SHA-1 End Times Have Arrived

For the past couple of years, browser makers have raced to migrate from SHA-1 to SHA-2 as researchers have intensified warnings about collision attacks moving from theoretical to practical. In just weeks, a transition deadline set by Google, Mozilla and Microsoft for the deprecation of SHA-1 is u...

Buggy Domain Validation Forces GoDaddy to Revoke Certs

GoDaddy has revoked, and begun the process of re-issuing, new SSL certificates for more than 6,000 customers after a bug was discovered in the registrar’s domain validation process. The bug was introduced July 29 and impacted fewer than two percent of the certificates GoDaddy issued from that dat...

Tesco Bank Hacked — Cyber Fraudsters Stole Money From 20,000 Accounts

Almost 20,000 Tesco Bank customers have had their money stolen from their accounts after the banking arm of UK's biggest retailer fall victim to a hacking attack this weekend. As a result of the hack, Tesco Bank has frozen online transactions in an attempt to protect its customers from, what it...

Half of Chrome Pageloads are HTTPS

First it was Mozilla, and now Google is the latest to confirm that encryption is inching closer toward becoming a standard building block for websites and web applications. Google reported yesterday that more than half of pages loaded on desktop versions of the Chrome browser are being done so ov...

Google to Make Certificate Transparency Mandatory By 2017

Google is making Certificate Transparency mandatory for its Chrome web browser by October 2017. Google software engineer Ryan Sleevi made the announcement in conjunction with the CA/Browser Forum that took place in Redmond, Washington last week. The move is an attempt to reduce the number of doma...

Free SSL Sparks Unprecedented Growth in Encrypted Traffic

If recent telemetry from Mozilla is indeed representative of the Internet, then it would appear that half of all traffic in transit is encrypted, a more than 10 percent jump from last December. The emergence of free Certificate Authorities such as Let’s Encrypt, and similar gratis HTTPS certifica...

FBI Arrests Two Hackers Who Hacked US Spy Chief, FBI and CIA Director

US authorities have arrested two North Carolina men on charges that they were part of the notorious hacking group "Crackas With Attitude." Crackas with Attitude is the group of hackers who allegedly was behind a series of audacious and embarrassing hacks that targeted personal email accounts of...

Breaching a CA – Blind Cross-site Scripting (BXSS) in the GeoTrust SSL Operations Panel Using XSS Hunter

This is a continuation of a series of blog posts which will cover blind cross-site scripting XSS and its impact on the internal systems which suffer from it. Previously, we’ve shown that data entered into one part of a website, such as the account information panel, can lead to XSS on internal...

Google Details Linux Kernel Defenses, New and Old

Developers with Android’s Security Team peeled back some of the layers on the mobile operating system this week; describing the lengths Google goes to protect the Linux kernel. In a post to Google’s Security Blog, Jeff Vander Stoep clarified several mitigations slated for inclusion in Nougat, the...

Keeping Positive – Obtaining Arbitrary Wildcard SSL Certificates from Comodo via Dangling Markup Injection

I recently decided to investigate the security of various certificate authority’s online certificate issuing systems. These online issuers allow certificate authorities to verify that someone owns a specific domain, such as thehackerblog.com and get a signed certificate so they can enable SSL/TLS...

Google Updates CA Trust Mechanisms in Android Nougat

Google last week announced changes in the way it will handle trusted Certificate Authorities in Nougat, the latest version of the Android operating system. The changes are expected to cut into the likelihood of a successful man-in-the-middle attack, or a device falling victim to an...

Russia arrests 50 hackers who stole $25 million from Banks

Russian authorities have arrested a gang of 50 hackers suspected of stealing more than 1.7 Billion Rubles over US$25 Million from banks and other financial institutions in the country since 2011. The same criminal gang had tried to steal a further 2.273 Billion Roubles by issuing false payment...

Vulnerability in OpenSSL - Memory corruption in the ASN.1 encoder

This issue affected versions of OpenSSL prior to April 2015. The bug causing the vulnerability was fixed on April 18th 2015, and released as part of the June 11th 2015 security releases. The security impact of the bug was not known at the time. In previous versions of OpenSSL, ASN.1 encoding the...

Bitcoin Creator Has Finally Unmasked Himself. Maybe, Real?

The mysterious creator of the BITCOIN digital cryptocurrency seems to have been identified as an Australian entrepreneur, and his name is: Craig Steven Wright. Five months after Wright, an Australian computer scientist and businessman was outed as Satoshi Nakamoto, revealed himself as the origina...

The vulnerability of the Android operating system allows a hacker to replace the server

The vulnerability of the caching function in the TrustManagerImpl class TrustManagerImpl.java of the Conscrypt component in the Android operating system is related to security configuration errors. Exploiting this vulnerability could allow a malicious actor to replace servers by accessing...

What is Certificate Transparency? How It helps Detect Fake SSL Certificates

Do you know there is a huge encryption backdoor still exists on the Internet that most people don't know about? I am talking about the traditional Digital Certificate Management System… the weakest link, which is completely based on trust, and it has already been broken several times. To ensure t...

'Hacking Team' Loses License to Sell Surveillance Malware Outside Europe

Hacking Team – the infamous Italy-based spyware company that had more than 400 GB of its confidential data stolen last year – is facing another trouble. This time not from other hackers, but from its own government. Hacking Team is infamous for selling surveillance spyware to governments and...

Google Debuts New Untrusted CA Log Submariner

Google wants the internet to know that it’s keeping track of deployed certificates, whether they’re trusted or not. While the search behemoth has long maintained a list of trusted Certificate Authorities, it announced on Monday that it has created a new list of CAs that were once, or are not yet...

Linode Customer Password Reset, DDoS Attack

Cloud-based webhost Linode absorbed another body blow on Tuesday when it said it was resetting customer passwords after a suspected breach. The development compounded the company’s existing woes as it continues to battle a distributed denial-of-service attack that began on Christmas. A Linode...

Encrypted Email Servers Seized by German Authorities After School Bomb Threats

In the wake of a hoax bomb threat, all public schools in Los Angeles were closed for a day last week, and now German authorities have seized an encrypted email server. But, Does that make sense? In a video statement posted on Monday, the administrator of Cock.li – an anonymous email provider...