VOGH Exclusive: Xbox Live Outage Caused For Networking Misconfiguration, Not Hacker Attack

Microsoft Said Xbox Live Outage Caused For Networking Misconfiguration During Routine Maintenance, Not Hacker Attack 

Xbox Live -one of the world's most popular and usually very reliable gaming network which rarely has unexpected outages, nor does Microsoft ever take it down for any extended period of time. But accident occurs, and it happened in last Sunday. The software giant and the developer of Xbox - Microsoft has reported a significant Xbox Live outage, rendering the service unavailable since earlier last 13th afternoon, smack in the middle of the peak weekend usage period. The outage is preventing users from signing in to Xbox Live, blocking access to the online services normally available through the console. While acknowledging the issue, on their official Xbox Live Status page Microsoft said “There is still an issue members are having signing in to Xbox LIVE, we greatly appreciate you sticking it out with us while we work as hard as we can to get this problem fixed. Keep checking back here every 30 minutes for another update on our progress.” This update came from Microsoft at 3:30 Pacific time on 13th of April. As soon as this story get spotted, several hikes rises. Among this buzz, it was a few unnamed hacker who took credit of the Xbox outage, while declaring that a cyber attack. Another buzz which just got spread so quickly, was that the outage of Xbox Live network has been caused by hacker collective Anonymous.  Here we must have to say that those buzz have some solid reasons as couple of months ago Windows Azure faced an organized cyber attack which effected the service of Azure storage, Xbox Live and 52 other. And that outage or in other word service interruption stays for 12 long hours. But unlike earlier, this time the issue get resolved immediately. Within one hour all the service get restored and came back to its normal order. On the same Xbox Live Status page Microsoft said “If you were one of the members who was having issues signing in to Xbox LIVE, good news! This issue has been fixed! Thank you so much for your patience during this time, feel free to go enjoy your favorite games and content!”

So far we have discussed about the story of the outage and it's restoration. Now we will talk about the cause of this interruption. As I have said earlier that the rumor of hacker's attack was there which was claiming responsibility of the Xbox Live outage. But in reality it was not due to cyber attack but some internal network problems. In their official respond of the situation and those buzz Microsoft completely dines all those rumors and said  "The Xbox Live service outage on 13 April resulted from networking misconfiguration during routine maintenance and was in no way related to false claims of hacking the service." 

While talking about Xbox outage, we would like to remind you that - another world famous gaming console 'PlayStation' had fallen victim to cyber attacks. It was Anonymous who hit Sony PSN and caused massive outage, data leak and many other devastating damages. 

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'Scribd' World's Largest Document Sharing Website Admits Security Breach

'Scribd' World's Largest Document Sharing Website Admits Security Breach 

Scribd- San Francisco-based document sharing site have fallen victim of cyber attack. Such kind of massacre is no doubt very much shameful for one of the world largest document sharing website which have more than 100 million of registered user. Like other largest companies, Scribd acknowledged the attack. In their official security announcement the company said that the operations team of Scribd have discovered and blocked suspicious activity on Scribd's network that appears to have been a deliberate attempt to access the email addresses and passwords of registered Scribd users. But the matter of relief is that only the 1% of its registered users have been affected during the hack. Immediately after this intrusion get spotted Scribd security team have emailed every user whose password was potentially compromised with details of the situation and instructions for resetting their password.  So, if you are a Scribd user and you did not receive such email from Scribd, then you are most likely unaffected.  If you still wish to check, you can use this web tool to determine if your account was among those affected. From the official announcement of Scribd, we came to know that the inertial investigation have already take place, which indicates that no content, payment and sales-related data, or other information were accessed or compromised. It has been  believed that the information accessed by the hackers was limited to general user information, which includes usernames, emails, and encrypted passwords.  Even though this information was accessed, the passwords stored by Scribd are encrypted (in technical terms, they are salted and hashed). Most of the users were therefore unaffected by this; however, the analysis shows that a small percentage may have had their passwords compromised. In an abundance of caution, it has been highly recommended for those affected users to reset their password and to change their password on any other services they might have used it on. 

