Tech Knock

rampage-attack-android-rowhammer-bit-flipping. No matter how secure Google calls its mobile operating system, it seems like  a determined security research could come up with a vulnerability any day. A team of eight researchers has done the same with their exploit having the unauthorized access to Android devices. What is RAMPAGE Attack? In 2012, with the release of Android ICS, Google introduced a new component to the Android kernel called ION that allocates memory for different apps and services. RAMPAGE targets ION, thus, making itself a thread to million of Android devices across the world. However, Android isn't to be blamed entirely. The attack originates out of a fundamental, more of a hardware error in the RAM chip called Rawhammer which works on ARM-based devices. In modern RAM chips, the memory cells are packed very close to each other. This could result in the cells leaking their charge and interact with other cells. Each memory cells contains one...

A massive malware outbreak that last week infected nearly  half a million computers  with cryptocurrency mining malware in just a few hours was caused by a backdoored version of popular BitTorrent client called  MediaGet. Dubbed  Dofoil  (also known as Smoke Loader), the malware was found dropping a cryptocurrency miner program as payload on infected Windows computers that mine Electroneum digital coins for attackers using victims' CPU cycles. Dofoil campaign that hit PCs in Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine on 6th March was discovered by Microsoft Windows Defender research department and blocked the attack before it could have done any severe damages. At the time when Windows Defender researchers detected this attack, they did not mention how the malware was delivered to such a massive audience in just 12 hours. However, after investigation Microsoft today revealed that the attackers targeted the update mechanism of MediaGet BitTorrent software to push ...

Whether you're a developer, designer or a writer, a good text editor always help you save time and make you work more efficiently. For example, I use Sublime a lot while programming because it includes some useful tools like 'syntax highlighting' and 'autocomplete' that every advanced text editor should have. Moreover, these advanced text editors also offer users extensibility, allowing users to install and run third-party plugins to extend the editor's functionality and most importantly its scope. However, it's a known fact that third-party plugins always pose a significant risk of hacking, whether it's about WordPress plugins or Windows' extensions for Chrome, Firefox or Photoshop. SafeBreach researcher Dor Azouri analyzed several popular extensible text editors for Unix and Linux systems, including Sublime, Vim, Emacs, Gedit, and pico/nano, and  found  that except for pico/nano, all of them are vulnerable to a critical privilege escal...

The world is moving online, and so is crime. One of the most common cyber crimes that often target innocent individuals is phishing. Phishing refers to fraudulent electronic communication which attempts to steal personal data, especially for financial theft. Despite advancements in technology worldwide, such decades-old crimes still keep happening. Here's how you can keep yourself safe from phishing attacks. In context:  How to protect yourself from phishing 07 Aug 2017 Keep yourself safe from phishing attacks: Find out how! The world is moving online, and so is crime. One of the most common cyber crimes that often target innocent individuals is phishing. Phishing refers to fraudulent electronic communication which attempts to steal personal data, especially for financial theft. Despite advancements in technology worldwide, such decades-old crimes still keep happening. Here's how you can keep yourself safe from phishing attacks. Identify ...

On Wednesday, February 28, 2018, GitHub's code hosting website hit with the largest-ever distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that peaked at record 1.35 Tbps. Interestingly, attackers did not use any botnet network, instead weaponized misconfigured Memcached servers to amplify the DDoS attack. Earlier this week we published a report detailing how attackers could abuse Memcached, popular open-source and easily deployable distributed caching system, to launch over 51,000 times powerful DDoS attackthan its original strength. Dubbed  Memcrashed , the amplification DDoS attack works by sending a forged request to the targeted Memcrashed server on port 11211 using a spoofed IP address that matches the victim's IP. A few bytes of the request sent to the vulnerable server trigger tens of thousands of times bigger response against the targeted IP address. "This attack was the largest attack seen to date by Akamai, more than twice the size of the September...

First notified in November of a data breach incident, popular clothing retailer Forever 21 has now confirmed that hackers stole credit card information from its stores throughout the country for several months during 2017. Although the company did not yet specify the total number of its customers affected by the breach, it did  confirm  that malware was installed on some point of sale (POS) systems in stores across the U.S. at varying times between April 3, 2017, and November 18, 2017. According to the company's investigation, which is still ongoing, the malware was designed to search for and likely steal sensitive customer credit card data, including credit card numbers, expiration dates, verification codes and, in some cases, cardholder names. Forever 21 has been using encryption technology since 2015 to protect its payment processing systems, but during the investigation, the company found that some POS terminals at certain stores had their encryp...

Short Bytes:   There are times when your internet connection is fine but you’re still not able to open any website. One of the possible causes could be the issues with your ISP’s DNS server. Configuring a custom DNS server on your make contribute to make your internet faster and load websites quickly. There are many ways to get a faster internet speed in Microsoft Windows. Today, I am going to show you a simple DNS hack that can speed up your web browsing considerably. Before that, I need to remind you an obvious thing that happens with most of us when we are using a slow internet connection. The only thing we blame is our Internet Service Provider (ISP) for slow internet connection, but this isn’t the only case all the time. Sometimes, the problem is related to the default DNS (Domain Name System) used by the ISP. So, let me explain you something about DNS before telling you the method to get a faster internet speed. What is DNS? DNS – Domain Name System ...