British Spy Agency GCHQ Performed DDoS Attack Against Anonymous -Snowden Documents Transpired

British Spy Agency GCHQ Performed DDoS Attack Against Hacktivist Anonymous & LulzSec -Snowden Documents Transpired

While excavating the past, it was always found that cyber criminals, large hacker collective groups were the culprits for engaging voluminous denial of service attack. But this widely transfusing story get a one eighty degree reverse turn, when the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed another trade secret. Recently a lurid story get spot lighted, as the whistle blower Snowden unfold yet another breathtaking stealthy  documents taken from the National Security Agency. The clandestine documents taken the mask from the so called good guys, unveiling British spy agency GCHQ had launched a secret war against the infamous hacktivist collective Anonymous and a splinter group known as LulzSec several years ago. Many of you guessed right, this was happened when Anonymous were targeting various UK companies and government websites. The documents disclose that GCHQ carried out seemingly illegal DDoS attacks against the collective, flooding their chatrooms with so much traffic that they would become inaccessible – and all with the approval of the British government. The revelations come less than a year after several LulzSec activists were jailed by a British court for carrying out similar DDoS attacks against targets including the CIA, the UK’s Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA), News International, Sony and the Westboro Baptist Church, among others. 

This sensational issue was made public by NBC News deferentially with the help of none other than Edward Snowden. In their exclusive report headed 'War on Anonymous: British Spies Attacked Hackers,' NBC said -The blunt instrument the spy unit used to target hackers, however, also interrupted the web communications of political dissidents who did not engage in any illegal hacking. It may also have shut down websites with no connection to Anonymous. According to the documents, a division of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British counterpart of the NSA, shut down communications among Anonymous hacktivists by launching a “denial of service” (DDOS) attack – the same technique hackers use to take down bank, retail and government websites – making the British government the first Western government known to have conducted such an attack.

The documents, from a PowerPoint presentation prepared for a 2012 NSA conference called SIGDEV, show that the unit known as the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group, or JTRIG, boasted of using the DDOS attack – which it dubbed Rolling Thunder -- and other techniques to scare away 80 percent of the users of Anonymous internet chat rooms. 

The existence of JTRIG has never been previously disclosed publicly. The documents also show that JTRIG infiltrated chat rooms known as IRCs and identified individual hackers who had taken confidential information from websites. In one case JTRIG helped send a hacktivist to prison for stealing data from PayPal, and in another it helped identify hacktivists who attacked government websites. 

As soon as this story getting all the spot lights, immediately the GCHQ responded to this saying all their movements and operations were lawful. “All of GCHQ’s work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensure[s] that our activities are authorized, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the Secretary of State, the Interception and Intelligence Services Commissioners and the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee. All of our operational processes rigorously support this position.” -GCHQ said the press. To know more detail about this story, don't forget to stay tuned with VOGH. 

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VOGH Exclusive: URL Redirection Vulnerability Found In Facebook

VOGH Exclusive: URL Redirection Vulnerability Found In Facebook [The Vulnerability Still Active & Not Been Patched]

Facebook -the world's largest social networking site with registered users of more than one billion, is considered among one of the safest site of the cyber space. To maintain such reputation Facebook Inc has done all the required steps, that one could possibly take. Like other high profile and very popular websites, Facebook also stand as one of the hot target of almost every cyber criminals of the world. To get rid of this and make FB safe and secure, the company have introduced what it called 'Bug Bounty' offer; where you can submit vulnerabilities to FB and get rewarded. We have seen many security researchers and hackers across the globe has done this and get their award. But not every time, and today I will talk about that- few days ago a reader of VOGH, who also goes by the nick name of 'Dr41DeY' has figured out a URL redirection vulnerability in Facebook. One of the link in Facebook App which is apps.facebook.com is posing URL redirection vulnerability. The hacker has demonstrated how any one can use  the vulnerability  in order to manipulate millions of innocent Facebook users. Let see  

Before publishing this, one of our VOGH representative have talked with Facebook Security regarding this security vulnerability, but due to some reason FB might overlooked this issue. Finally after waiting for almost a week, we the Team VOGH decided to bring this in-front of our reader. Let briefly go through with the vulnerable link- 