At conclusion of the note, Scribd team did serious apology to its users while saying -"we would like to sincerely apologize for our failure to live up to our users' expectations in this instance. We’re incredibly disappointed that this happened and are committed to doing everything we can to prevent this from happening again. We will work harder than ever to ensure that we deserve the trust that our users place in us." 

While talking about big cyber attacks against large companies we would like to remind you in the last year we have been a slew of attacks against the following sites: 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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Anonymous Threatens Israel to Erase From The Internet (#OpIsrael)

Anonymous Threatens Israel to Erase From The Internet (#OpIsrael)

Infamous hacker collective group Anonymous along with some organized hacker communities together started a massive rampage against Israeli cyber space. The hacker group threatened Israel government while  planning to engage a massive cyber-attack on Israel, saying that, they will "erase" the country from the Internet. From some legitimate sources it has been confirmed that the hackers are planning to execute the attack on 7th of April. One of the twitter account of Anonymous also confirmed the date and timing, while saying "Hacktivists Starting Cyber Attack against Israel on 7th of April." Also twitter feed of Anonymous invited numerous hackers communities around the world to join up for the cyber rampage dubbed Operation  Israel Phase 2 (#OpIsrael). On the other hand Israel government took the threat seriously and taking almost every steps to avoid any kind of disaster. Ofir Ben Avi, director of online group Accessible Government of Israel told the media -“It’s something being organized online over the past few days. What distinguishes this plan when compared to previous attacks is that it really seems to be organized by Anonymous-affiliated groups from around the world in what looks like a joining of forces”

As you all might know that past experience of Israel while dealing hackers was not at all sweet. In case of Anonymous then we would like to remind you that, this would be the second attack on Israel by the group, as they launched the first “OpIsrael” in November 2012 in response to Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip.  If you dig the recent past you will come to know that not only Anonymous, but also hackers from different part of the world targeted Israeli cyber space and caused big damages. For instance we can recap the hack of Kosova Hackers Security (KHS) where they hacked and exposed personal data of 35,000 Israeli people. Here we must have to name the hackers from Pakistan who are constantly against Israel causing massive cyber attack against leading IT industry of Israel and other high profile Israeli sites. Just a couple of months ago, the world seen what it call the black day in the history if Israeli cyber space where another Pak hackers community hacked the main domain controller of Israel, which causes a massive hack against almost all the big Israeli sites such as government, MSN, Bing, Live, Skype, Microsoft Store, BBC, CNN, Coca-Colla, XBOX, Windows, Intel & many more. Here we can also take the name of Indian hacker Godzilla & Arabian hacker community (Group-XP) who also harassed and harmed the Israeli cyber space very very badly. After observing all the scenario mentioned above, it is expected to watch some sensational fight between hackers and Israeli government. So lets wait for the time, and stay tuned with VOGH to get all the latest update on this story and also other cyber issues.

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NATO Prepared Tallinn Manual -International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare

NATO Prepared Tallinn Manual -International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare

NATO finally published the final version of a document expected to shape cyber warfare policies among Western nations was published last week, clarifying when and how countries can legally conduct online aggression against one another. The International law of Cyber Warfare have been  published by the Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE) set up in Estonia, in 2008, the Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare. Spanning 215 pages, the Tallinn Manual makes it clear that a full-scale war can be triggered by network-borne attacks on computer systems and that civilian activists that participate in those are considered legitimate targets. However, the manual specifically rules out state-sponsored attacks on critical civilian infrastructure. Nuclear power plants, hospitals, dams and similar are all out of bounds for cyber war, the manual states.

The Tallinn Manual:-

The Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare, written at the invitation of the Centre by an independent ‘International Group of Experts’, is the result of a three-year effort to examine how extant international law norms apply to this ‘new’ form of warfare. The Tallinn Manual pays particular attention to the jus ad bellum, the international law governing the resort to force by States as an instrument of their national policy, and the jus in bello, the international law regulating the conduct of armed conflict (also labelled the law of war, the law of armed conflict, or international humanitarian law).  Related bodies of international law, such as the law of State responsibility and the law of the sea, are dealt within the context of these topics.

