New Shamoon Malware Variant Targets Italian Oil and Gas Company

Shamoon is back… one of the most destructive malware families that caused damage to Saudi Arabia's largest oil producer in 2012 and this time it has targeted energy sector organizations primarily operating in the Middle East.

Earlier this week, Italian oil drilling company Saipem was attacked and sensitive files on about 10 percent of its servers were destroyed, mainly in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, but also in India and Scotland.

Warning! Unprivileged Linux Users With UID > INT_MAX Can Execute Any Command

Hold tight, this may blow your mind…

A low-privileged user account on most Linux operating systems with UID value anything greater than 2147483647 can execute any systemctl command unauthorizedly—thanks to a newly discovered vulnerability.

The reported vulnerability actually resides in PolicyKit (also known as polkit)—an application-level toolkit for Unix-like operating systems that defines policies, handles system-wide privileges and provides a way for non-privileged processes to communicate with privileged ones, such as "sudo," that does not grant root permission to an entire process.

U.S Charges Two Iranian Hackers for SamSam Ransomware Attacks

The Department of Justice announced Wednesday charges against two Iranian nationals for their involvement in creating and deploying the notorious SamSam ransomware.

The alleged hackers, Faramarz Shahi Savandi, 34, and Mohammad Mehdi Shah, 27, have been charged on several counts of computer hacking and fraud charges, the indictment unsealed today at New Jersey court revealed.

The duo used SamSam ransomware to extort over $6 million in ransom payments since 2015, and also caused more than $30 million in damages to over 200 victims, including hospitals, municipalities, and public institutions.

Chinese Spying Chips Found Hidden On Servers Used By US Companies

A media report today revealed details of a significant supply chain attack which appears to be one of the largest corporate espionage and hardware hacking programs from a nation-state.

According to a lengthy report published today by Bloomberg, a tiny surveillance chip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, has been found hidden in the servers used by nearly 30 American companies, including Apple and Amazon.

The malicious chips, which were not part of the original server motherboards designed by the U.S-based company Super Micro, had been inserted during the manufacturing process in China.

Wi-Fi Gets Simplified Version Numbers and Next Version is Wi-Fi 6

Do you know what is the latest version of Wi-Fi? It's okay if you don't know.

It is — Wi-Fi is 802.11ac.

I am sure many of us can't answer this question immediately because the Wi-Fi technology doesn't have a traditional format of version numbers… at least until yesterday.

The Wi-Fi Alliance—the group that manages the implementation of Wi-Fi—has today announced that the next version of WiFi standard, which is 802.11ax, will use a simpler naming scheme and will be called WiFi 6.

Pangu Hackers have Jailbroken iOS 12 on Apple's New iPhone XS

Bad news for Apple.

The Chinese hacking team Pangu is back and has once again surprised everyone with a jailbreak for iOS 12 running on the brand-new iPhone XS.

Well, that was really fast.

Pangu jailbreak team has been quiet for a while, since it last released the untethered jailbreak tool for iOS 9 back in October 2015.

New Linux Kernel Bug Affects Red Hat, CentOS, and Debian Distributions

Security researchers have published the details and proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits of an integer overflow vulnerability in the Linux kernel that could allow an unprivileged user to gain superuser access to the targeted system.

The vulnerability, discovered by cloud-based security and compliance solutions provider Qualys, which has been dubbed "Mutagen Astronomy," affects the kernel versions released between July 2007 and July 2017, impacting the Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and Debian distributions.

Operator of VirusTotal Like Malware-Scanning Service Jailed for 14 Years

A Latvian hacker behind the development and operation of counter antivirus service "Scan4You" has finally been sentenced to 14 years in prison.

37-year-old Ruslans Bondars, described as a Latvian "non-citizen" or "citizen of the former USSR who had been residing in Riga, Latvia," was found guilty on May 16 in federal court in Alexandria, during which a co-conspirator revealed he had worked with Russian law enforcement.

Bondars created and ran Scan4you—a VirusTotal like online multi-engine antivirus scanning service that allowed hackers to run their code by several popular antiviruses to determine if their computer virus or malware would be flagged during routine security scans before launching them into a real-world malware campaign.