Hacktivism Sub Forum Introduced
A new sub forum has been introduced in the Beginner Hacking section to cover political and socially motivated hacking discussion, including operations, netizen justice, cyber warfare and political agendas. In the three days of its existence, members appear to be enjoying the section and several threads have been made to voice views on political hacking, hacking for change, and idolized hackers. >>Source
MOTM Nominations Opened
Three months since Member of the Month was retired over drama, Froggy has returned to continue with Hack Forums' traditional monthly contest to decide the most contributing member during the month. June of 2015's MOTM contest is now accepting nominations. >>Source
Justin Timberlake: Welcome to this week's edition of the HF News, today I'm joined by Radar7. How are you doing today? Radar7: I’m doing great! How about yourself?
Justin Timberlake: I'm fine, thanks for asking. Are there any shoutouts you'd like to make? Radar7: Yes, I would like to give a shoutout to all of The Black Hand and Crypto.
Justin Timberlake: Cool, I've seen quite a few friendly members in those groups. For those who don't know, what exactly is The Black Hand? Radar7: The Black Hand is essentially a group individuals with a high degree of knowledge in doxing and detracting. We primarily focus on helping individuals who have been scammed with getting their money back. We operate on several other forums and have set a great reputation for ourselves. Dubitus and Ego launched the student program several months ago, which was essentially a paid mentorship from knowledgable members from The Black Hand. Doxing and detracing was taught to all students with some private methods included in the sessions. From there you have the chance of moving into trials and eventually to the main branch. It’s a great group and I can personally say that I learned a lot from graduating the student program. We also are associated with Null, which is pretty neat.
Justin Timberlake: Kudos to you guys for serving up justice to scammers. Moving on, what's your opinion on groups as a whole? Radar7: I feel it’s just a pit of drama. Members envy each other based on which group they are in and lessen the quality of the group with stupid feuds. I personally couldn’t care less about a groups policies. The owner paid a large sum of money for it and he can do whatever he wants with it, but I don’t agree with selling them right off the bat. I don’t understand why certain members get so upset from buy-ins, when it’s the leaders choice. If they feel they want to make their group exclusive to buy-ins, who cares? The second group owners and leaders stop caring about judgment from others is when I see the quality of groups improving. One suggestion that I would have to Omni is having some kind of term with the group owners that doesn’t let them sell the group after purchase for x amount of days. When owners try and monetize their group and drain every bit of profit out of it, they lessen the quality of groups on HF. I believe having to own the group for a minimum of a year would help in repairing this issue. That way members won’t have to worry about their “Lifetime Membership“ lasting for an unknown period of time.
Justin Timberlake: Thankfully that policy is being enforced for the new OMC group. Speaking of which, what theme would you like to see the new group have? Radar7: Definitely a marketing group! Haha, just messing with you. I would love to see either an Education Nation / Writing Group or a Graphics Group. I am artistically challenged so I wouldn’t be apart of the graphics group, but it would be a neat idea. Its evident that we have a lot of talented graphic guys on HF and it would be pretty neat to see what all of them would be able to make when collaborating with eachother. Aside from graphics I would love to be in an education group and let out my nerd side haha. I enjoy education and would love to share valuable knowledge with other members. Things such as literature and Mathematics could be discussed and taught throughout the group. You never know, maybe a tutoring service could arise from such a group. It would be a change from the common group themes, but it would be really cool for those that are interested.