The Tallinn Manual is not an official document, but instead an expression of opinions of a group of independent experts acting solely in their personal capacity.  It does not represent the views of the Centre, our Sponsoring Nations, or NATO.  It is also not meant to reflect NATO doctrine.  Nor does it reflect the position of any organization or State represented by observers. 

The Tallinn Manual is available in both paper and electronic copies from Cambridge University Press

-Source (IT News & CCDCOE)

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White House Calls China to Stop Hacking & Cyber Espionage Against U.S.

White House Calls China to Stop Hacking & Cyber Espionage Against U.S.

The story of cyber espionage by Chinese hackers used to remain on the spot light due to its consistency, but now the situation get nasty and takes a new way as the national security adviser of U.S. President Obama directly pointed his finger to China. Many of our readers might take this issue lightly as earlier China has been blamed for engaging cyber attacks against different countries for many times. But this time there is a twist as the U.S. government vows to take the issue in a very serious manner. In his speech the national security advisory Tom Donilon said that "The international community cannot afford to tolerate such activity from any country," Like earlier China has denied any type of involvement and condemned the report for lack of hard evidence. But this time such reaction will not at all be entertained as the president said in the State of the Union, "we will take action to protect our economy against cyberthreats." The above two statements can be taken in both friendly warning or also in a serious threat. The White House already warned China to end the campaign of cyber espionage against U.S. companies, saying in its toughest language yet on the issue that the hacking activity threatens to derail efforts to build stronger ties between the two countries. 

Donilon did not directly accuse the Chinese government of launching the attacks on U.S. computer systems, only noting that the attacks are coming from inside the country. "Increasingly, U.S. businesses are speaking out about their serious concerns about sophisticated, targeted theft of confidential business information and proprietary technologies through cyber intrusions emanating from China on an unprecedented scale," he said. Another important message came from the Obama administration saying United States “will not accept North Korea as a nuclear state” and called on Chinese leaders to get serious about cracking down on cyber-related crimes. 

While covering this story we would like to remind you that couple of weeks ago Chinese officials issued a same complain against United States where they blamed U.S. for engaging massive cyber attacks against Chinese military and defense system. If you look at the story of major cyber attacks of last few days we will find that the name of China has been involved several times for engaging cyber attacks against several high profile websites and organization of U.S. including New York Times, Twitter, NBC and so on. And if you refresh our memory then then we will find the scenario of big cyber attack and espionage by Chinese hackers have been spotted several times. In 2012 Chinese hackers had  breached Telvent's corporate network & gained control of US Power Grid. Also in the middle of last year, we have seen that Chinese hackers have broken into Indian Navy's Computer System & stolen sensitive data. Few months before this hack, Tokyo based computer security firm Trend Micro confirmed that Chinese hackers were responsible for biggest cyber-espionage in India, Japan & Tibet. Also the director of National Security Agency (NSA) General Keith Alexander confirmed that hackers from China was responsible for the serious attack on one of the leading IT security & cyber security company RSA. Also in 2011 China was responsible behind the attack on US Chamber of Commerce, Satellite System of U.S, Nortel Network & so on.  But few days ago National Computer Network Emergency Response Coordination Center of China (CNCERT/CC), China's primary computer security monitoring network claimed that China fallen victim of one of biggest cyber attacks originated from US, Japan & South Korea. We must have to say that this statement is truly irrelevant. Cyber crime investigator have found that China was directly responsible for the hack into Japan's Biggest Defense Contractor Mitsubishi, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) & Parliament of Japan. In case of South Korea  more than 13 Million of MapleStory players data has been stolen, there also hackers from China was responsible. 

