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On January 6th reports of Symantec (makers of Norton Anitvirus) being hacked surfaced. The group of hackers behind the attack behind the attack were from India. In a statement issued by a member from the Lords of Dharamraja group (badass name!), the guys said:
As of now we start sharing with all our brothers and followers information from the Indian Militaty (sic) Intelligence servers, so far we have discovered within the Indian Spy Programme (sic) source codes of a dozen software companies which have signed agreements with Indian TANCS programme (sic) and CBI
Ignoring the typing error, gaining access to Indian Military’s Intelligence servers is pretty damning for the agency. The hack got covered since the hackers claimed to have acces to Norton’s source code. Earlier today I came across scans of a set of documents that are internal communications between the Indian Military. The documents claim the existence of a system known as RINOA SUR. While I did not find what SUR stands for but RINOA is RIM, NOkia and Apple. And this is where things start to get very interesting, according to the set of documents, the RINOA SUR platform was used to spy on the USCC—the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.



The hacking group Anonymous has confirmed that they have once again hacked Sony Pictures, gaining access to their Facebook account and website. Anonymous did threaten Sony for supporting the controversial SOPA bill and now it seems that the threats materialized.


The hack hit the Sony Pictures Facebook page and its web site homepage, according to reports and tweets from those involved. Comments were left on the web pages, but have since been removed.
The attacks carry the name Op Sony and were noted through the @s3rver_exe Twitter account. “#OpSony SonyPictures Hacked! by s3rver.exe , Anonnerd and N3m3515,” says a tweet from that user, who continued, “I uploaded a @YouTube video (link removed) Sony Pictures Hacked By Anonymous.“
“Your support of the act is a signed death warrant to Sony Company and Associates. Therefore, yet again, we have decided to destroy your network. We will dismantle your phantom from the internet. Prepare to be extinguished. Justice will be swift, and it will be for the people, whether some like it or not,” Anonymous.
“The hack wasn’t big, but still the servers were vulnerable and I got access to the admin too,” Hacker Said.
Anonymous caused major problems for Sony in 2011 after successfully hacking into the firm’s online gaming network and stealing the login information of thousands of users, forcing the system offline for several weeks.



Two Indian Hackers Aditya Gupta(@adi1391) and Subho Halder (@sunnyrockzzs) have discovered Clickjacking vulnerability in one of the famous website “Ping.FM“. Clickjacking is a malicious technique of tricking Web users into revealing confidential information or taking control of their computer while clicking on seemingly innocuous web pages.


This is based on a technique known as clickjacking ( or UI Redressing ) where an attacker could perform actions on the behalf of user by tricking the user to click on a button or perform some other action.

This vulnerability was earlier seen in Twitter where it allows the status to be loaded through the GET method, and an attacker could frame the twitter webpage and trick the user to click on the tweet button, with the user thinking that its a part of the attacker’s webpage.

This can be disabled by setting the X-FRAME-ORIGIN method to SAME ORIGIN or DENYING the use of webpage inside a frame which have been adopted by google, facebook and many other famous websites.

Ping.fm is a online service which allows the user to connect to many social networks at once. However an attacker could use a technique known as Clickjacking to silently update the user’s social networking status at Twitter, Facebook and all other connected accounts.In this technique, the user is tricked into clicking on a button on a webpage designed by the attacker,which silently updates the status of the user on the social netowrks status taking advantage of thePing.fm API and clickjacking technique.

Back in June 2011, three windows 8 builds were leaked to the web. Those builds were packed with a cool Betta Fish boot screen. Many of you might have even seen the pictures and videos of the Betty Fish boot screen. To speed up the boot time, Microsoft removed this boot screen and replaced it with a simple one in Windows 8 Developer Preview  build.

Windows 8 Betta Fish Boot Screen

Users who are looking for a way to enable the beautiful Betty Fish boot screen in window 8 developer privew will be delighted to know that the old Fish boot screen can be enabled in Windows 8 DP with a simple workaround.

The workaround involves replacing a default system file. So, we’d suggest you create a manual system restore point before attempting this procedure on your PC. We tested this workaround on Windows 8 Developer Preview build (x86)  and can confirm that it works without any issues.

Procedure:

 Step 1: Create a manual system restore point  so that you can revert to the original system settings in case anything goes wrong.

Step 2: Open Windows Explorer, navigate to C:\Windows\Boot folder. Here, “C” is your Windows 8 drive letter.

Step 3: Locate Resources folder and then take the ownership of it with the help of our how to take ownership of file and folder in window 8 guide.

Step 4: Open Resources folder, rename bootres.dll file to bootresbackup.dll. We are not deleting the original bootres.dll file so that we can return to the original boot screen with ease.

Betta Fish Boot Screen In Windows 8

Step 5: Now download the custom bootres.dll file from here. This bootres.dll file has been taken from Windows 8 7989 build.

Step 6: Copy the new bootres.dll file to C:\Boot\Resources folder. Reboot your PC to see the new Betta Fish boot screen. Good luck!

To return to the original boot screen, you can use the previously created restore point or follow the steps given below. Navigate to C:\Boot\Resources folder. Rename bootres.dll (the custom bootres.dll) to bootrescustom.dll. Finally, rename the bootresbackup.dll to bootres.dll. You are done.