https://apps.facebook.com/a.php?u=http://www.voiceofgreyhat.com&mac=AQLy7nyXi5NBt31j&__tn__=*B&eid=AQLpbizR7KEf3cyD0VTN7fNtv99fMZABDp2gdWhvL-MQocJIPy3w4hUG7_7hrmSMqDq7QLCI9k_0LbB95NEz_6GUDHGNgTDsGP_rX-VWRHxfg5a--VlnN1K9FdG3NAek8r2JPWENkb2Mu56EckbZCGXcPie27OnHxE-H7MBufQel0Pr-ZjpCWB6QF5xHeWsdKqyHzjK2woBGGrjk9Dlgnzcw3d9ZWPzrwbGpm6MSkpks3mqEphXnTP2Vd9UDQxIs68NnTaO35XIwKq5t3CSdb11iU_34gzjfLgvvDo_BYbgtrGe0Juc5CpRSwd5nImw9oPPvn6Za9rrxO_ivROtOGc2b2S3bYzNLWpbDwt3cFN2rJ3JElyIR0vjB4R859PpE9SrZx6AD3s_liikzPh30YLVb8XvPABk7r9MShk6OrVFPiAWZnEvPx49UzPDSF-nEl188rEPAi0KGJ4u1zb10hhzmHUCjH04SezDByUkyNituMb2lgiQz-Xlpgy_tkVYR-U7plDa38N9VzdAj_Bwefd7B85ykZCAy9ZQOt48Ql8KQeKfivk3sThZIkLwWPiju7R28Sw6bj09vS_Y28kFSqanGe9tYAPfKIe4zOzQt9-Q1CC_EwX3ypOlyQ2yXMiU3lwp7M9EriKHRFDsTgsuzzF-uvlpx3UrWh8M55-NX0ULjr4kxjAR5g_1wU-luUyn_Ot6Ly1_ZbBdahyb5uSmCDNvF5kMuIH8Gxvpql45dNffGzKau9oZGn6r1OmsG47JIGipznCVaZnWjXAakDnEMX6X8ZtI-M-db1olzbBpJdj5sZe-x2VM02S5XsXJWe_QLxFDOupjbz8I82HETHQ9PbzSIMsJboll4E3-f_JQFfdzwEguLa8SC_ImRahWBCwKNJeSlmRv91FqWpQaChe5-UyAoqcblvK4jPuRO3qC7o-qMTQ2jEJqqUW46koulOmgNJpMYXPgRxjNGcwjyTPS59Nr08zq6eCNd1aYLh2E4s5MYXBtVUTF8l0uhQ2wYSoR66xZsI2tK0DD1KiQHyTO1QieBwPtCN3eWgRzUTg3lM3ttkuwYKRPPLDvtUOPWmZhYUzUFcbfPM2kXdpqyGlrGx9-ErKGygYKATx2xzrTzktjgW4q0L5wfO3CSKAOCAoKfi_pfz-zIHSNE8ZAjZDtpbC_chgkvbHWJYYIs7pnE1riWJYORACjkkRr6nZoivC3z_g-8JBahghwy2C34kJYZJ6cBC8LKoB6KCTbj_F1tArQAzcSUij4vrJNUATzsdlO_ol6HwUQb8FjoWa38Bhtx81stxB328sgC9IGu1omPG0QeNJVhcJwh6HyEwtgycBLrlcdedaWbkwvnjv3F3BWuJIi763nBeYuAgNUaEUYHaXu_ZJzXW8fQ72nz_hddGT_GH50&sig=89099

Replace voiceofgreyhat.com with any of your favorite site, and the the said vulnerability will allow you to get redirected to that very website you want to from Facebook. This loophole is still active, and any one can test that with the above url, we thought the impact of this loophole is very serious, as any malicious attacker can misuse the trust-hod of Facebook's url in order to harm regular internet users, while redirecting them to any junk or malfunctional websites.

Disclaimer:- Earlier I told that the issue has already brought into the notice of Facebook Security, but they overlooked the whole issue, so being a responsible cyber media, we VOGH are disclosing this to people. If any one misuse this vulnerability, then Voiceofgreyhat will not at all be responsible for any kind of mishap.

Update:- May be doing more that what we call late repent, but finally the above disclosed vulnerability has been patched by Facebook security team. 

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BBC Server Compromised! Russian Hackers Broke Into FTP & Tried to Sell Unauthorized Access

BBC Server Compromised! Russian Hackers Hacked Into FTP & Tried to Sell Unauthorized Access on The X-Mass Evening 

Earlier we have seen world renowned media houses like CNN, NBC, Fox News, Washington Post, NY Times, NDTV and so on have fallen victim to hackers and cyber criminals. Now it was the turn for world’s largest and oldest broadcaster -British Broadcasting Corporation, widely known to us as BBC. Sources revealed that cyber criminals have managed to breach the security system of BBC and secretly took over a computer server at the BBC and then launched a Christmas Day campaign to convince other cyber criminals to pay him for access to the system. The attack was first identified by a cyber security firm named Hold Security LLC, in Milwaukee that monitors underground cyber crime forums in search of stolen information. However, it is still not clear whether the hacker stole any information or data or caused any damage to the site. In conversation with press Alex Holden, founder and Chief Information Security Officer of Hold Security told -"So far Hold Security researchers have found no evidence the conversations led to a deal or that data was stolen from the BBC.” So far the identity of hacker has not been confirmed, but the firm researchers observed a notorious Russian hacker known by the monikers "HASH" and "Rev0lver," attempting to sell access to the BBC server on December 25. However, BBC's security team managed to secure the site on Saturday, claims a person close to clean up efforts. One of the BBC spokesman refused to comment on the issue, he said, “We do not comment on security issues.” On the other hand, Justin Clarke, a principal consultant for the cyber security firm Cylance, said that while "accessing that server establishes a foothold within BBC's network which may allow an attacker to pivot and gain further access to internal BBC resources.” So far Hold Security researchers have found no evidence the conversations led to a deal or that data was stolen from the BBC. But we all know that  ftp systems are typically used to manage the transfer of large data files over the Internet. That's why the chances of data breach cant not be denied at this time. For updates on this piece of news and other hot information of the cyber & tech world stay tuned with VOGH. 

