Apple Hacked By The Same Group Who Attacked Facebook

Apple Hacked, Macintosh Computers Infected  By The Same Group Who Attacked Facebook 

The month of February is not going good for cyber space, specially for giant organization. Last week the social networking giant Facebook fallen victim of a devastating cyber attack which did effected a number of  systems. Facebook admitted that it faced a "sophisticated attack" on computers where it has been found the attackers used a zero-day Java exploit to initiate the attack, but that no user data was compromised. The same thing happened to micro blogging site Twitter and New York Times. And now it was the turn for Apple. The California based multinational company acknowledged that recently their systems has been attacked by hackers who infected Macintosh computers of some employees. Like Facebook here also no data has been effected, "there was no evidence that any data left Apple." -said Apple. 

According to an exclusive report of Reuters -some unknown hackers infected the computers of some Apple workers when they visited a website for software developers that had been infected with malicious software. The malware had been designed to attack Mac computers. The same software, which infected Macs by exploiting a flaw in a version of Oracle Corp's Java software used as a plug-in on Web browsers, was used to launch attacks against Facebook, which the social network disclosed on Friday. The malware was also employed in attacks against Mac computers used by "other companies," Apple said, without elaborating on the scale of the assault. Experts are presuming that all these cyber attacks of February, that is Twitter, New York Times, Facebook & Lastly Apple Inc was originated from China, and executed by the same hacker group. On the other side few experts are also saying that the group responsible for the hack, has been identified as "Unit 61398" of the People's Liberation Army. But so far there is no proof. 

Apple also revealed that it plans to release a software tool later Tuesday that will protect customers against the same type of software that was used against its employees. 

Apple also provided a statement as follows:-

"Apple has identified malware which infected a limited number of Mac systems through a vulnerability in the Java plug-in for browsers. The malware was employed in an attack against Apple and other companies, and was spread through a website for software developers. We identified a small number of systems within Apple that were infected and isolated them from our network. There is no evidence that any data left Apple. We are working closely with law enforcement to find the source of the malware.

Since OS X Lion, Macs have shipped without Java installed, and as an added security measure OS X automatically disables Java if it has been unused for 35 days. To protect Mac users that have installed Java, today we are releasing an updated Java malware removal tool that will check Mac systems and remove this malware if found..."

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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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Ambedkar Institute of Telecom Training India (BRBRAITT) Hacked By Hitcher

Ambedkar Institute of Telecom Training India  (BRBRAITT)Hacked By Hitcher

He was noiseless since his last massive attack against Israel, with the banner of #OpIsrael for Muslim Liberation Army. He was mum but not passive, and it shows when well known Pakistani hacker going by the name of "Hitcher" come back again. The name of Hitcher is common to us for defacing high profile websites, his last few high profile hack was HP Training Center, Bank of Punjab, Kingfisher Airlines, Central Statistical Agency of Ethiopia & 100+ Chinese Govt Websites, again ensue the same path. This time the target was the official website of Bharat Ratna Bhim Rao Ambedkar Institute of Telecom Training India (BRBRAITT) also known as India Premier National Level Telecommunication Training Center. As per sources the hacker managed to breach the server security and get administrative access into the BBBRAITT system. He not only hacked and defaced the index page, but also stolen sensitive data like employ details, course curriculum,  student details, several ongoing project information, and few more confidential tidings. Immediately after the hack, webmaster of BBBRAITT noticed the issue and patched those security holes and back doors from which the hacker get in. Also he restored the site to its normal format. But still the deface mirror can be found on an archiving site called Th3Mirror.com, though the reason of this hack is still a mystery. 

Brief About BRBRAITT:- 

BRBRAITT is one of the premier institutes of BSNL India, imparting training in various fields like latest technologies in field of telecommunications, computer networking, accounting, management, providing competency and skills to meet the ever changing needs of esteemed customers. 

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NASA Sub-domain is Vulnerable Allowing Information Disclosure

NASA Sub-domain is Vulnerable Allowing Serious Information Disclosure

National Aeronautics and Space Administration, widely known as NASA used to fascinate the hackers to come and breach its security system. Many of our readers may be astonished after reading the above lines, but its a fact and history is the witness of that. So far NASA have been targeted several times, where hackers have figured out vulnerability and penetrated the digital security. Yet again same thing happened to NASA, when an ethical hacker from India going by the name of "Zero Cool" find out serious loopholes in one of the sub-domain of NASA, which could lead sensitive information disclosure. The hacker shared a vulnerability report with us, where he has shown that, exploiting the vulnerability one malicious attacker can easily extract lots of confidential data from NASA server, such as source code of various programs (used by NASA), current project information, future research paper, topological graph, license information, several executable files, .dll files, private application software & it's source codes, employ details and many more highly confidential or in other word "Top Secrete" data and files. For security and privacy purpose we are not disclosing those vulnerable links, but exclusively for VOGH readers we are sharing few images to justify the fact. 

