On IoT Botnets, Ransomware, and More

Mike Mimoso, Tom Spring, and Chris Brook recap 2016’s biggest news stories, including the proliferation of IoT botnets, the rise of ransomware, the FBI vs. Apple battle, Yahoo, and a rash of old password breaches. Download: Threatpost2016YearinReview.mp3 Music by Chris Gonsalves...

Congressional Group Says Encryption Backdoors Are a Bad Idea

The Congressional Encryption Working Group released its year-end report that concluded that encryption backdoors do more harm than good. The 12-page report said that “any measure that weakens encryption works against the national interest.” The bipartisan congressional panel recommended that the...

'MethBot' Ad Fraud Operators Making $5 Million Revenue Every Day

The biggest advertising fraud ever! A group of hackers is making between $3 Million to $5 Million per day from United States brands and media companies in the biggest digital ad fraud ever discovered. Online fraud-prevention firm White Ops uncovered this new Ad fraud campaign, dubbed "Methbot,"...

FBI Most Wanted Fugitive JPMorgan Hacker Arrested in New York

One of the FBI's most wanted hackers who was behind the largest theft of financial data has finally been arrested at the JFK airport in New York. Joshua Samuel Aaron is accused of being part of a hacking group that attacked several major financial institutions, including JPMorgan Chase, and...

Google Discloses Contents of Eight National Security Letters

Google on Tuesday disclosed the contents of eight National Security Letters it received between 2010 and 2015, becoming the latest company under reforms afforded by the USA Freedom Act to do so. The requests made by United States Federal Bureau of Investigation were made to Google to identify 21...

Tor Project Releases Sandboxed Tor Browser 0.0.2

The non-profit organization behind TOR – the largest online anonymity network that allows people to hide their real identity online – has launched an early alpha version of Sandboxed Tor Browser 0.0.2. Yes, the Tor Project is working on a sandboxed version of the Tor Browser that would isolate th...

Tor Browser / Firefox Remote use-after-free FBI Exploit

Exploit for multiple platform in category remote exploits This is an Javascript exploit actively used against TorBrowser NOW. It consists of one HTML and one CSS file, both pasted below and also de-obscured. The exact functionality is unknown but it's getting access to "VirtualAlloc" in...

Mozilla Patches Firefox Zero Day Used to Unmask Tor Browser Users

As expected, Mozilla released a new version of Firefox on Wednesday to address a zero-day vulnerability that was actively being exploited to de-anonymize Tor Browser users. The vulnerability, disclosed on a public Tor Project mailing list late Tuesday night, forced the Tor Project to also issue a...

Rule 41 — FBI Gets Expanded Power to Hack any Computer in the World

Hacking multiple computers across the world just got easier for the United States intelligence and law enforcement agencies from today onwards. The changes introduced to the Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure by the United States Department of Justice came into effect on Thursday,...

Tor Patched Against Zero Day Under Attack

Update The Tor Project has provided a browser update that patches a zero-day vulnerability being exploited in the wild to de-anonymize Tor users. “The security flaw responsible for this urgent release is already actively exploited on Windows systems. Even though there is currently, to the best of...

US-CERT Alerts Users to Holiday Phishing Scams and Malware Campaigns

US-CERT reminds users to remain vigilant when browsing or shopping online this holiday season. Ecards from unknown senders may contain malicious links. Fake advertisements or shipping notifications may deliver infected attachments. Spoofed email messages and fraudulent posts on social networking...

Firefox Zero-Day Exploit to Unmask Tor Users Released Online

Hackers are actively exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Firefox to unmask Tor Browser users, similar to what the FBI exploited during an investigation of a child pornography site. Tor The Onion Router is an anonymity software that not only provides a safe heaven to human rights activists,...

Hacker who exposed Steubenville Rape Faces longer Prison term than Rapists

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...

FBI Hacked into 8,000 Computers in 120 Countries Using A Single Warrant

The FBI hacked into more than 8,000 computers in 120 different countries with just a single warrant during an investigation into a dark web child pornography website, according to a newly published court filings. This FBI's mass hacking campaign is related to the high-profile child pornography...

Hackers Steal Millions From European ATMs Using Malware That Spit Out Cash

ATM hackers who long relied on tactics of stealing payment card numbers and online banking credentials to steal millions are now targeting the bank itself to steal cash directly from the machines. Earlier this year, a gang of cyber criminals infected several ATMs with malware in Taiwan and Thaila...

Lobbyists Press Trump to Support Strong Encryption, Surveillance Reform

A lobbying organization that includes some of the Internet’s most valuable entities made a plea to President-Elect Donald Trump to support the expansion of strong encryption and reform government surveillance activities. The Internet Association on Monday sent a letter to Trump’s transition team...

CrySis Ransomware Master Decryption Keys Released

The threat posed by a ransomware family known as CrySis was diminished considerably on Sunday when the master decryption keys were released to the public. Researchers at Kaspersky Lab said they have already folded the keys into the company’s Rakhni decryptor and victims of CrySis versions 2 and 3...

Wikileaks Gets DDoSed after Leaking 8,200 DNC Emails One Day before U.S. Election

With just two days before the presidential election, WikiLeaks late Sunday night published a new trove of emails apparently hacked from the Democratic National Committee DNC. The most recent dump of more than 8,000 emails came after the whistleblowing site, on a daily basis over last four weeks,...

Russian Hacker Behind LinkedIn Breach also Charged with Hacking Dropbox and Formspring

The alleged Russian hacker, who was arrested by the FBI in collaboration with the Czech police, was believed to be the one responsible for massive 2012 data breach at LinkedIn, according to a statement released by LinkedIn. Now, United States authorities have officially indicted Yevgeniy...

An Army of Million Hacked IoT Devices Almost Broke the Internet Today

A massive Distributed Denial of Service DDoS attack against Dyn, a major domain name system DNS provider, broke large portions of the Internet on Friday, causing a significant outage to a ton of websites and services, including Twitter, GitHub, PayPal, Amazon, Reddit, Netflix, and Spotify. But ho...