Hack

Time Warner Cable User Accounts Could Be Under Potential Threat

Jan 9, 2016 By

With the advent of technological advance and the growing use of internet around the world, no service goes completely free of any cyber threats, not even if your organisation is as big as Time Warner Cable. The television network providing giant was recently in the throes of a serious security breach which was immediately alerted to users.

Time Warner Cable informed users that there could have been a situation where the passwords and other account related information was temporarily compromised. Although no major damage seems to have been inflicted, this is a warning signal for the company to tighten up security even further. TWC was alerted by Federal Bureau of Investigation about the issue, to which the VP of Public Relations, Nathalie Burgos responded by saying that she was confident of the TWC systems capability of protecting user information and that there was no evident breach, but investigations were still being run. Burgos is of the view that the information tap could be the result of malware that the server encountered, further being unable to prevent a phishing attack.

However, the organization feels that up to 320,000 accounts of customers may have been compromised. Although there is no exact proof that that many number of accounts were actually hacked, the Time Warner Cable took initiatives to inform all the customers under threat to be quick in changing the passwords of the accounts that they were using. This would be the best way to stem the leak in the system for the time being; the company already has the experts working on the causes of the breach and a means of fixing it.

The company has advised users who feel that their accounts might have been hacked should immediately get in touch with the Time Warner cable team at 1-844-899-8913. For those who rely on the company for their business needs should reach the helplines at 1-866-892-4249.

Microsoft To Alert Users On State Sponsored Hacks

Jan 1, 2016 By

Privacy in today’s day and age is at a major threat. Not just malicious hackers are breaking into the accounts of the users, but various governments too are trying to get access of the mailboxes and social media accounts of people who have an international presence. Espionage has now taken a major turn technologically, as spying has now become much more internet focused and tech oriented than it ever was.

State sponsored hacks have become quite a matter over the last few months. With more and more tech firms stepping up to defend user privacy, it has now become a battle between government spying vs tech companies protecting their users. In recent times, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook and Gmail have all been alerting their users over state sponsored hacks. You can view our coverage of Yahoo alerting their users HERE and on Twitter informing their users over similar threats to their privacy HERE.

The latest name to join the mix of things is Microsoft, as the company is now providing alerts to their users over state sponsored hacks on their Outlook accounts.

Microsoft said this in a statement after it was being grilled by Reuters over the fact that they had not given this warning to the victims of a 2011 hacking campaign. It has now been revealed by Microsoft that they ‘suspected’ Chinese state sponsored hackers were behind this hacking campaign, however neither them nor the US agencies could have said anything for sure as there had been attacks happening from various countries.

“As the threat landscape has evolved our approach has too, and we’ll now go beyond notification and guidance to specify if we reasonably believe the attacker is ‘state-sponsored’,” said Microsoft in a statement.

State sponsored hacks have been becoming common with every passing day, and there have been various such instances where people have been under major attacks from foreign nations. Government employees and journalists are the most likely targets in this case.

BBC Under DDoS Attack – iPlayer Platform Also Affected:

Jan 1, 2016 By

The British Broadcasting Center was recently taken down by hackers who were able to successfully launch a DDos Attack on the News giant.

This BBC DDoS attack had lasted over a period of almost 4.5 hours. In a recent report launched by the Internet analysis service, called ComScore, it was mentioned that the exact duration of the BBC DDoS attack was between 7:00 GMT and 11:45 GMT. The news giant’s services remained suspended and users who tried accessing the website were only shown error messages.

So how does a DDoS attack work? A large number of DDoS sites are present over the internet, that can find out which site can be hacked easily. These websites are then hired by the anti socials, who then administer the attacks and bring down network services. They try to impair the network by sending out so many messages to the server, that the system gets clogged and is not able to communicate with the network properly. The legitimate traffic receives no response, as a result of which content is not distributed. This is why DDoS expanded as “Distributed Denial of Service” or DDoS.

Although BBC did not admit that it had come under a DDoS attack, it did confirm to sources that it was facing technical issues that it was striving to resolve and would be back on track soon. The service did come online for sure, but some investigation was done into the matter.

Akamai, a content delivery network provided delved into the matter and found out that the number of DDoS attacks had been on the rise recently. The main target of the attackers are generally the media and Entertainment websites. Just like BBC DDoS attack, in the third quarter of 2015, some massive attacks were launched, that had completely impaired the Tier 1 router of a major ISP. The State of Internet Security Report stated that this attack was able to hamper 220 million packets per second and was one of the largest noted in all these days.

