Category Archives: Hackers News

Hackers News

Hackers behind Dyre Malware Busted in Police Raid

The world’s most notorious financial hacking operation disrupted by Russian authorities in November, when they raided the offices associated with a Moscow-based film and production company named 25th Floor.

According to the Russian authorities, 25th Floor was allegedly involved in distributing the notorious password-stealing malware known as Dyre Banking Trojan.

Malware Costs Hundreds

Oracle Issues Emergency Java Update for Windows

The US-based software maker Oracle delivered an unusual out-of-box emergency patch for Java in an effort to fix a during-installation flaw on the Windows platforms.

The successful exploitation of the critical vulnerability, assigned CVE-2016-0603, could allow an attacker to trick an unsuspecting user into visiting a malicious website and downloading files to the victim’s system before

Maru OS — Android ROM that Turns into Debian Linux When Connected to a PC

Good News for Linux Techno Freaks! Do you usually mess with your Android smartphone by trying out the continual ins and outs of various apps and custom ROMs?

Then this news would be a perfect pick for you!

What If, you can effectively carry a Linux computer in your pocket?

Hereby introducing a new Android-based Operating system named “Maru OS” that combine the mobility of a

MIT Develops Hack-Proof RFID Chip — Here's How It Works

Do you know about RFID chips and how many you are carrying at this moment?

Today, RFID chips are built-in all sorts of items, including your credit cards, travel swipe cards, library books, grocery store cards, security tags, implanted medical records, passports and even the access cards provided by companies.

But, What actually is an RFID chip?

Radio frequency identification (RFID)

Critical Flaws Found in NETGEAR Network Management System

Netgear, one of the most popular router manufacturers, has been vulnerable to two different flaws that could allow hackers to compromise your corporate network and connected devices.

Reported critical vulnerabilities reside in the Netgear’s ProSafe NMS300 Model (Network Management System) – a centralized and comprehensive management application for network administrators that enables them

How to Unlock (and Play) Hidden Chess Game Inside Facebook Messenger

What can you do with Facebook Messenger?

Chat with your friends
Send GIFs, stickers, and photos
Make video calls
Send people money in Messenger

Have you ever wondered to Play a game while you chat with friends?

Yes, it is possible.

Facebook had made it to the reality by building a hidden built-in functionality in Facebook Messenger that lets you play Chess with your friends without

United Nations Rules in Favor of WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange

VICTORY!

As a result of the legal action against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange by both British and Swedish Governments, he has been arbitrarily detained by the United Kingdom and Sweden since his arrest in London over five years ago.

However, Assange filed a complaint against both the governments in September 2014 that has been considered by the United Nations Working Group on

Someone Hijacks Botnet Network & Replaces Malware with an Antivirus

The Dridex banking trojan that is widely being used by cyber criminals to distribute malware onto users’ machines has now been found distributing a security software.

A portion of the Dridex banking Trojan botnet may have been hacked or compromised by an unknown Whitehat Hacker, who replaced the malicious links with Avira Antivirus installers.

What is Dridex Banking Trojan? How it Works

Here's Why Microsoft Drops a Cloud Data Center Under the Ocean

microsoft-underwater-datacenter

Where tech companies like Facebook and Google prefer to move their data centers to colder countries to reduce their air conditioning bill, Microsoft has come up with an even better home for data centers while cutting high energy costs for cooling them: Under the Sea.

Here’s what Microsoft says:
“50% of us live near the coast. Why doesn’t our data?”
Building massive data centers underwater might sound crazy, but it is exactly something Microsoft is testing with its first submarine data center, dubbed Leona Philpot.

World’s First Underwater Data Center

The testing is part of Microsoft’s plan dubbed Project Natick — an ongoing research project to build and run a data center that is submerged in the ocean, which the company believes, could make data centers faster, cost-effective, environmentally friendly and easier to set up.
Leona Philpot (named after the Halo character from Microsoft’s Xbox) was tested last August, when engineers placed an enormous steel capsule a kilometer off the California coast, 30 feet underwater in the Pacific Ocean.
A single datacenter computing rack was placed in an eight-foot-wide steel capsule, which was covered in around 100 sensors to monitor every aspect of the underwater conditions: pressure, humidity, and, most importantly, motion.
The test ran from August to November last year (exactly 105 days) and the engineers said it was more successful than expected.