-Source (The Hill, Cnet & WT)

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Evernote Security Breached! Causing 50 Million Passwords Reset

Evernote Security Breached! Causing 50 Million Passwords Reset

World famous online information storage firm Evernote, allows millions of people to store and organised personal data on an external server from cross-platform have fallen victim to latest round of cyber attacks where hackers had managed to breach the company network which results a massive data breach effecting more than 50 million of its registered users. The breach on Evernote follows malicious activity at Twitter, NBC, New York Times, Facebook and others in recent weeks. In their blog release the firm has acknowledged the incident while saying "Evernote’s Operations & Security team has discovered and blocked suspicious activity on the Evernote network that appears to have been a coordinated attempt to access secure areas of the Evernote Service." But the matter of relief for the millions of its users are that, whether the hackers have gained access inside Evernote user information, which includes usernames, email addresses associated with Evernote accounts, but due to salted encryption; hackers fail to gain decrypt those  credentials. But to avoid further massacre Evernote did password reset of all it's registered users. Phil Libin, Evernote’s CEO and founder, told press that the services are running, although if you try to access the site things may not work as normal at the moment: “We just pushed out a password reset, so the servers are going to be saturated for a bit,” he wrote. “Everything is up, although response is choppy. There’s no threat to user data that we’re aware of” -said Phil. Evernote also claimed that also have no evidence of any payment information for Evernote Premium or Evernote Business customers was accessed during the hack. 

The security response team of Evernote apologized for the annoyance of having to change your password, but, ultimately, they believed that; this simple step will result in a more secure Evernote experience.

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China Claiming Their Defense & Military Sites are Serially Attacked By U.S. Hackers

China Claiming Their Defense & Military Sites are Serially Attacked By U.S. Hackers 

We all are very much familiar of hearing the story of cyber espionage and cyber attacks originated from China by Chinese hackers. Where many countries across the globe have fallen victim like U.S. India, Japan, South Korea, many European countries and many more. But today a complete reverse story came under light where the Chinese government are claiming that several top secrete government sites like defense, army, military were targeted and hit by hackers from United States. According to some classified sources it came that Chinese government websites are routinely hacked from IP addresses originating within the United States. In a news conference, spokesman of Defense Ministry of China; Mr. Geng Yansheng said that - more than 144,000 hacking attempts per month are targeted at the China Military Online and Defense Ministry websites. According to Chinese defense ministry a close to two-thirds of those attacks (62.9 percent) originated in the United States. Geng said he had noted reports that the United States planned to expand its cyber-warfare capability but that they were unhelpful to increasing international cooperation towards fighting hacking.

"We hope that the U.S. side can explain and clarify this." The U.S. security company, Mandiant, identified the People's Liberation Army's Shanghai-based Unit 61398 as the most likely driving force behind the hacking. Mandiant said it believed the unit had carried out "sustained" attacks on a wide range of industries. Yansheng did not mention a direct link between the cyber attacks and the U.S. government only that the attacks originated in the United States. He did note, however, that China is concerned with reports that the United States is planning to expand its cyber warfare capabilities. 

In the last month China was blamed for engaging cyber attacks against several high profile websites and organization of U.S. including New York Times, Twitter, NBC and so on. And if you refresh our memory then then we will find the scenario of big cyber attack and espionage by Chinese hackers have been spotted several times. In 2012 Chinese hackers had  breached Telvent's corporate network & gained control of US Power Grid. Also in the middle of last year, we have seen that Chinese hackers have broken into Indian Navy's Computer System & stolen sensitive data. Few months before this hack, Tokyo based computer security firm Trend Micro confirmed that Chinese hackers were responsible for biggest cyber-espionage in India, Japan & Tibet. Also the director of National Security Agency (NSA) General Keith Alexander confirmed that hackers from China was responsible for the serious attack on one of the leading IT security & cyber security company RSA. Also in 2011 China was responsible behind the attack on US Chamber of Commerce, Satellite System of U.S, Nortel Network & so on.  But few days ago National Computer Network Emergency Response Coordination Center of China (CNCERT/CC), China's primary computer security monitoring network claimed that China fallen victim of one of biggest cyber attacks originated from US, Japan & South Korea. We must have to say that this statement is truly irrelevant. Cyber crime investigator have found that China was directly responsible for the hack into Japan's Biggest Defense Contractor Mitsubishi, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) & Parliament of Japan. In case of South Korea  more than 13 Million of MapleStory players data has been stolen, there also hackers from China was responsible. 