Justin Timberlake: I agree, those are both solid ideas for a group. The auction has brought a lot of attention to OMC recently, what are some features you think should be implemented to get more people to support it? Radar7: Omni has done a great job implementing it with sale tags and group purchases, but I feel we need to start moving to more forums. HF is only one community and as lovely as it would be to be exclusive to HF, we need to spread word of Omnicoin to other forums and communities. If they like the idea and see value behind implementing it the number of users will instantly go up. The best time to do this in my opinion would be after the group auction as the price will be at its highest. Omni has told the community that he has plans for implementing Omnicoin more into the forums, which makes me anxious to see what he has in mind. There are a lot of little features that could be purchased using Omnicoin. For example, you pay X Omnicoin for 1000 more PM space. Even though I am 3P1C and have 5000 PM space, I would love to increase that without having to delete anything important and I am sure other members would like to do this as well. Another good idea would be to allow regular members to temporarily purchase upgraded features. So they can pay x Omnicoin to change their username once. I can see the issue with this idea though. It takes away the purchased privileges that upgraded members get for donating. HF members are the real factor of Omnicoins popularity. If everyone it talking about it, odds are that they will tell friends, which will eventually lead to the idea being spread around from word of mouth. The future is unsure, but I do have confidence that the right decisions will be made.
Justin Timberlake: I would love to see those things implemented as well. Hopefully the new features will draw in more users as they roll out. And it's definitely risen in volume, it's ranking pretty high for daily trade volume. Aside from OMC, what else do you think should be introduced to HF? Radar7: I know this is a tad unrealistic, but some kind of automated Escrow system for the marketplace would be outstanding and basically put an end to scamming. I would think something like that would be very complicated and expensive to implement though. It would also require extra manpower to manage. Think about it like this. A buyer pays for a product directly off HF with automated checkout (PP, BTC, OMC, LTC), then the seller has a maximum number of days to deliver the product and if there are any issues the money is given back to the buyer while in escrow. Similar systems are being used on online marketplaces, but not many forums. It would be one of the first! I know that the possibility of this being added is slim, but it ever hurts to pitch ideas haha. Other than that I would love to see a section about literature. Members would be able to discuss their favourite novels and recommend their personal favourites. I know a couple members who wouldn’t mind if this was added :). I am kind of sad about the removal of the upgraded member sections, but I think a separate section should be created that allows the requesting of accounts such as Netflix and Spotify. I know this is a LQ idea but sometimes people (including myself) wanna watch some Friends or something on Netflix lol. I can’t think of anything else as I feel HF is in a good state right now. Omni has been adding a bunch of new features, which is awesome! The one thing I wish is that we can go back to being known more for a Hacking Forum as opposed to a big marketplace and lounge.
Justin Timberlake: I think The Black Hand was actually working on something just like that, should be interesting to see how it turns out. And it may seem like HF is getting more LQ but that's because most of the real "hackers" are no longer on the forum and there's a constant influx of new members finding HF. Speaking of which, how did you come across the site? Radar7: Very true. It was a little over a year ago when I Googled how to port forward Darkcomet and came across a tutorial on on Hackforums. I made an account and made a thread asking how to setup my rat. That was the only activity I had for around 2 months. I then stumbled on it again when looking up a solution to a Python error. I realized that the community was pretty fun and decided to become active. This was in June of 2014. I have a very addictive personality which gets me hooked to things very quickly. I promised myself I wouldn’t buy an upgrade until I really learned more about the community. My initial goal was to stay a normal member for my entire stay, but that was quickly dismissed when I made the decision to buy l33t in October of the same year. I then launched my Homework Service (Ik zSerity loves it lol) and joined my first group, which was Enterprise. From there I realized there was a lot going on in the community. I gained about 300 rep in a month or two and upgraded to Ub3r in January. Over the past couple months I have been focusing on my studies and haven’t been involved as much with my services. I hope to get back into it this summer :)
Justin Timberlake: Yeah the community is what keeps a lot of us coming back every day, myself included. So what do you do in your free time outside of HF? Radar7: I am finishing up the twelfth grade and will be attending University next year. I am going to be majoring in Computer Science, hoping to eventually get into Business Intelligence. I find myself doing some of everything. I love education, sports and even odd stuff like magic. I was raised by my aunt, who always spoke about higher education and excelling in school. I have always been a great student. I don’t find it to be a chore or a pain in the ass like many perceive it to be. I love learning and always will. I am also a very athletic person and enjoy playing pretty much every sport. My favourites are American Football, Wrestling and Bodybuilding. I am an extremely competitive person who can’t lose. I fear mediocracy with everything I do. My day usually consists of me getting up at 4:00am (no lie there) and going to the gym, school then work until around 8:00 pm. After that I usually study and go to bed. I strongly believe that if you want success you must be available 24 hours a day. Another neat thing I do is magic tricks! I have been practising for about 4 months now and am getting pretty good. I was actually planning to post a video in the lounge of some of my tricks to get some opinions. Would that be something that you would be interested in?