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Microsoft Along With FBI & EC3 Shattered The Notorious ZeroAccess Botnet

Microsoft Along With FBI & EC3 Shattered The Notorious ZeroAccess Botnet Responsible For Infecting More Than 2 Million Computers

Redmond based software giant Microsoft yet again got a huge success against a big racket of cyber criminals while shattering one of the world's largest and most rampant botnets named 'ZeroAccess'. The Sirefef botnet, also known as ZeroAccess, is responsible for infecting more than 2 million computers, specifically targeting search results on Google, Bing and Yahoo search engines, and is estimated to cost online advertisers $2.7 million each month. Tech giant Microsoft working alongside the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Europol's European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) have successfully disrupted this notorious botnet. This is Microsoft’s first botnet action since the Nov. 14 unveiling of its new Cybercrime Center — a center of excellence for advancing the global fight against cyber crime — and marks the company’s eighth botnet operation in the past three years.

“This operation marks an important step in coordinated actions that are initiated by private companies and, at the same time, enable law enforcement agencies around Europe to identify and investigate the criminal organizations and networks behind these dangerous botnets that use malicious software to gain illicit profits,” said Troels Oerting, head of the EC3. “EC3 added its expertise, information communications technology infrastructure and analytic capability, as well as provided the platform for high-level cooperation between cyber crime units in five European countries and Microsoft.”

Due to its botnet architecture, ZeroAccess is one of the most robust and durable botnets in operation today and was built to be resilient to disruption efforts, relying on a peer-to-peer infrastructure that allows cyber criminals to remotely control the botnet from tens of thousands of different computers. ZeroAccess is used to commit a slew of crimes, including search hijacking, which “hijacks” people’s search results and redirects people to sites they had not intended or requested to go to in order to steal the money generated by their ad clicks. ZeroAccess also commits click fraud, which occurs when advertisers pay for clicks that are not the result of legitimate, interested human users’ clicks, but are the result of automated Web traffic and other criminal activity. Research by the University of California, San Diego shows that as of October 2013, 1.9 million computers were infected with ZeroAccess, and Microsoft determined there were more than 800,000 ZeroAccess-infected computers active on the Internet on any given day.

How It Happened:- 

Last week, Microsoft filed a civil suit against the cyber criminals operating the ZeroAccess botnet and received authorization from the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas to simultaneously block incoming and outgoing communications between computers located in the U.S. and the 18 identified Internet Protocol (IP) addresses being used to commit the fraudulent schemes. In addition, Microsoft took over control of 49 domains associated with the ZeroAccess botnet. A10 Networks provided Microsoft with advanced technology to support the disruptive action.

As Microsoft executed the order filed in its civil case, Europol coordinated a multijurisdictional criminal action targeting the 18 IP addresses located in Europe. Specifically, Europol worked with Latvia, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Germany to execute search warrants and seizures on computer servers associated with the fraudulent IP addresses located in Europe. This is the second time in six months that Microsoft and law enforcement have worked together to successfully disrupt a prevalent botnet. It demonstrates the value coordinated operations have against cyber criminal enterprises. For more information about this botnet operation click here

ZeroAccess is counted as a very sophisticated malware, blocking attempts to remove it, therefore recommended for every Microsoft user to click Here for detailed instructions on how to remove this threat. As Microsoft found that the ZeroAccess malware disables security features on infected computers, leaving the computer susceptible to secondary infections, it is critical that victims rid their computers of ZeroAccess by using malware removal or antivirus software as quickly as possible. 

In conversation with press David Finn, executive director and associate general counsel of the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit said -“Microsoft is committed to working collaboratively — with our customers, partners, academic experts and law enforcement — to combat cybercrime. And we’ll do everything we can to protect computer users from the sinister activities and criminal networks that victimize innocent people and businesses around the world.” 

While talking about ZeroAccess botnet take down, I would like to remind you that in Match, last year Microsoft has successfully shutdown two command and control (C&C) server of world's of the most dangerous banking trojan Zeus.

-Source (Microsoft Official Blog)

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Drupal.org Hacked ! More Than 967,000 Registered User Details Compromised

Drupal.org Hacked ! More Than 967,000 Registered User Details Compromised 

Drupal, one of the most famous and widely used open-source content management framework have fallen victim to cyber criminals. The Drupal Security Team and Infrastructure Team has discovered unauthorized access to account information on the official Drupal website and another site called groups.drupal.org. This security breach has exposed user names, country, and email addresses along with hashed passwords of more than 967,000 registered users on the Drupal.org. But still a matter of relief is that the breach failed to infiltrate the credit card details which was stored on the same server. According to security release unauthorized access was made via third-party software installed on the Drupal.org server infrastructure, and was not the result of a vulnerability within Drupal itself. Drupal team have worked with the vendor to confirm it is a known vulnerability and has been publicly disclosed. They are still investigating and will share more detail when it is appropriate. Upon discovering the files during a security audit, the security team has already shut down the association.drupal.org website to mitigate any possible ongoing security issues related to the files. The Drupal Security Team then began forensic evaluations and discovered that user account information had been accessed via this vulnerability. The suspicious files may have exposed profile information like username, email address, hashed password, and country. In addition to resetting your password on Drupal.org, it is also recommending a number of measures (below) for further protection of your information, including, among others, changing or resetting passwords on other sites where you may use similar passwords. 

As a precautionary measure of the said security breach, Drupal Security Team has reset all Drupal.org account holder passwords and are requiring users to reset their passwords at their next login attempt. A user password can be changed at any time by taking the following steps. 

1. Go to https://drupal.org/user/password 
2. Enter your username or email address. 
3. Check your email and follow the link to enter a new password. It can take up to 15 minutes for the password reset email to arrive. If you do not receive the e-mail within 15 minutes, make sure to check your spam folder as well.