After keeping in mind all the above facts, we can not conclude the matter very easily, but what we can say that, whether China is responsible or not is neither been proved so far. In spite of looking at the situation we can only say, the entire matter is foggy; where the original truth has either been manipulated or been still untold. But it is sure that those untold or manipulated issues will some day came in front, till that time we have to keep patience and don't forget to stay tuned with VOGH for all kind of cyber related topics and expert reviews.

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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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President Obama & Congress Will Issue Long Awaited Executive Cyber Security Order

President Obama & Congress Will Issue Long Awaited Executive Cyber Security Order 

Last week we reported that Pentagon has declared that they are moving toward a major expansion of its cyber security force to counter increasing attacks on the nation’s computer networks, as well as to expand offensive computer operations on foreign adversaries. Just one week after this declaration another crucial movement came from the U.S. government.  A secret legal review on the use of America’s growing arsenal of cyber weapons has concluded that President Obama has the broad power to order a pre-emptive strike if the United States detects credible evidence of a major digital attack looming from abroad. According to sources President Barack Obama will issue a long-awaited cyber security executive order this week. Two former White House officials told the publication that the order is expected to be released after Tuesday night's State of the Union address. 

Given his status as commander-in-chief, Obama seems to be the clear choice, but since cyber warfare is such a new and unknown thing, the government hasn't actually figured out the rules of engagement yet. In the past couple of decades, the power to use America's cyber weapons has been shared between the Pentagon and the various intelligence agencies. With the exception of a series of strikes on the computer systems that run Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities an attack that Obama ordered himself the U.S. hasn't launched any major cyber attacks in recent memory, however. This probably won't be the case in the future. So the government is working on new rules of engagement, as it realizes that the capabilities of cyber weapons are evolving at a startling rate. The rules will be not unlike the set that governs how drone attacks are ordered and who orders them. Cyber warfare certainly stands to affect the average American more, though.  On Capitol Hill this week, Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) and Rep. Mike Rodgers (R-Mich.) are set to reintroduce the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) during a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

According to an exclusive report the bill would allow the government to share classified cyber threats with the private sector so that those companies can then protect their systems from cyber attacks. The bill was killed last year due to privacy concerns. Civil-liberty groups argued that the bill allows companies to exchange too much personal information back and forth without regulation. 

-Source (Bloomberg, NY Times & Atlantic Wire)

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Pentagon Assigning More Experts to Boost Cyber Security & Protect U.S. Computer Networks

Pentagon Assigning More Experts to Boost Cyber Security & Protect U.S. Computer Networks

Cyber security has become one of the most sophisticated area of National security and defense, and in order to implement that Pentagon has increased their estimated expense on cyber security. And this deceleration has been made while publishing the budget late in last year. Now that implementation is getting executed as the Pentagon is moving toward a major expansion of its cyber security force to counter increasing attacks on the nation’s computer networks, as well as to expand offensive computer operations on foreign adversaries. This confirmation has came from defense officials. The expansion would increase the Defense Department’s Cyber Command by more than 4,000 people, up from the current 900, an American official said. Defense officials acknowledged that a formidable challenge in the growth of the command would be finding, training and holding onto such a large number of qualified people. The Pentagon “is constantly looking to recruit, train and retain world class cyberpersonnel,” a defense official said Sunday.

