.

Source: Microsoft Joins The Linux Foundation — Turns Love Affair Into a Relationship