Justin Timberlake: Of course, I'd definitely tune in to watch. You could even do a livestream sometime. Anyway I don't want to take up any more of your time, you seem like a busy guy already. Is there anything else you'd like to say before we wrap up this interview? Radar7: That is a far better idea! I will definitely take it into consideration. Don’t have anything else to say. Thank you for taking the time to interview me. Have a good night.
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SSL is Officially Dead
For the last several years, vulnerabilities in the SSLv1 and v2 protocols have been coming to light, and demonstrations of these vulnerabilities have lead to the downfall of the use of these protocols. Three of the more common attacks included FREAK, which relied on the ability of government agencies to downgrade stronger encryption to weaker encryption and allow the keys to be more easily factored, BEAST, which was a browser exploit based on the weak cipher block chaining, and POODLE, which allows attackers to identify certain aspects of SSL packets. However, for many people, SSLv3 has remained the top choice as opposed to moving to the far stronger, and more secure, TLS (Transport Layer Security), which is essentially the next installment and a continuation of SSL. With many people and security researchers coming to the same conclusion: SSL is inherently broken! Its key exchange is vulnerable during the renegotiations of sessions, its cryptography is based on depreciated algorithms like SHA-1, and it cannot take advantage of the security features added to the most recent versions of TLS. Security researchers are not silent on this; not only is it broken, but it simply cannot be fixed.
Cisco's Virtual Appliances are Bad at Securing Themselves!
A common way of logging into SSH appliances is to distribute SSH keys instead of usernames and passwords. This allows engineers to allow access for certain people without creating a multitude of accounts. On Cisco's hardware devices, such as routers, managed switches, PIX's, managed WAP's, and ASA's, the SSH keys are generated randomly by the device. However, three of their virtual appliance groups have been demonstrated to contain default keys, allowing unauthorized members to re-use the default key on other systems and obtain unauthorized access. Cisco's Web Security Virtual Appliances, Email Security Virtual Appliances, and Content Security Management Virtual Appliances are all vulnerable. Manufacturers sometimes produce hardware that contains default SSH keys, but this is usually fixed by merely giving them the algorithm to produce a key, so they must generate a random key before using SSH. However, this is slightly more difficult when it comes to software, but is by no means impossible. Cisco's lack of concern for its virtual appliances undoubtedly will lead, or has already lead, to breached devices.
Facebook drops the "Face"
Facial recognition software is a very intriguing idea. Cameras are able to determine someone's identity based on the contours of one's face, the shape of the features such as your eyes or nose, and other aspects. It has been used for several years aiding people such as the police department and military to identify missing persons or confirm the identity of potential targets. However, Facebook's Artificial Intelligence research team has developed a way to recognize someone without needing their face at all. Even by looking at the back of your head, the algorithm determines identity based on your hairstyle, clothing choice, body shape, skin color, and pose. Although this research is experimental at this point, it demonstrates that Facebook is still committed to pushing the frontier of technology; the very reason for which Facebook is such a technological revolutionary.