As part of the expansion, officials said the Pentagon was planning three different forces under Cyber Command: “national mission forces” to protect computer systems that support the nation’s power grid and critical infrastructure; “combat mission forces” to plan and execute attacks on adversaries; and “cyber protection forces” to secure the Pentagon’s computer systems. Cyber Command’s connections to the NSA are also leading some officials to ask how much of the expansion will be focused domestically, especially considering the opening of the NSA’s new, $2 billion Utah Data Center, scheduled to go live later this year. An unnamed "senior defense official" said that the agency’s efforts would remain focused outside US networks, unless it were asked to assist "another agency with domestic authority, such as the FBI." There is significant overlap between Cyber Command and the NSA — until recently, some employees of the former had nsa.gov email addresses, for instance — and there is some doubt that the nascent offshoot of US Strategic Command will be able to achieve true independence under NSA Director Alexander.

-Source (NY Times, Washington Post)

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Twitter Hacked, More Than 250,000 User Data Compromised

Twitter Hacked, More Than 250,000 User Data Compromised

The social networking giant and the world famous micro blogging site Twitter again fallen victim of cyber attack. Last year we have seen that the tight security system if twitter have been compromised many times. Yet again in this year the San Francisco based social media giant who have more than 500 million registered users failed to protect them selves from hackers. On last Friday Twitter acknowledged that it had become the latest victim in a number of cyber-attacks against media companies, saying hackers may have gained access to information on 250,000 of its more than 200 million active users. The micro blogging giant said in a blog posting that earlier this week it detected attempts to gain access to its user data. It shut down one attack moments after it was detected. According to reports usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/salted passwords for 250,000 users might have been accessed in what it described as a “sophisticated attack” 

"This attack was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident,” said Bob Lord, Twitter’s director of information security. “The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organisations have also been recently similarly attacked” Bob added. 

Jim Prosser, a Twitter spokesman, would not say how hackers infiltrated Twitter’s systems, but Twitter’s blog post said hackers had broken in through a well-publicized vulnerability in Oracle’s Java software. Last month, after a security researcher exposed a serious vulnerability in the software, though Oracle patched the security hole, but Homeland Security said the fix was not sufficient. The DHS issued a rare alert that warned users to disable Java on their computers. Prosser said Twitter was working with government and federal law enforcement to track down the source of the attacks. For now, he said the company had reset passwords for, and notified, every compromised user. The company encouraged users to practice good password hygiene, which typically means coming up with different passwords for different sites, and using long passwords that cannot be found in the dictionary.

Twitter said it “hashed” passwords — which involves mashing up users’ passwords with a mathematical algorithm — and “salted” those, meaning it appended random digits to the end of each hashed password to make it more difficult, but not impossible, for hackers to crack. Once cracked, passwords can be valuable on auction-like black market sites where a single password can fetch $20.

While talking about Twitter and cyber issues, I would like to remind you that in last year twitter faced several cyber attacks where more than 55,000 twitter account details was leaked, after this issue in the middle of last year the social networking giant faced massive denial of service which interrupted its services. Later a huge number of Twitter users across the globe received  emails warning that their account have been compromised and their passwords had been reset, and it was another security breach which affected twitter. Such big organization are not at all careless about security, so as twitter and it has been proved when they hired renowned white hat hacker Charlie Miller to boost up their security, but after this current massacre, it seems that twitter need to think more and emphasize a lot to make sure that their system is good enough to prevent cyber attacks. For all the hot cyber updates and reviews stay tuned with VOGH.

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Chinese Hackers Breached New York Times & Stolen Employee's Password

Chinese Hackers Breached New York Times & Stolen Employee's Password 

Yet again the story of cyber espionage by Chinese hackers spotted in the wild, when the famous and one of the most popular American news daily reported that their system has been compromised by a round of sophisticated cyber attack generated from China. After the hack of White House unclassified network, it is the second time in last six month; when Chinese hackers have targeted the American cyber space. The New York Times has reported that for the last four months Chinese hackers have been infiltrating its networks, broken into the email accounts of senior staff, stolen the corporate passwords for every Times employee and used those to gain access to the personal computers of  more than 50 employees. 