Counter Measures that Drupal has Taken to avoid such mishap is something followed- as attacks on high-profile sites (regardless of the software they are running) are common, Drupal strive to continuously improve the security of all Drupal.org sites. To that end, Drupal have taken the following steps to secure the Drupal.org infrastructure:

• Staff at the OSU Open Source Lab (where Drupal.org is hosted) and the Drupal.org infrastructure teams rebuilt production, staging, and development webheads and GRSEC secure kernels were added to most servers
• Drupal is scanning and have not found any additional malicious or dangerous files and making scanning a routine job in their process
• There are many subsites on Drupal.org including older sites for specific events. Drupal created static archives of those sites.

This security breach of Drupal which affected more than 967,000 users is giving us a remind of the decent history of breach where we have seen a slew of attacks against the following sites: Scribd, Guild Wars 2, Gamigo, Blizzard, Yahoo, LinkedIn, eHarmony, Formspring, Android Forums, Gamigo,  Nvidia,Blizzard, Philips, Zynga, VMWare, Adobe,  Twitter  New York Times, Apple and so on. 

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Hackers Exploiting Old Ruby on Rails Vulnerability To Compromise Web Servers & Create Botnet

Hackers Exploiting Old Ruby on Rails Vulnerability (CVE-2013-0156) To Compromise Web Servers & Create IRC Botnet

A critical vulnerability on Ruby on Rails spotted in January this year which was deemed “critical” at the same time yet again found in the wild. The vulnerability known as CVE-2013-0156 that affected versions 3.0.20 and 2.3.16 again rises it's hand. Though a security patch was released by the Rails developers. But as we all know that many server administrator used to be unaware of these events have not patched their systems. As a result hackers and cyber criminals are actively exploiting a critical vulnerability in the Ruby on Rails Web application development framework in order to compromise Web servers and create a dangerous botnet. This major security issue was first discovered by a security consultant Mr. Jeff Jarmoc of research firm Matasano Security. In his blog Jarmoc said "It’s pretty surprising that it’s taken this long to surface in the wild, but less surprising that people are still running vulnerable installations of Rails. It also appears to be affecting some web hosts." According to his blog post -the exploit that's currently being used by attackers adds a custom cron job -- a scheduled task on Linux machines that executes a sequence of commands. Those commands download a malicious C source file from a remote server, compile it locally and execute it. The resulting malware is a bot that connects to an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server and joins a predefined channel where it waits for commands from the attackers. A pre-compiled version of the malware is also downloaded in case the compilation procedure fails on the compromised systems.

"Functionality is limited, but includes the ability to download and execute files as commanded, as well as changing servers," Jarmoc said. "There's no authentication performed, so an enterprising individual could hijack these bots fairly easily by joining the IRC server and issuing the appropriate commands." But the matter of relief is that Jarmoc concluded while saying "this is a pretty straightforward skiddy exploit of a vulnerability that has been publicly known, and warned about, for months."

But still administrators who have not yet patched their Rails version should immediately should update the Ruby on Rails installations on their servers to at least versions 3.2.11, 3.1.10, 3.0.19 or 2.3.15 which contain the patch for this vulnerability. However, the best course of action is probably to update to the latest available Rails versions, depending on the branch used, since other critical vulnerabilities have been addressed since then. 

Brief About RoR:- Ruby on Rails is a popular framework for developing Web applications based on the Ruby programming language and is used by major websites including Hulu, GroupOn, GitHub and Scribd.

-Source (Network World)

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Oxford University Will Get £1 Million of Investment in Next 2 Year to Tackle Cyber Crime

Oxford University Will Get £1 Million of Investment in Next 2 Year to Tackle Cyber Crime

The rising amount of cyber crime has already put the world of security under a serious threat. Since last five years we have seen many devastating cyber attack which have broken almost every security measure. In short, today the entire cyber space is posing a serious risk. To get rid of this situation many developed countries have already started taking required counter measure. Cyber awareness program, campaigns are going in almost every part of the world. Such steps and countermeasures were mainly limited to government and corporate, but now as we are sitting at the edge of cyber threat, so the security system should be more enhanced. While looking at the current status OXFORD University have came forward, and they are going to open a cyber hub to tackle these ongoing cyber challenges. Acceding to the official website of Oxford Mail - OXFORD University will get £1 million of investment in the next two years to fund a center to tackle cyber crime. Funding for the Government’s Global Center for Cyber Security Capacity Building has been announced by Foreign Secretary William Hague, who pledged £500,000 a year for at least the next two years. It will be based at the home of the Oxford Martin School, with the aim of combating activists and terrorists who are posing a growing threat to our national security and economy.

The school’s director, Ian Goldin, Oxford University Professor of Globalisation and Development, said: “The whole purpose is to address critical challenges of the future. The international scale of the challenge requires new research and connections with the business world, which is part of the school’s mandate.” The centre will be based at the Old Indian Institute, a former university library building, on the corner of Broad Street and Catte Street, which is currently being refurbished. Prof Goldin, whose new book Divided Nations explores the risks brought about by rapid globalization and technological leaps like the internet, said keeping up with criminals will be far from easy. He said: “We are in a race, or struggle, between people who want to keep systems safe and secure and those who – for whatever reasons that may be commercial, nationalist or anarchical – want to undermine the system. That won’t end. 