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The threat of Internet censorship has spurred some to seek refuge in space. Hackers at the Chaos Computer Club’s Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin this year proposed an initiative called the Hackerspace Global Grid (HGG), which aims to create and freely make available satellite based communication as a fallback or to bypass stuffy legislation.
The bunch of “hobbyist hackers, tinkerers and part time scientists” are predominantly based in Stuttgart, Germany. They say their ultimate goal is to put a hacker on the moon in 23 years, but right now they’re keeping their goals small. They want to keep their freedoms safe from threats like the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), by creating an “uncensorable Internet in space.” The project builds off of an earlier idea by Nick Farr in August for a Hacker Space Program.
The BBC interviewed 26-year-old Armin Bauer from Stuttgart who is working on the communications infrastructure for the project with his team. Bauer is currently working with Constellation, which is a platform that uses Internet-connected computers for aeropsace related research. The team is developing an idea for a network of low-cost ground stations for when the project gets those low-orbit satellites up there. The stations would be there to pinpoint satellites and facilitate sending data back to earth.


http://www.nus.edu.sg/iw/resources/global/images/logo.gif


Hackers infiltrated one of the National University of Singapore’s Web servers yesterday, leading to the re-setting of passwords for affected accounts.
The hackers, who call themselves Team Intra, made staff user names, domain information and hashed passwords – the taking of a variable-length password and creation of a cryptic, fixed-length one – public, reported SC Magazine of Australia yesterday.
The IT security magazine reported that the hackers were spurred on by an error message generated by probes of the NUS website, which allegedly read: “If you’re trying to use the SQL error message to dig for juicy information, get lost.”  The magazine also informed the NUS about the hack.


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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has expressed concerns about recent changes to AOL’s Instant Messenger service and recommends that “AIM users do not switch to the new version, as it introduces important privacy-unfriendly features”. The EFF met with AOL to discuss its concerns, but says that the company has only in part responded positively.
The EFF’s concerns fall into two main areas. The first involves the scanning of messages for URLs and the pre-fetching of any displayable media. The purpose of this pre-fetching is to improve performance when a user is sent an embedded link to an image that is intended for display. However, AOL was following all embedded links, some of which might refer to sensitive information. AOL has informed the EFF that it will limit the types of sites and URLs followed in this manner. The company told the EFF that it did not plan to log or store the data that it pulls down during this process.
According to the EFF, its other main concern has not been addressed properly. By default, the new version of AIM stores all conversations in plain text on its servers for up to two months, and perhaps much longer. AOL say that this enables users to access their messaging history from different machines, but it does mean that messages are potentially accessible to third parties, either through legal means or through a security breach

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The New Year is upon us, and you might be partaking in the tradition of making a resolution for the coming year. This year, why not make a resolution to protect your data privacy with one of the most powerful tools available? Commit to full disk encryption on each of your computers.
Many of us now have private information on our computers: personal records, business data, e-mails, web history, or information we have about our friends, family, or colleagues.  Encryption is a great way to ensure that your data will remain safe when you travel or if your laptop is lost or stolen. Best of all, it’s free. So don’t put off taking security steps that can help protect your private data. Join EFF in resolving to encrypt your disks 2012.
Here’s some basic info about full disk encryption. You can read this and much more (including information on password security) in our recent whitepaper on protecting privacy at the border





Indian computer security analysts have detected and alerted internet users against “malicious spam mails” in the name of the dead North Korean leader Kim Jong-iI leading to hacking and crashing of vulnerable e-mails.

The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), country’s national agency to respond to computer security incidents, has found the malware virus streaming into theIndian cyberspace.

“It has been observed that a spam campaign in the pretext of death of North Korean leader “Kim Jong iI” is making rounds for malware propagation. The malicious spam mails carry a fake name– “brief_introduction_of_kim_jong_Ill_pdf.pdf”.

“The said pdf file is exploiting vulnerabilities in Adobe reader and Acrobat, that once successfully exploited leads to remote code execution in the victim system,” the CERT-In said in its latest advisory to computer and internet users in the country.

“The malware has been detected more than ten days after the death of the North Korean leader and it lures the internet user to fall into trap of reading his life and style of living. The spam generators are being detected,” a senior internet investigator told PTI.

The CERT-In has asked all government and other Internet Protocol ( IP) addresses to avoid clicking on the link as it may lead to loss of valuable secret data including threat to personal financial details.

The North Korean leader died of a heart attack on December 17 at the age of 69 while travelling by train outside Pyongyang, the country’s capital.

Nmap release today an interesting version nmap 5.61TEST4 with number of interesting features. Also, to improve the user experience, the Windows installer nowinstalls various browser toolbars, search engine redirectors, andassociated adware.

  • a spidering library and associated scripts for crawling websites.
  • 51 new NSE scripts, bringing the total to 297.
  • a substantial decrease in the size of the Mac OS X installer due to the removal of PPC support.
  • a new vulnerability management library which stores and reports found vulnerabilities.
Mac OS X packages are now x86-only (rather than universal), reducing the download size from 30 MB to about 17. Change Log can be found here and Download Here .