According to a blog post of NYT - The timing of the attacks coincided with the reporting for a Times investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings. Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks gathered digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times’s network. They broke into the e-mail accounts of its Shanghai bureau chief, David Barboza, who wrote the reports on Mr. Wen’s relatives, and Jim Yardley, The Times’s South Asia bureau chief in India, who previously worked as bureau chief in Beijing. 

“Computer security experts found no evidence that sensitive e-mails or files from the reporting of our articles about the Wen family were accessed, downloaded or copied,” said Jill Abramson, executive editor of The Times. The hackers tried to cloak the source of the attacks on The Times by first penetrating computers at United States universities and routing the attacks through them, said computer security experts at Mandiant, the company hired by The Times. This matches the subterfuge used in many other attacks that Mandiant has tracked to China.

Cyber Espionage of China (2011-2012) at a Glance:-

While talking about this cyber attack, we would like to refresh your memory last two years, where the scenario of big cyber attack and espionage by Chinese hackers have been spotted several times. In 2012 Chinese hackers had  breached Telvent's corporate network & gained control of US Power Grid. Also in the middle of last year, we have seen that Chinese hackers have broken into Indian Navy's Computer System & stolen sensitive data. Few months before this hack, Tokyo based computer security firm Trend Micro confirmed that Chinese hackers were responsible for biggest cyber-espionage in India, Japan & Tibet. Also the director of National Security Agency (NSA) General Keith Alexander confirmed that hackers from China was responsible for the serious attack on one of the leading IT security & cyber security company RSA. Also in 2011 China was responsible behind the attack on US Chamber of Commerce, Satellite System of U.S, Nortel Network & so on.  But few days ago National Computer Network Emergency Response Coordination Center of China (CNCERT/CC), China's primary computer security monitoring network claimed that China fallen victim of one of biggest cyber attacks originated from US, Japan & South Korea. We must have to say that this statement is truly irrelevant. Cyber crime investigator have found that China was directly responsible for the hack into Japan's Biggest Defense Contractor Mitsubishi, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) & Parliament of Japan. In case of South Korea  more than 13 Million of MapleStory players data has been stolen, there also hackers from China was responsible. 

All those above stories it has been clearly identified that China was the point of those said attacks, but it doesn't necessarily prove that it the operation is backed by the Chinese government or intelligence services. It could just as easily be a patriotic group of skilled, independent Chinese hackers upset with how the Western media is portraying their country's rulers. For all kind of cyber related topics and expert reviews on those matters just stay tuned  with only VOGH. 

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Master Card Blog Hacked & defaced By Syrian Electronic Army

Master Card Payments Perspectives Blog Hacked & defaced By Syrian Electronic Army

It's became a very common scenario that hackers targets banks, payment gateway and other financial sectors. Sites like Paypal, Visa, Master Card were among those common victims who used to face massive round of cyber attacks. Past two years hacktivist managed to interrupt the service of those websites many times. Here also in the beginning of 2013 almost same situation took place, when the official blog of Master Card get hacked and defaced.  It was the Saturday evening when a hackers collective group named "Syrian Electronic Army" managed to breach and get access inside Master Card blog. I am sure that all our readers will be shocked after hearing the way of intrusion. In the platform of the blog, Master Card was using an older version of WordPress (Ver. 3.3.2) which has several critical vulnerabilities like XSS, file uploading, CSRF and so on. Exploiting those loopholes the hacker managed to get access inside the blog and defaced one of the page of the giant in international financial services company's blog. Though WordPress have released a security patch and also version 3.5, but it's quite unfortunate and shocking that Master Card did not even patched their older version for which their system get penetrated. It is truly unbelievable that sites like Master Card is so careless about basic security and counter measure of cyber attack. According to sources Syrian Electronic Army used  the CSRF exploit of WordPress which is said to be available on the Internet and allows an attacker to add a new administration user. This is a possible explanation of how the Syrian Electronic Army managed to hack and deface the blog. After this incident occurs Master Card immediately updated the version of WP and closed those back doors. Still the the defaced and cached version of the  blog can be viewed on Google’s Web Cache. 

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