Arrest made after VTech hacks – 11.5 million people’s security compromised –

Dec 18, 2015 By

With technology improving at the speed that it has been, safety has become one of the key issues in the modern day and age. While we believed threats of security are only to our computers and phones, hackers have proven us wrong. The recent VTech hacks, which affected the Toy company have lead to major learnings – and the biggest question that emerges is, are we ready for IoT yet? If we can’t even secure toys, how are we to secure smarthomes, artificial intelligence and maybe even robots! The VTech hacks have affected 11.5 million people, including 6.5 million kids and 5 million adults.

A 21 year old man has been arrested in UK following the incident. He was arrested in Bracknell, Berkshire. The charges against him are those of violating the Computer Misuse Act of 1990. The police have also managed to seize a large number of electronic items from him. The information that this man had been able to hack included the pictures of children, and their conversations with their parents, along with their passwords.

In an interview the hacker had stated that the is doing this to bring to light the flaws in security, and he does not intend to do anything with the data. As of this moment there has been no information on how this breach of security had happened and VTech has not commented anything on it. There have been speculations that this had been attained by using SQL injections as the devices did seem to have major vulnerabilities.

Craig Jones, Head of the Cyber Crime Unit at SEROCU said in a final statement that “Cyber criminality is affecting more and more business around the world and we continue to work with our partners to thoroughly investigate, often very complex cases,”

With technology expected to reach levels never imagined before in the years to follow, we really need to step up and ensure that our security measures are up to the level. Hackers will always exist and will try to outsmart the system, but there needs to be an increased sense of security for the users as well.

Your Twitter Account May Be Under Government Surveillance, Twitter Warns

Dec 14, 2015 By

Twitter has warned people of an impending hack attack mobilized by the government. Time to flee! — *Twitter has warned people of a hack attack mobilized by the government. Time to flee!*

Twitter users were all a trifle bewildered when they stumbled upon a strange mail from Twitter that they had never before seen before – a warning.

This warning was issued in the interest of the users by Twitter, warning them of an account hack possibility, which is actually an event backed by the state. A lot of users happened to receive this email. The mail clearly indicated that the attack was intended to gain sensitive information from users regarding a vast array of things, mainly those being IP addresses and phone numbers of users. Twitter has been unable to confirm in the email as to how much information was taken from the accounts, but they are hpoing to find the extent of the information compromised as soon as possible.

The most vulnerable happened to be the accounts of users who are people with some level of public interaction or with people involved with the internet and its functioning. The people who were possibly attacked were journalists, security researchers and programmers.

According to Twitter, some help could be gained if the affected users were to use TOR, a service that could actually make you appear anonymous while using the internet. A guide to “Protecting Yourself on Social Networks” laid down by the Electronic Frontier Foundation was also added to the email for users to refer and prevent any more transactions.

It would be incorrect to say that Twitter has been the only website to be involved in such ‘state sponsored hacks’. Such hacks were previously noted by Facebook as well, when it had also sent out similar warnings to users about the government possibly snooping on their accounts. Other websites included Google that faced this issue back in 2012 and had pro-actively asked its users to be alert.

What are your views about these moves by the state? Do you think that they have the right reason to target our accounts? Share your views below.

Hello Barbie Doll Can Now Be ‘Hacked’: Protect Your Kids –

Dec 5, 2015 By

With the world of technology taking rapid strides towards progress, there have been several changes that have been happening, and happening for the good. With technology constantly changing, and with every passing day, we move towards a different future. A few years ago, smartphones were the future, then there was the VR and AR technologies. Today, IoT (Internet of Things) is being developed as the next big thing, and it is expected that it will take over most of the world of telecommunications as well as technology in the years to come. Internet of Things is an incredible technology, and when it gets implemented on a large scale level it is going to change the way we use our devices completely.

However, with great technology comes a greater risk. If control tends to fall in malicious hands, things can go haywire pretty quick. Hackers have now been reported to be hacking into ‘Hello Barbie’ dolls. Matell, ever since they released the Hello Barbie series of dolls, have been facing this constant threat of hackers breaking into the internet systems and gaining access of the doll.

The doll connects to the internet using Wi-Fi, and it uses the audio obtained by children and transmits it to the servers. The servers process this speech and responses are prepared, which are then spoken to the children via the doll. Simply speaking, the doll acts like a Siri or Cortana for children.

As per security research director Andrew Hay of OpenDNS, the toy uses a digital ID that attackers can abuse and potentially let them spy on the chatter between a doll and a server. As per more research by the firm, it was brought to light that the phones with the app will automatically connect to any Wi-Fi network that includes “Barbie” in its name.

This doll was made by Matell in association with ToyTalk. Toy companies have become a major target for hackers now, as this comes as a second major attack after the recent one on VTech.