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WordPress Attacked By Hackers
March 14, 2012 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Security outfit Websense said that more than 200,000 infected pages that redirect users to websites displaying fake antivirus scans have been created. The latest compromises are part of a rogue antivirus distribution campaign that has been going on for months, the Websense researchers said.
Cybercriminals gangs have switched to drive-by download attacks that exploit vulnerabilities in outdated browser plug-ins to automatically download and install their rogue software. The large number of infected Web pages seen in this campaign is an indication that these scams still work. Vulnerable websites are a rich source of opportunity for cybercriminals. More than 85 percent of the compromised sites were located in the US, but their visitors were geographically dispersed.
Tool Created To Hack BlackBerry Passwords
October 7, 2011 by admin
Filed under Smartphones
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A Russian security firm has upgraded a phone-password cracking software with the ability to figure out the master device password for Research in Motion’s BlackBerry devices.
Elcomsoft said on Thursday that before it developed the product, it was believed that there was no way to uncover a device password on a BlackBerry smartphone or PlayBook tablet. BlackBerry smartphones are configured to wipe all data on the phone if a password is typed incorrectly 10 times in a row, the company said.
Elcomsoft said it figured a way around the problem using a BlackBerry’s removable media card, but only if a user has configured their smartphone in a specific way. In order for Elcomsoft’s software to be successful, a user must have enabled the feature to encrypt data on the media card.
The feature is disabled by default, but Elcomsoft said around 30% of BlackBerry users have it enabled for extra security.
The company’s software can then analyze the encrypted media card and use a brute-force method to figure out a password, which involves trying millions of possible password combinations per second until one works.
Elcomsoft said it can recover a seven-character password in less than an hour if the password is all lower-case or all capital letters. The software does not need access to the actual BlackBerry device but just the encrypted media card.
Hackers Breach WordPress Servers
April 15, 2011 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Hackers have gained access to several servers that support WordPress and may have obtained source code, according to the founding developer of Automattic, the company behind the popular blogging platform.
Matt Mullenweg wrote on the WordPress blog that Automattic has been reviewing log records to determine how much information was breached and re-evaluating “avenues to gain access.”
“We presume our source code was exposed and copied,” Mullenweg wrote. “While much of our code is open source, there are sensitive bits of our and our partners’ code. Beyond that, however, it appears information disclosed was limited.”