This vulnerability report has already been submitted to NASA, and as expected they immediately reacted and promised to path those loopholes with immediate effect. While talking about the ethical hacker "Zero" we would like to remind you that, before this NASA vulnerability disclosure, he exposed several vulnerabilities among many major and high profile websites such as Facebook, Reebok,Indiagames, mtv, lapdonline, UNESCO, Toshiba, Discovery.com, Novell.com, Microsoft Store India, several Pakistani  and Bangladeshi Govt websites and many more.  

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Yamaha Motor's Official Website of Six Different Countries Hacked & Defaced

Yamaha Motor's Official Website of Six Different Countries Hacked By Dark Snipper

Yamaha, Japanese multinational corporation; widely known to us for manufacturing motorcycles and power sports equipment, have fallen victim in front of hackers. A newly formed hacker group calling themselves "Dark Snipper" targeted several websites of Yamaha. This round of cyber attack has blown Six Yamaha websites from different countries like Bosnia Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Slovenia & Serbia. According to sources a few hackers code named 'Soul Inj3ct0r,  P4K-CoMManDeR, Error Haxor,  Dream.Killer, X3o-1337 & SOG' mainly from Pakistan took responsibility of the hack. So far the reason of the attack is not clear, but still the deface page is saying that the attack was inspired by the cause of "Free Palestine". But it is very irrelevant that, why the hacker group targeted Yamaha, as there is hardly any relation between the cause of Gaza, Palestine and Yamaha. What ever! Yamaha authority and the cyber response team immediately recovered those hacked sites by deleting the hacker's page (as shown in the picture below) and patched the security hole.

It is come to our concern that, team 'Dark Snipper' managed to get access into Yamaha server, where all those domain were hosted, and that is why it became possible for the hackers to breach all those Yamaha sites. But, Yamaha did not passed any reaction after the breach. 

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Julian Assange Started His Journey For Australian Senate on Behalf of WikiLeaks Party

Julian Assange Started His Journey For Australian Senate on Behalf of WikiLeaks Party

The world knows Julian Paul Assange, as the editor-in-chief and founder of WikiLeaks, which publishes submissions of secret information, news leaks and classified media from anonymous news sources and whistleblowers, will now see a different avatar as Mr. Assange have taken the first step toward a Senate run in the Australian state of Victoria as a member of the newly formed WikiLeaks Party. According to sources, Assange's electoral enrollment application was submitted to the Australian Electoral Commission in Melbourne by WikiLeaks supporters, including Assange's father, John Shipton. Mr Shipton said Mr Assange's enrolment was ''a first step'' in a political campaign that would focus on ''the democratic requirement of truthfulness from government''. The party, not yet registered with the Australian Electoral Commission, has an initial 10-member national council comprised of close associates of Mr Assange and pro-WikiLeaks activists. Its constitution highlights the promotion of openness and transparency in government and business. Mr Assange has nominated his mother's home in Mentone, in the federal electorate of Isaacs, as his address for eligible enrolment before his most recent trip overseas in June 2010 -reported a reputed Australian daily. 

According to post of The Age we came to know that --Australian citizens living overseas can enrol to vote as an overseas elector, and consequently run as a Senate candidate if they left Australia within the past three years and intend to return within six years of their date of departure.

Mr Assange has indicated that if elected and unable to return to Australia to take up a seat in the Senate, a WikiLeaks Party nominee would fill the vacancy. Opinion polls last year by UMR Research, the company the Labor Party uses for its internal polling, suggest that Mr Assange could be a competitive Senate candidate in Victoria. 

But the WikiLeaks founder has been living at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for more than six months — eluding Swedish authorities, who have an outstanding arrest warrant for him in connection to a sexual assault investigation.
Assange spoke of his political ambitions in December, when he said he was interested in running for Senate, adding that "a number of very worthy people admired by the Australian public" had signaled they'd be willing to join him on a party ticket. A representative for the Australian Electoral Commission said the application for electoral enrollment is a private matter between the applicant and the commission, so he would not discuss individual cases.