Why Underwater Data Center?

According to Microsoft, these are the main reasons for experimenting with underwater data centers:
1. Air conditioning cost is one of the biggest pain in running data centers. Traditional data centers are believed to consume up to 3 percent of the world’s electricity.
So, placing the data centers in the ocean eliminated the need for cooling and will highly cut energy costs required to cool the heat generated by the racks upon racks of servers that process and store the world’s digital lives.
2. Half of the world’s population is located within 200 kilometers of the coast, so placing data centers in the sea would reduce latency – the time data takes to travel from its source to customers, which simply means faster delivery of data.
3. Reduce the time to build a data center from 2 Years to 90 Days. Microsoft believes that if it can mass produce the steel capsules, the company could build data centers in just 90 days.
This would make its operations cheaper and much quicker than the time needed to set a data center up on land.
Moreover, the capsules designed by the company would also adopt new, innovative rack designs that do not even need to consider human interaction.
4. Use of Renewable Energy. The project’s engineers even believe that in future, underwater data centers might be able to power themselves by renewable energy, as in this case, perhaps underwater turbines or tidal power to generate electricity.
5. Environment-Friendly. Microsoft will also be tackling environmental concerns related to underwater data centers. The company says its current underwater data center prototype emits an “extremely” small amount of heat energy into the surrounding waters.

A Few Limitations:

Data centers on land are open for IT engineers to fix issues and replace servers whenever required, but the company wants its undersea data centers to go without maintenance for years at a time.
Since Microsoft doesn’t have a team of Scuba engineers, each Natick data center unit would operate for over 5 years without maintenance and then it would be dragged up to the surface to have its internal parts replaced.
Other obvious risks for submarine data centers could be saltwater that is corrosive and weather that can also be a problem, to name just two potential hurdles.

Future Of The Data Center

The company started working on this idea in 2013, but the development of a physical prototype began in 2014 and August last year with its first ever submarine data server, Leona Philpot.
Since Microsoft’s Project Natick has been in its “early days,” it is hard to say when underwater data centers can actually adopted. However, Microsoft has plans to design a new version of underwater data centers that’s three times larger than Leona Philpot.
It is not just Microsoft; many tech companies are considering new ways of housing data. In 2013, Facebook located one of its latest state-of-the-art data centers in Luleå, the far north of Sweden, to make use of cheap, renewable energy generated by hydroelectric schemes and outside air for cooling.

Latest Windows 10 May Have a Linux Subsystem Hidden Inside

windows10-linux-subsystem
A Few Months Back, Microsoft impressed the world with ‘Microsoft loves Linux‘ announcements, including, development of a custom Linux-based OS for running Azure Cloud Switch and selecting Ubuntu as the operating system for its Cloud-based Big Data services.

Also Read: Microsoft Drops a Cloud Data Center Under the Ocean.

Now, a renowned Windows Hacker and computer expert, who goes by the name ‘WalkingCat’, discovered that the latest version of Windows 10 may have a Linux subsystem secretly installed inside.
According to his tweets, hacker spotted two mysterious files, LXss.sys and LXCore.sys, in the most latest Windows 10 Redstone Build 14251, which are suspected to be part of Microsoft’s Project Astoria.
windows-10-linux-subsystem
Project Astoria, also known as Windows Bridge for Android, is a toolkit that allows running Android apps on Windows 10 Mobile devices.
The naming convention for latest discovered files is very similar to the Android Subsystem files from Project Astoria, i.e. ADss.sys.
So, the “LX” in these name, however, can only be taken for one thing, and that is LINUX, which suggests the Windows 10 will have access to a Linux subsystem also.

Why a Linux Subsystem?

Since Windows 10 has been introduced as a Universal Operating system for all devices, so it might be possible that Microsoft wants to expand Project Astoria from mobile devices to desktop users.
If this comes to be true, adding a Linux subsystem will be beneficial in case Microsoft has plans to offer support for Linux applications, especially servers related technology and software.

Isn’t this exciting?

Stay tuned to The Hacker News Facebook page for further developments on this topic.