According to some legitimate sources it has been confirmed that the new center will be a beacon of expertise and put the UK at the forefront of cyber policy development. It will operate from Broad Street from September. The two-year funding will help pay for an additional 12 specialists. Sadie Creese will head the new center as professor of cyber security.

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Angelina Jolie & Lady Gaga Became Victim of Ongoing Celebrity Hacking

Angelina Jolie & Lady Gaga Became Victim of Ongoing Celebrity Hacking 

Now a days it has became a fascination for cyber criminals to target and hack celebrities and public figures. Earlier we have seen similar scenario many a time. Last month an unnamed hacker released personal details of many public figure, national leaders, celebrities. The hacked data dubbed "The Secret Files" by the hackers contains personal information and credit reports (including social security numbers, details of their mortgages, addresses, and details of their credit card and banking details) was made public by those hackers on a website. Now we have past just a couple of weeks, yet again the same massacre took place, the hackers returned to the Internet after a brief hiatus and immediately hit six more. 

Angelina Jolie who played a key role in one of the most fine hacking movie named "Hackers" herself became victim to hackers in real life, as well as Jolie; Lady Gaga, NRA advocate Wayne LaPierre, Dennis Rodman, Michael Vick, Secret Service Director Julia Pierson and Robert De Niro. 

Like earlier, this time also the nature of the hack was similar to the previous the hackers have posted what they claim to be the social security numbers, mortgage amounts, credit card info, car loans, banking and other info for the celebs listed on their site. Last time, the website; where the hacker have posted those hacked credentials; were shutdown by the authorities. But it's now back up and running with a new domain extension (.re) that suggests it's based out of the French island of Réunion located off the coast of Madagascar -said TMZ in an exclusive report. Again also the same style were followed by the hacker group and leaving the very same message saying - "If you believe that God makes miracles, you have to wonder if Satan has a few up his sleeve."

According to sources - Jolie's page (prepared by the hacker) includes what is said to be her social security number as well as her credit report, which can be downloaded. There are addresses listed as well, but they are all business addresses, likely for her lawyer and other people she employs. The same information for Lady Gaga and Johansson is also available. However, Johansson's page also features a photo of her which became public through a previous hacking incident. The FBI has already started investigation, but so far no arrest have been made. In 2011 another high profile hack taken place, where the hacker targeted several celebrities like Scarlett Johansson & few more; while leaking nude photos. Later FBI carried out a special operation named 'Hackerazzi' which put a full stop in that issue and also FBI arrested the master mind named Christopher Chaney was sentenced to imprisonment after pleading guilty. 

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Gang of Cyber Criminals Arrested For Stealing $7 Million From Exchange Companies in Dubai

Gang of Cyber Criminals Arrested For Stealing $7 Million From Exchange Companies in Dubai 

Yet again another infamous gang of cyber criminals who were behind the hack of more than $7 Million from exchange companies in Dubai get busted by the Dubai Police. The special Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of Dubai Police were behind these criminals for a long time, and after a certain period they successfully managed to track down and crack the cyber crime ring. Major General Khamis Matter Al Mazeina, acting chief of Dubai Police, said on last Sunday that a gang of Asians and Africans work with hackers in order to enter different websites and systems of different companies here in Dubai in order to transfer money inside and outside the country. “Cheques worth more than Dh6 billion have been found with the gang after their arrest,” he said. He also said that the gang was able to transfer more than Dh7 million from exchange companies in Dubai to their own accounts. From an exclusive report of Gulf News we came to know that the deputy director of the General Department of Criminal and Investigation for research, Colonel Salem Khalifa Al Rumaithi said the incident happened early this month when police received complaints about a scam and transfer of $2 million from a company’s account. “This was done through hacking the e-mails of this company by someone outside the UAE,” he said.

He said the hackers used to change the data of the transactions, billing, and then transfer the money into their accounts.

He said the first accused, an Asian identified as Kh. Q., used to receive the transferred funds. “He owns three luxury cars which he bought from the proceeds of such crimes,” he said. 

He said the role of the second suspect, another Asian identified as U.K., was to provide the gang with bank account numbers by creating fake companies on the internet and dealing with the victims’ accounts. “After the process of converting the money credited to the first accused U.K. used to take 3 per cent of the money and give the remaining to an African man who was the mastermind. According to Lt Colonel Saeed Al Hajeri, director of the electronic investigation department, the third suspect was identified as D.Q. from Africa.

“The role of this suspect was as a mediator between the gang members and manipulating the business processes and changing the bank accounts to any other account,” he said. The suspect admitted that he was part of the Dh4 billion scam and another Dh6 million scam.

Lt Col Al Hajeri said Dubai Police had taken the necessary measures to obtain sufficient information from the rest of the gang members who operate outside the country in African countries through Interpol. Brigadier Khalil Ebrahim Al Mansouri, director of CID, said the police team worked on arresting the gang quickly.