While talking about Jullian Assange and WikiLeaks, we would like to give you reminder that in this year we got several leaks from WikiLeaks, among them -'Detainee Policies' containing more than 100 classified or otherwise restricted files from the United States Department of Defense covering the rules and procedures for detainees in U.S. military custody. SpyFiles, GI Files (Global Intelligence Files & Five Million E-mails From Stratfor) & The Syria Files Containing 2.5 Million Emails of Syrian Politicians, Govt, Ministries & Companies.

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#opSOTU By Anonymous To Oppose Executive Cyber Security Order (The Revised CISPA)

#opSOTU By Anonymous To Oppose Executive Cyber Security Order (The Revised CISPA)

Last year the Internet and its trillion of users across the globe has faced several barrier when, number of approach from Senate and government, along with few corporate and other organization were in the target to make the entire Internet censored. To engage this motive they have approached and introduced a number of regulations and act such as SOPA, PIPA, CISPA & ACTA. But to implement those enactment was not that easy, as huge number of organization (including White House, Wikipedia & so on), billions of mass people stand against those controversial act, and as expected those acts were ruled back, that said protest might not get the full success, if hackers around the globe did not take part in it. It was the hackers communities who forced the govt to roll back those rules. But the victory was not that easy to achieve, as the president of U.S. appeared before a joint session of Congress to deliver the State of the Union Address and he plans to sign an executive order for cyber-security as the House Intelligence committee reintroduces the defeated CISPA act which turns private companies into government informants. As soon as the deceleration of the executive order for cyber-security came, immediately protest came. Hacktivist group Anonymous yet against stand against the controversial CISPA, and called an operation dubbed Operation SOTU (#opSOTU). In the campaign the hacker group states a clear intent to obstruct Internet broadcasts of the president's State of the Union address, an action the group justifies by pointing to renewed interest in Congress to pass the Cybersecurity Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), a measure Anonymous has long opposed. 

Press Release of Anonymous (#opSOTU):- 

Citizens of the Internet,
Last year we faced our greatest threat from lawmakers. We faced down SOPA, PIPA, CISPA and ACTA.

And we won!

But that victory did not come easily. Nor did it come without a price.

Aaron Swartz was one of the leading voices in the fight against these idiotic and destructive efforts to control the last free space on Earth.

Aaron Swartz was persecuted. Now Aaron Swartz is dead.
Tonight, the President of the United States will appear before a joint session of Congress to deliver the State of the Union Address and tomorrow he plans to sign an executive order for cyber-security as the House Intelligence committee reintroduces the defeated CISPA act which turns private companies into government informants.

He will not be covering the NDAA, an act of outright tyrannical legislation allowing for indefinite detention of citizens completely outside due process and the rule of law. In fact, lawyers for the government have point-blank refused to state whether or not journalists who cover stories or groups the Government disfavors would be subject to this detention.

He will not be covering the extra-judicial and unregulated justifications for targeted killings of citizens by military drones within the borders of America, or the fact that Orwellian newspeak had to be used to make words like “imminent” mean their opposite.

He will not be covering Bradley Manning, 1000 days in detention with no trial for revealing military murders, told that his motive for leaking cannot be taken into consideration, that the Government does not have room for conscience.

He will not be covering the secret interpretations of law that allow for warrant-less wiretapping and surveillance of any US citizen without probably cause of criminal acts, or the use of Catch-22 logic where no-one can complain about being snooped on because the state won’t tell you who they’re snooping on, and if you don’t know you’re being snooped on, you don’t have a right to complain.

We reject the State of the Union. We reject the authority of the President to sign arbitrary orders and bring irresponsible and damaging controls to the Internet.
The President of the United States of America, and the Joint Session of Congress will face an Army tonight.
We will form a virtual blockade between Capitol Hill and the Internet. Armed with nothing more than Lulz, Nyancat and PEW-PEW-PEW! Lazers, we will face down the largest superpower on Earth.

And we will win!

There will be no State of the Union Address on the web tonight.

For freedom, for Aaron Swartz, for the Internet, and of course, for the lulz.

We Are Anonymous,
We Are Legion,
We Do Not forgive,
We Do Not forget,
Expect Us.

..."

But unlike last year, this time the approach of CISPA is more organized, as not only Congress but also the White House will also unveil President Barack Obama's long-awaited executive order on cyber security. So to stand against such an organized and well planned act, the protester need to be more decent and more united. As we all want and prefer freedom and privacy in our personal life as well as in the Internet, so we will fight and expect to win. So stay tuned with VOGH, and lets see what is coming for us. 

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