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  • Dirty NSA hacked into Webcam of millions of Yahoo users for Private images

    Once again, a new revelation showed the ugly side of the Government who are conducting Global Mass surveillance and previous documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden have defaced the US Intelligence Agency NSA, who were taking care of a number of projects like PRISM, XKeyscore, DROPOUTJEEP, and various others to carry out surveillance of millions of people.

    Now, it has been revealed that the US National Security Agency (NSA) helped its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), to allegedly capture and store nude images and others from webcam chats of millions of unsuspecting Yahoo users, The Guardian reported.

    Documents handed to the Guardian by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show that the GCHQ’s worked with the US intelligence agency NSA on a joint project dubbed as ‘Optic Nerve’. The project carried out a bulk surveillance program, under which they nabbed webcam images every five minutes from random Yahoo users’ video chats and stored them in a database.

    The project didn’t target individual users; rather it targeted Yahoo webcam chats between 2008 and 2010. Indeed, the method of collection appears somewhat recklessly, and in just six months of period alone, the still images of about 1.8 million users were captured and stored in the government servers in 2008.

    Instead of saving full videos, the program logged one image every five minutes from a user’s chat. The document says that between 3 and 11 percent of the images taken contain “undesirable nudity.

    One GCHQ document states, “It would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person.

    The collected webcam information was stored in the NSA’s XKeyscore search tool, and the NSA research was used to build the tool which identified Yahoo’s webcam traffic, reads the report.

    NSA Optic Nerve Webcam hacking

    GCHQ webcam spying program, Optic Nerve, was still active in 2012, according to an internal GCHQ wiki page accessed that year.

    Why Images??? It is known from the revealed documents that the images were collected by the government agency, so that the group could experiment with facial recognition.

    Face detection has the potential to aid selection of useful images for ‘mugshots’ or even for face recognition by assessing the angle of the face,” it reads. “The best images are ones where the person is facing the camera with their face upright.

    NSA Optic Nerve Webcam hacking

    The GCHQ agency staffs were allowed to display “webcam images associated with similar Yahoo identifiers to your known target”, the document reads, also it states “Bulk surveillance of Yahoo users was begun” as “Yahoo webcam is known to be used by GCHQ targets.

    Not Surprising, because your knotty private webcam sex session you loved and enjoyed with your lover four years back was potentially pored over by the suits at GCHQ.

    Yahoo has reacted furiously and denied any prior knowledge of the webcam interception program, and said that it had no awareness of or involvement with the GCHQ collection, describing the activity as “a whole new level of violation of our users’ privacy.

    And a GCHQ spokesman said in a statement, “It is a longstanding policy that we do not comment on intelligence matters. Furthermore, all of GCHQ’s work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorized, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the secretary of state, the interception and intelligence service commissioners and the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee,” adding, “All our operational processes rigorously support this position.

    The NSA spokesperson declined to respond saying, “As we’ve said before, the National Security Agency does not ask its foreign partners to undertake any intelligence activity that the US government would be legally prohibited from undertaking it.

    This is how our privacy is getting ruined by the government intelligence officials that we all trust blindly.

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  • Android iBanking Trojan Source Code LEAKED ONLINE

    Smartphone is the need of everyone today and so the first target of most of the Cyber Criminals. Malware authors are getting to know their market and are changing their way of operations. Since last year we have seen a rise in the number of hackers moving from the Blackhat into the Greyhat.

     

    iBanking, a new mobile banking Trojan app which impersonates itself as an Android ‘Security App‘, in order to deceive its victims, may intimidate a large number of users as now that its source code has been leaked online through an underground forum.

    It will give an opportunity to a larger number of cybercriminals to launch attacks using this kind of ready-made mobile malware in the future.

     

    Since many banking sites use two-factor authentication and transaction authorization systems in order to deal with the various threats, by sending unique one-time-use codes to their customers’ registered phone numbers via SMS, but in order to defraud them, cyber criminals have started to create various mobile malware like iBanking to solve their purpose.

     In addition, with the iBanking malware, Computer malware is used to defeat the mobile-based security mechanisms used by the banking sites.

    Apart from the server-side source-code, the leaked files also include a builder that can un-pack the existing iBanking APK file and re-pack it with different configurations, essentially providing fraudsters with the means to create their own unique application,” added Daniel Cohen.

    In addition to SMS Sniffing, the iBanking app allows an attacker to redirect calls to any pre-defined phone number, capture audio using the device’s microphone and steal other confidential data like call history log and the phone book contacts.

    During the installation process, the malicious app attempts to Social Engineer the user into providing it with administrative rights, making its removal much more difficult.

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  • Mass Exploit of Linksys Routers

    It has been revealed that a vulnerability in possibly 23 different models of Linksys (Belkin) routers has been exploited by a worm known as The Moon.

     

    The exploit was first noticed about a week ago and reported by the Internet Storm Center. The Worm bypasses authentication on the router to take control. Linksys state that “the router starts flooding the network with ports 80 and 8080 outbound traffic, resulting in heavy data activity”. The worm also attempts to detect any vulnerable systems on the router’s network for exploitation.

     

    Current intentions of The Moon are not yet known, however, there is code within the worm which seems to suggest that it may be gathering infected routers into a network of compromised devices through a command and control system.

     

    Linksys will be issuing a firmware update to fix the vulnerability in the next few weeks. But for now, if you’re using a Linksys router, you should read the advice given here to disable Remote Access Management.

     

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  • What It’s Like When The FBI Asks You To Backdoor Your Software

    At a recent RSA Security Conference, Nico Sell was on stage announcing that her company—Wickr—was making drastic changes to ensure its users’ security. She said that the company would switch from RSA encryption to elliptic curve encryption, and that the service wouldn’t have a backdoor for anyone.

    As she left the stage, before she’d even had a chance to take her microphone off, a man approached her and introduced himself as an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He then proceeded to “casually” ask if she’d be willing to install a backdoor into Wickr that would allow the FBI to retrieve information.

    MORE HERE: https://securitywatch.pcmag.com/secu…en-the-fbi-asks-you-to-backdoor-your-software

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