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Australia Joined 38 Other Nations as Part of an International Cybercrime Treaty

Australia Joined 38 Other Nations as Part of an International Cybercrime Treaty

Sitting at the edge of the latest technology, today we can easily separate our world into two parts. One is the real world where we live and another is the virtual or cyber world, in which we all are tightly attached. As these two fields are the prime factor where we have to stay happily so the matter of safety, security is highly required on the both said areas. Being one of the leading cyber media, our main concern is the cyber domain,  so we are worried as well are responsible and committed to server our readers. In this period of time many of us feel terrified to engage themselves in the cyber space due to lack of security and privacy, and also keeping in mind the major disaster done by cyber criminals. But how long? To get rid of that not only we the media people but also the sincere government of several countries make themselves committed to prepare a safe cyber world for the people. Earlier we have seen several developed countries came under a shade, in order to make an united shield to protect this cyber domain and its people. Today that shield got a new member. Yes it is Australia who has now formally joined 38 other nations as a party to the world's first international treaty on crimes committed via the internet. This deceleration came from the Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus. In his speech he said "Australia becoming a party to the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime will help combat criminal offences relating to forgery, fraud, child pornography, and infringement of copyright and intellectual property" 

By joining the Convention, Australian law enforcement agencies will be able to rapidly obtain data about communications relevant to cybercrimes from partner agencies around the world. With the Convention now in effect, Australia's investigative agencies are able to use new powers contained in the Cybercrime Legislation Amendment Act 2012 to work with cybercrime investigators around the globe. The Act amended certain Commonwealth cybercrime offences and enabled domestic agencies to access and share information relating to international investigations. Dreyfus says the Act also created new privacy protections, safeguards and reporting requirements for the exercise of new and existing powers.
"A warrant is always required to access the content of a communication whether the information is in Australia, or accessed from overseas under the Cybercrime Convention. The Cybercrime Act and the Cybercrime Convention do not impact in any way on the need to have a warrant to access content from a telephone call, SMS or e-mail." -Dreyfus said in his statement.

-Source (ZDNet)

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Shahrukh.com -The Official Fan Site of Shahrukh Khan Hacked

Shahrukh.com -The Official Fan Site of Shahrukh Khan Hacked

Last week we covered the hack of several Yamaha motor's official website, where a newly formed hacker group named 'Dark Snipper' took responsibility of that attack. Yet again that group strikes while setting a new target and that is the official website of famous Indian actor Shahrukh Khan's fan. Shahrukh Khan widely known as SRK, one of the most famous actor in Indian industry called "Bollywood". The attack took place couple of days ago, where this Pakistani hackers community have gained access into the server where shahrukh.com was hosted and thus the defaced the index page. After the matter get spotted, the webmaster took action and recovered the website. But the hacker did not forget to create a deface mirror on Zone-H, to justify the hack. Though such kind of cyber attack against Bollywood celebrities is a very normal phenomenon, infarct earlier we have seen the official website of Shahrukh Khan's movie named 'Ra.One' Also the twitter account of srk once became the hot target of hackers. If we define the nature of the attack, then we must have to say no such big object or cause driven the hackers, so the main purpose of engaging the hack can be defined as fun purpose. While talking about relation between hackers and Bollywood we would like to remind you that earlier we have seen several instances where celebrities like Mahesh Bhatt, Kangna Ranaut, Mallika Sherawat, Arbaaz Khan, Vishal and Shekhar and so on have fallen victim to cyber criminals. 

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NBC.com Compromised, Hackers Exploited The Website to Spread Malware

NBC.com Compromised, Hackers Exploited The Website to Spread Malware

The month of February is still going from bad to worse for the cyber domain, in this very month cyber criminals swallowed the security system of many giant companies like Facebook, Twitter, Apple, New York Times and many more. But the game is not over yet, as we have just passed a few weeks, when the attack on NY Times took place, which stolen the employ database; yet again the cyber criminals have targeted another media giant National Broadcasting Company widely known as NBC. During the attack, hackers have successfully gain access inside the server of NBC and planted malware, in order to harm innocent readers. Famous security expert and blogger Brian Krebs said that the hackers inserted code into the NBC.com homepage. This caused visiting browsers to load pages from third-party sites that were compromised. While explaining the nature of the attacker, Krebs said; "The compromised sites tried to foist the Citadel Trojan, a variant of the Zeus Trojan." The Zeus is a "sophisticated data theft tool that steals passwords and allows attackers to control machines remotely" he added. Not only the NBC’s home page, also several others were affected, including the pages of late night talk show hosts Jay Leno and Jimmy Fallon. Well known security firm Sophos explained how roughly attack played out, and how NBC got sucked into the equation:

• NBC's hacked pages were altered to add some malicious JavaScript that ran in your browser.
• The JavaScript injected an additional HTML component known as an IFRAME (inline frame) into the web page.
• The IFRAME sucked in further malicious content from websites infected with an exploit kit known as RedKit.
• The exploit kit delivered one of two exploit files to try to take control over your browser via a Java vulnerability or a PDF bug.
• If the exploit worked on your computer, financially-related crimeware from the Citadel or ZeroAccess families was installed.

This, of course, is an example of a dreaded drive-by download, where the crooks use a cascade of tricks to download, install and execute software without going through any of the warnings or confirmation dialog you might expect. This, in turn, means that even if you are a careful and well-informed user, you may end up in trouble, since there are no obvious signs that you are doing anything risky, or even unexpected.

As soon as this story get spotted the American commercial broadcasting television network, NBC News reported and confirmed that its site had been attacked. The broadcaster released the following statement regarding the website: "We've identified the problem and are working to resolve it. No user information has been compromised."