New Chrome Extension blocks BeEF Attacks
An engineer has come up with a clever way to help prevent BeEF (Browser exploit framework) attacks. This newly created tool, an extension for Google's web browser, Chrome, detects and blocks BeEF, a tool similar to Metasploit that uses JavaScript to control browsers. Brian Wallace, a security researcher and engineer with Cylance's advanced research team SPEAR unveiled the new extension, Vegan, on Wednesday in the Chrome Store. Wallace noted in a blog entry that the tool is open source and acknowledges while it can detect and block attacks, it cannot stop them. This has to do largely with the fact that the tool is built in a truncated Snort rule which with little work can be bypass. The rule searches for HTTP clients communication with remote HTTP servers and assists in detecting any instance of BeEF running with a default configuration. If the attack went out of their way, they could get around the way Vegan detects attacks. Developers admit the tool isn't a failsafe since developers of BeEF could change their tool to prevent this sort of detection should they want to. However, the tool works for now. I addition to detection, Wallace also added a prevention mechanism in the tool that can prevent a domain's attempt to modify the cookie Vegan is looking for. “While a detection method is important, it really only tells the user they are now at the will of the attacker, and there is not much the victim can do,” Wallace writes, “This will prevent the browser from being able to communicate with the BeEF panel.”, said Wallace. Wallace is a fan of BeEF and said he came up with the extension because he wanted to make it easier to know if he had been hooked. >>Source
Samsung Announces Patch for Windows Update Issue
Samsung, after much criticism, said that it would no longer automatically disable Windows updates on PCs and laptops it makes. The practice was revealed this week by a 22-year-old Microsoft MVP named Patrick Barker who posted a report to his personal website explaining in detail how Samsung's SW Update service was also adding programs onto its Windows machines that prevented Microsoft's update mechanism. SW Update is a service provided by Samsung that is designed to update drivers and features. Barker uncovered that it also downloads a file called "Diable_Windowsupdate.exe" which disables Windows update and forces users with each reboot to decide if they want to enable updates. The file is persistent and removing SW Update does not stop it. “Windows Update remains a critical component of our security commitment to our customers. We do not recommend disabling or modifying Windows Update in any way as this could expose a customer to increased security risks. We are in contact with Samsung to address this issue.” said a Microsoft spokesperson. In Thursday's statement, Samsung made sure to make it clear that it values its relationship with Microsoft. “We will be issuing a patch through the Samsung Software Update notification process to revert back to the recommended automatic Windows Update settings within a few days,” Samsung said. >>Source
Emergency Adobe Flash Patch Fixes Zero Day Under Attack
Tuesday, Adobe released an out-of-band patch for a Flash Player zero-day vulnerability. The vulnerability was being used in attacks by an APT gang known for its myriad of exploits targetting unpatched browser based vulnerabilities. The group, named by FireEye APT3, has been targetting and exploiting the latest Flash zero-day since early this month via phishing emails that target aerospace and defense, construction and engineering, high tech, telecommunications, transportation organizations. Last year, targeted attacks were uncovered that used an Internet Explorer zero-day that worked all the way back to IE6. However, no known public attacks occurred until IE 9-11. Microsoft addressed the issue with its very own out-of-band patch. This current set of Clandestine Fox attacks is similar to many of the attacks last year, containing generic, almost spam-like phishing emails that are intent on luring in as many victims as possible. The attack group, AP3, has been linked to China according to Mike Oppenheim, FireEye intel operations manager. “Any time one of these groups is using a zero-day and casting such a wide net, it’s pretty significant, especially since the activity started in early June and a patch was not released until today,” Oppenheim said. “That’s a big window, and possibly tons of victims affected.” APT3 is particularly known for targeting intellectual property, specifically industrial types of information and documents from compromised systems. The use of these widespread emails allows APT3 to target multiple people in a single organization, the emails contain links to the attack-controlled site where the Flash exploit is downloaded silently onto a victim's machine. Earlier, in May 2014, Microsoft was forced to release an out-of-band patch for IE to prevent attacks from a zero-day used by APT3. >>Source
