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Uber Being Sued for $13.5 Million

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Uber had revealed in November 2016 that hackers had stolen names, phone numbers and email ids of 57 million customers across the globe. The hackers had also stolen driver licence number of 600,000 drivers in the United States of America. While this hack was covered up for more than an year, Uber had acknowledge paying $100,000 to hackers to ensure that they do not misuse the data. The company had fired chief security officer Joe Sullivan and his senior lawyer Craig Clark for covering the same. The law According to Pennsylvania data breach law, a business must inform the victims in case of a data breach of personal information within a reasonable amount of time. They personal information may refers to first name (or initial) and last name along with social security number, driver’s license number (or state ID), or bank information along with the access code or similar codes. But no court has ever defined the length of 'Reasonable amount of Time' The Lawsuit The la...

1.3 Tb/sec DDOS on github!

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What is DDOS? DDOS or Distributed Denial Of service refers to crashing server by sending tons of requests from different systems. The systems are usually infected with trojan or malware and all the online systems are made to send continuous requests at one particular time flooding the server. Memcached Server Memcached server are more responsive than usual servers since they have improved memory caching. The attack Attackers spoofed github's IP and took control of memacached servers of Github from UDP port 11211 . Github stated that these servers are inaccessible to the general public. They used it to amplify traffic and attempted to crash the server. The amplification was around 50 times. This lead to github being attacked at a volume of 1.3 Tb/s. This is the largest DDOS attack ever recorded in the history. Astonishingly it took Github approximately just 5 mins to recover. Github was down on 28th Feb between 17:21 UTC and 17:26 UTC. What now? As quoted from  htt...

SS7 Vulnerability Explained

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What is SS7? Signalling System No 7 (SS7)  is an international telephone signalling protocol which was developed in 1975 . SS7 is designed to operate in two modes: associated mode and quasi-associated mode. The diagram shows a basic  structure of the network. Customers are connected at End Office. It is directly connected to service switching point (SSP) which converts the dialed digits to signalling messages. Then the SS7 network routes the signals to its destination using  signal transfer point ( STP). The vulnerability Signalling System No 7 (SS7) vulnerability is found in the mobile network which allows hackers to read your text messages, listen to your calls or track your mobile location. It was first discovered in 2014 where some German researchers demonstrated the exploit. Many people think that it had been known to many government secret agencies but was not made public for security reasons.  “It’s like you secure the front door of the ho...

OWASP Top 10

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At the end of every year OWASP releases top 10 security exploits of the year. This helps security analysts find security loopholes in the applications they have deployed or are about to deploy. This year's list of OWASP top 10 is :- 1) Injection Injection attacks allow an attacker to input dangerous code in an application which causes data leakage or a crash in the application. Injection like SQL, NoSql etc. have been discovered years ago, yet it still needs to be fixed in many applications across the internet, 2) Broken Authentication Not enabling secure authentication methods may allow an attacker to gain access to one's account allowing him to gain access to a lot of personal data. 3) Sensitive Data Exposure Some API's pass or do not encrypt sensitive data while they request it. This allows an attacker to gain access to the data by various methods  like sniffing the API. (More on   https://vapthacker.blogspot.in/2018/02/api-sniffing-using-fiddler.html ) ...

Intel's bug bounty raised

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Following the release of the meltdown and spectre bug which is one of the most dangerous vulnerability till date, Intel has increased its bug bounty to $250,000. Rick Echevarria, the vice president of and the general manager of Platform security at Intel Corporation stated that "At Intel, we believe that working with security researchers is a crucial part of identifying and mitigating potential security issues in our products. Similar to other companies, one of the ways we’ve made this part of our operating model is through a bug bounty program. The Intel® Bug Bounty Program was launched in March 2017 to incentivize security researchers to collaborate with us to find and report potential vulnerabilities. This, in turn, helps us strengthen the security of our products, while also enabling a responsible and coordinated disclosure process." Updates to our program include: 1) Shifting from an invitation-only program to a program that is open to all security researchers...

Sniffing Android API

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API Application Programming Interface aka API is a code that allows two different softwares to interact with each other. We will try to sniff Web API here. Web API are of mainly two types :- SOAP and REST. SOAP API contains only headers while REST API contains headers as well as body. Headers and body are used to send data to a server across the internet. SNIFFING If your APIs are insecure, a hacker can sniff them and modify it to cause damage to your server.  Fiddler is one of the software which allows us to sniff API. 1) Download fiddler from  https://www.telerik.com/download/fiddler  and install it in Kali or Windows. 2) Install Fiddler and run it as Admin. 3) You will see a screen like this 4)Go to tools->option->connections and check allow remote computers to connect. 5) On taking the cursor to the top right corner of the screen, you can see your the local IP address of the PC. 6) Open your android phone and enter this IP in...

Bitcoin mining in nuclear lab

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Bitcoin Bitcoin is currently the world's strongest cryptocurrency with 1 btc(bitcoin) being more than $11000(As on 19th feb 2018). No wonder people are going crazy over buying it or mining it. Mining For those of who don't know about cryptocurrency mining,  mining is the process by which transactions are verified and added to the public ledger, known as the block chain, and also the means through which new bitcoin are released. Anyone with access to the internet and suitable hardware can participate in mining. People have spent crazy amount of money to build a rig to mine it. But some people like few Russian scientists who couldn't afford it or didn't want to spend money on it are trying unfair means to get a hold of it. Overview Several Russian scientists were arrested for mining at a nuclear weapon facility. Yes, you read it right, a nuclear weapon faculty. The scientists who have not been named are likely to face criminal charges. "There has been...