The emergency response team immediately take the situation under control and restored the website, and confirmed that the site is back again and completely safe for its visitors. But so far there is no evidence of attackers who were involved in this attack. For the safety of VOGH readers we would like to recommend you to update your operating systems and browser plugins. Also note that the attack on NBC was similar to many that have occurred in recent years in that the malicious sites tried to exploit vulnerabilities in Java. So it will better to disable Java, unless it is that much necessary. So stay tuned with VOGH and be safe in the cyber domain. 

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'Data Theft' A Serious Issue! Be Watch Full, Be Safe

Hidden Costs of 'Data Theft' A Serious Issue! What You Need to Know to Be Safe 

Sitting at the edge of technology, we the people of this century are blessed with all the required equipment  which makes our work so easy that one could have even imagined three hundred years ago. Along with these positive sides, we must have to keep in mind that, these technologies not only elaborating our effort  making life easier, but also posing  high level of threat. As the main concern of VOGH is cyber domain, so here w would like to share a fact which will make you think and even make your cyber life and your personal life too uncanny. Yes, I am talking about the rising cyber threats; the more we are shedding with technologies, the more we are involving our lives with some dangerous threats and challenges. Now a days cyber criminals are every where, you don't even know, what trap has already been set for you, that can ruin your happy life. One of the big example is "Data Theft" which becoming boomerang for us. In an age of fully digitized data, consumers and businesses can lose thousands of dollars in the blink of a hacker’s eye. The costs of data theft are well known to anyone who has ever found themselves victim to financial identity or medical record fraud. What few of us realize is that the procedures required to right a financial wrong are often costlier than the crimes themselves. Lets share some interesting statistic, which will surely put terror in your mind - the economy loses an average of $22,346 for every time an identity is stolen. And to fully recuperate losses, repair credit and prosecute fraudsters, consumers, accountants, lawyers and IRS officials can spend up to 5,000 hours, the equivalent of two years of full-time work on a single case. Even so, 60% of medical record fraud victims admit that they don’t monitor their medical statements for inconsistencies. 

Shocking!! Why not?

For one, most consumers don’t have time every month to file through complex medical or financial statements and check for accuracy. And secondly, the image of thousands of evil savants working around the clock to hack BOA databases sure makes a consumer feel helpless. Identity theft seems random and unpreventable–a stroke of bad luck like getting struck by lightning. If we are struck, we tell ourselves, banks, credit agencies and insurance companies are legally bound to recover our funds and correct our records. 

Now lets check out a fascinating video in our Hidden Costs Series to get a deeper look at how our high-cost, high-risk data management systems really work.

Hidden Costs of Data Theft (Statistic At a Glance):-

Data theft includes financial identity theft, identity cloning, and medical identity theft. The average cost per victim was $22,346 in 2012. And the total national cost of just medical identity fraud was $41 billion in 2012. The worst part – nearly 60% of reported victims say they don’t ever check their medical records for fraud. Depending on the severity of the case, it can take over 5,000 hours (the equivalent of working a full-time job for two years) to correct the damage.

Since 1935, over 435 million social security cards have been issued. That’s over 2,175 tons of paper issued as cards, or 52,200 trees and 5 million new cards are issued every year. 

Worldwide, digital warehouses storing private information, like banking and personal history, use about 30 billion watts of electricity, which equals roughly the output of 30 nuclear power plants. Data centers in the US make up almost a third of that usage, and waste 90% of the electricity they pull off the grid.

On average, 47% of victims encounter problems qualifying for a new loan and 70% have difficulty removing the negative information from their credit reports.

Over the next five years, the IRS stands to lose as much as $21 billion in revenue due to identity theft, and worldwide, businesses lose close to $221 billion a year with the US, UK, Canada and Australia ranking the highest in reported fraudulent activity.

After reading the above story carefully, many of you will feel insecure and panic. But I would like to inform you that the main purpose of sharing such important information, is to enhance carefulness, to rise cyber awareness. Many people became victim, not because of less knowledge, but of less information, less awareness. So from now onward before connecting your self into the digital world make sure that the significant & the emergent knowledge and information you have gathered from the article, should remain intact inside your brain. Trust me, if you became a bit cautious, you can easily get rid of all those cyber threats, and can enjoy the bless of technologies to make your life prosperous and happy. 

So stay tuned with VOGH and also be canny, be attentive and be safe inside the digital world. 

We the Team VOGH heartily thanks one of our invaluable reader and friend Emily Stewart of Insurance Quotes for the statistic and the awesome video. We love you Emily :) 

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3 Russian Cyber Criminal Who Was The Master Mind of Banking Trojan 'Gozi' Charged in New York

3 Russian Cyber Criminal Who Was The Master Mind of Banking Trojan 'Gozi' Charged in New York 

Yet again another serious issue of cyber crime get resolved when the FBI tracked and figured out the master mind of infamous 'Gozi banking Trojan' which effected more than millions of system world wide, including a handful at NASA, leading to tens of millions of dollars in lost banking funds and damages to computer systems and networks. Three alleged international cyber criminals from Russia, responsible for creating and distributing 'Gozi' that infected over one million computers and caused tens of millions of dollars in losses charged in Manhattan Federal Court. Mihai Ionut Paunescu aged 28, a Romanian, Deniss Calovskis, 27, a Latvian, and Nikita Vladimirovich Kuzmin, 25, of the Russian Federation, are charged with computer intrusion, conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud and access device fraud. Federal authorities said the three were arrested last week; Kuzmin is being held in New York, while Paunescu is in custody in Romania and Calovskis in Latvia. 

