Tag Archive for: hack

Illinois District 211 Impacted by Potential Hack


Township High School District 211, one of the largest school districts in Illinois, said Sunday that its communication systems were possibly hacked this weekend.



a person using a computer mouse and keyboard: hacker with laptop, hacking the Internet, computer security technology concept, e-mail spam viruses bank account hacking


© Getty Images

hacker with laptop, hacking the Internet, computer security technology concept, e-mail spam viruses bank account hacking


In a statement, district officials said emails, automated phone calls and text messages were sent to some families, but didn’t say what content was included in the messages.

“Once the District learned of the compromise, the system was immediately secured to stop the unauthorized communications,” a statement from the district read.

Only the outgoing communications system was affected, officials added. The District’s technology team was assessing any potential compromise of student or family data, but initial reports indicated the data was secure.

Local law enforcement were called to investigate possible criminal activity associated with the incident.

The district includes schools in several suburbs such as Hoffman Estates, Plainfield and Schaumburg.

Continue Reading

Source…

Cured DNS hack makes a surprising comeback



As per the group of researchers from Tsinghua University and UC Riverside, the vulnerability affects a majority of the popular DNS services, including Google’s 8.8.8.8 and CloudFlare’s 1.1.1.1.   The …

Source…

Mysterious Bugs Were Used to Hack iPhones and Android Phones and No One Will Talk About It


hacked-phone-worm

Image: Cathryn Virginia/VICE

Google’s elite teams of bug and malware hunters found and disclosed a flurry of high impact vulnerabilities in Chrome, Android, Windows, and iOS last week. The internet giant also said that these various vulnerabilities were all “actively exploited in the wild.” In other words, hackers were using these bugs to actually hack people, which is concerning. 

What’s more, all these vulnerabilities are in some way related to each other, Motherboard has learned. That potentially means the same hackers were using them. According to the disclosure reports, some bugs were in font libraries, and others were used to escape the sandbox in Chrome, and others were used to take control of the whole system, suggesting some of these bugs were part of a chain of vulnerabilities used to exploit victim’s devices.  

So far, very little information has come out about who may have been using the exploits and who they were targeting. Often, bugs in modern software are found and are ethically disclosed by security researchers, which means that they are fixed before they are widely exploited to hack people. In this case, however, we know that the bugs were being used for hacking operations. 

Last year, Google found a series of zero-days—vulnerabilities that at the time of discovery are unknown to the software maker—that spies were using to target the Uighur community. China has conducted a widespread, systemic campaign of physical and technical oppression and surveillance against the Muslim minority. 

“This feels like spy shit.”

Unfortunately, this time we don’t know any details because Google—the only company that has the whole story behind these bugs—has not said much at all about how it found the bugs, who was using them, and whom they were being used against. Notably, an update pushed to iOS 12 (which is two years old) patched the issue on phones dating back to the iPhone 5s and iPhone 6. Often, when updates are pushed to such old devices it means the bug is particularly bad, but, again, we do not know the specifics at this time.

“The fact that they updated iPhone 6 users means it was bad,” said a cybersecurity expert who asked not to be named because he wasn’t allowed…

Source…

​IIT-Indore students hack website, wins 8th position in world


By hacking a website in a very short period of time, a team of Indian Institute of Technology Indore stood first in India and eighth globally in a cyber security competition and awareness event, CSAW, organised by New York University for cyber security recently.

In second place in the country was secured by IITA Roorkee’s team. It was ranked 14th worldwide. Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham Amritapuri’s team stood third in Indian and 16th worldwide.

“ByteBandits, the team of cyber security enthusiasts comprising Vishnunarayan K I, Mrigank Krishan, Vaibhav Anand and Sarthak Jain made their institute proud,” said IIT Indore PRO Sunil Kumar.

This is the second consecutive time students of IIT Indore secured the first position in India. Last year, they were ranked first in India and 9th globally and in 2018 they secured second position in India and 16th globally.

CSAW is one of the oldest and biggest cyber security competition and awareness event held globally. This competition requires players to integrate concepts, develop skills, and learn to hack.

It was a 36 hour long event, which was held on November 7 and November 8, saw competition among 52 qualified teams from worldwide. “Challenges mimicked real-world scenarios modelling various computer security problems,” Kumar said.

Teams have to demonstrate a profound understanding of the roles and ramifications of cyber security in these situations. Topics include Pwnable, RE, Web, Crypto, Forensics, etc.

CSAW started as a contest for New York University Tandon School of Engineering students nearly two decades ago and has since grown to include simultaneous final competitions at schools in France, India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Mexico.

Source…