1.) France based security engineers have found a software tool to navigate and monitor the dark web. But they also argue that the tool could spell deep trouble to the web users if it falls into wrong hands.
Nicolas Hernandez, the Co-founder, and CEO of Aleph Networks, a company based in Lyon- France said that his company rejected over 30 to 40 licensing requests for its newly found software tool named as the “ Google of the Dark Web” in 2018 and will probably stick to it in the coming year as well.
As some website owners like to operate with anonymity with the help of TOR or I2P, finding such sites has become a herculean task to the law enforcement. As we need to type in the exact URL string of often random characters.
Aleph promises that its newly found software could engage in activity which the law enforcement of different countries has been struggling to do it till date.
Celine Haeri, the founder of the software said that her company has so far succeeded in indexing around 1.4 billion links and over 450 million documents across some 140,000 dark websites. And with the new software, the France based company was able to find over 3.9 million stolen credit card info which would have missed out in a comprehensive search engine view.
Founded in the year 2012, the company has recently managed to bag a 200,000 Euros funding from a French Military’s weapon and technology procedural agency. Earlier, the company faced a threat to go bankrupt as its mass data and indexing software couldn’t convince the renowned data analytics companies of the world.
2.) A British cybersecurity firm named ‘Insinia’ was able to post tweets on the behalf of several celebrities last week- all without entering a password. And the security firm achieved this task by compromising the twitter accounts of famous celebrities by spoofing their mobiles phones with hacking technology- all without their knowledge. This includes the accounts of Louis Theroux and Eamonn Holmes.
Mike Godfrey, the owner of the British business said that the activity was triggered to disclose the security flaws exhibited by social networking systems- like spreading disinformation and ruin the reputation of the account holders by abusing the security features of various platforms- in this case, Twitter.
3.) Recently, a new kind of ransomware was seen attacking Linux servers through Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI). The discovered ransomware variant is reported to JungleSec and was seen targeting only the unsecured IPMIs to remotely access and lock down the victim’s system.
A source from Bleeping Computer which was the first to report the issue said that the cyber crooks spreading the ransomware were seen demanding a ransom of 0.3 Bitcoins, but when the money was transferred to their wallets, they did not return the decryption key.
Security analysts say that the best way to keep your Linux servers from such cyber threats is by resetting the IPMI password to a more secure one.