According to the press release of FBI -Deniss Calovskis, a/k/a “Miami,” a Latvian national who allegedly wrote some of the computer code that made the Gozi virus so effective, was arrested in Latvia in November 2012. Mihai Ionut Paunescu, a/k/a “Virus,” a Romanian national who allegedly ran a “bulletproof hosting” service that enabled cyber criminals to distribute the Gozi virus, the Zeus trojan, and other notorious malware and to conduct other sophisticated cyber crimes, was arrested in Romania in December 2012. 

The cases are being handled by the Complex Frauds Unit of the United States Attorney’s Office. Assistant United States Attorneys Sarah Lai, Nicole Friedlander, and Thomas G.A. Brown, along with Trial Attorney Carol Sipperly of the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section of the Department of Justice on the Paunescu case, are in charge of the prosecution. The charges contained in the Indictments are merely accusations, and the defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.

Defendant	Age and Residence	Charges	Maximum Penalty
Nikita Kuzmin	25; Moscow, Russia	Conspiracy to commit bank fraud; bank fraud; conspiracy to commit access device fraud; access device fraud; conspiracy to commit computer intrusion; computer intrusion	95 years in prison
Deniss Calovskis	27; Riga, Latvia	Conspiracy to commit bank fraud; conspiracy to commit access device fraud; conspiracy to commit computer intrusion; conspiracy to commit wire fraud; conspiracy to commit aggravated identity theft	67 years in prison
Mihai Ionut Paunescu	28; Bucharest, Romania	Conspiracy to commit computer intrusion; conspiracy to commit bank fraud; conspiracy to commit wire fraud	60 years in prison

Brief About Gozi:-
The Gozi virus is malicious computer code, or “malware,” that steals personal bank account information, including usernames and passwords, from the users of affected computers. It was named by private sector information security experts in the U.S. who, in 2007, discovered that previously unrecognized malware was stealing personal bank account information from computers across Europe on a vast scale, while remaining virtually undetectable in the computers it infected. To date, the Gozi virus has infected over one million victim computers worldwide, among them at least 40,000 computers in the U.S., including computers belonging to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), as well as computers in Germany, Great Britain, Poland, France, Finland, Italy, Turkey, and elsewhere, and it has caused tens of millions of dollars in losses to the individuals, businesses, and government entities whose computers were infected.

The Gozi virus was distributed to victims’ computers in several different ways. In one method, the virus was disguised as an apparently benign .pdf document which, when opened, secretly installed the Gozi virus on the victim’s computer. Once installed, the Gozi virus—which was intentionally designed to be undetectable by anti-virus software—collected data from the infected computer in order to capture personal bank account information including usernames and passwords. That data was then transmitted to various computer servers controlled by the cyber criminals who used the Gozi virus. These cyber criminals then used the personal bank account information to transfer funds out of the victims’ bank accounts and ultimately into their own personal possession.

For Detailed Information Click Here

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DHS & US-CERT Recommended to Disable Java in Web Browsers

DHS & US-CERT Recommended to Disable Java in Web Browsers Unless It's Absolutely Necessary

The running time is proving to be the worst period for Java, as it has been walking under serious security issues. Yet again security researchers have pointed out a zero-day security vulnerability in the Java program that hackers are exploiting. The exploit takes advantage of a vulnerability left open in Java 7 Update 10, released in October last year. It works by getting Java users to visit a website with malicious code that takes advantage of a security gap to take control of users' computers. Thus how Java is being used by cyber criminals to infect computers with malware. Oracle, hasn't specified the number of users who have downloaded Java 7 Update 10. However, Java runs on more than 850 million computers and other devices. When Oracle released Update 10, so it is predictable that more than 850 million devices run by Java is under threat. The exploit was first discovered by French researcher Kafeine, who claimed to have found it running on a site registering hundreds of thousands of page views daily. From that site, immediately that vulnerability and a large number of effected devices has been spotted in the wild. In Java 7 Update 10 the creator of Java, Oracle added several security control and fixed older bugs and promised more security enhancement, but its very unfortunate that Oracle failed to keep their promise. What ever after this newly discovered 0-day hole spotted wildly, Oracle Security Alert CVE-2013-0422 states that Java 7 Update 11 addresses this (CVE-2013-0422) and an equally severe, but distinct vulnerability (CVE-2012-3174). Immunity has indicated that only the reflection vulnerability has been fixed and that the JMX MBean vulnerability remains. Java 7u11 sets the default Java security settings to "High" so that users will be prompted before running unsigned or self-signed Java applets. It "strongly recommends" that Java SE 7 users upgrade immediately to avoid all kind of security hazards. 

After seeing all the drama, many of you have failed to keep trust in Java, and you all will be relieved when you will gone through the security advisory of CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) where they have clearly instructed to disable Java in your popular web-browser. In their official release CERT said "Unless it is absolutely necessary to run Java in web browsers, disable it as described below, even after updating to 7u11. This will help mitigate other Java vulnerabilities that may be discovered in the future."

You will see similar advice in the advisory posted on the official DHS US-CERT website where DHS also suggested to disable Java until and unless it is that much necessary. "To defend against this and future Java vulnerabilities, consider disabling Java in web browsers until adequate updates are available. As with any software, unnecessary features should be disabled or removed as appropriate for your environment." - said U.S. CERT in their advisory. 

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