Batman: Arkham Knight Plagued with PC Problems
The PC edition of Batman: Arkham Knight has been pulled from the Steam marketplace for the time being due to a number of issues being reported by players. Some of the most noticeable of the issues are the sporadic freezes, frame-rate stutters, and audio glitches that are present at various times throughout gameplay. A number of these issues were expected to follow the adjustment of the system requirements by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, who left a warning about compatibility problems with AMD machines. A number of updates regarding the issues in the game and its status on the Steam marketplace can be found here. Gary Lake-Schall, the VP of game technology at Warner Bros Interactive, wrote on Steam that "there are some known issues with the performance of Batman: Arkham Knight for PC owners using AMD graphics cards." He added: "We are working closely with AMD to rectify these issues as quickly as possible and will provide updates here as they become available. We thank you for your patience in this matter." >>Source
Playstation Network Issues
According to the PSN status page, which can be found here, some players on both the Playstation 3 and the Playstation 4 are having troubles connecting to the Playstation Network. This may come as a result of the newest update to the Playstation Network, which was released on June 26. The update itself says that PS3 and PS4 owners "may be experiencing issues related to launching certain games or game functionality." The reasons for these issues are attributed to factors outside of the Playstation Network. Another issue that has appeared is the slowing down of downloads on the Playstation Network, but it isn’t yet known whether or not it’s in any way connected with the issues players are having connecting to the network. The problems are not affecting all players and aren’t noticeable on all games. Updates regarding these issues can be found here.>>Source
Predator Coming to Mortal Kombat X
The next DLC character to become available on Mortal Kombat X is Predator. The character has been announced to be released sometime in July, with a specific date still remaining unknown. Mortal Kombat series creator Ed Boon tweeted out this message this past week: "Recreate the Predator Movie (Komplete with Carl Weathers Jax) in Mortal Kombat X. Koming Soon…" Accompanying this tweet was an image of Predator squaring off against an opponent in-game on Mortal Kombat X. This image can be found here. Predator will be the third DLC character available on Mortal Kombat X, following Jason Voorhees and Tanya. >>Source
Lexus Builds Functional Hoverboard Prototype
Automaker Lexus has delved into a field other car companies haven't touched: hoverboard technology. “It’s very confidential information but we have been studying the flying car in our most advanced R&D area,” says Hiroyoshi Yoshiki, a Toyota managing officer. According to the Lexus website, the board uses superconductors cooled by liquid nitrogen, and magnets to stay afloat.
Although it is still in the prototype stage, Lexus says they will begin testing over the summer. They also claim they will announce more information about it on October 21, 2015 >>Source
Lenovo Combats Intel, Annouces USB-Sized PC
In the short time after Intel announced their pocket PC, Lenovo has revealed a tiny computer of their own. The device, named the Ideacenter Stick 300. The stick will have rather impressive specs for its size, housing 2GB of ram and 32GB of solid state storage. It will also house an Intel Atom processor, and run Windows 8.1 (until the release of Windows 10). The Ideacenter Stick 300 is inserted via an HDMI connector, meaning it can be used on nearly any display with an HDMI port. >>Source
Cable Allows You to Connect An External Graphics Card to Your Laptop
Away from home and need some extra power for your laptop? OCuLink has the answer to your problem, allowing you to achieve power closer to your desktop, without dismantling your laptop. The OCuLink cable connects via PCI Express, allowing data transfer speeds to be relatively high, at a maximum speed of 32 GBps. Note that newer, very high end lines of graphics cards like the NVIDIA Titan are not yet supported. Accessories such as data storage devices can be used with the cable, and it can be used to replace a PCI Express slot in desktop PCs. >>Source
Worldwide Terror Attacks
On Friday the world witnessed a worldwide simultaneous terrorist attack, three different countries, hundreds of victims. The first was in Kuwait, a Muslim-on-Muslim attack with a bomb in a Shia temple. This kind of violence has been happening for years now with outright war being declared on Shias. The second attack came on a beach in Tunisia targeting western tourists. The resort is known for its popularity among British tourists with many of the casualties being British. The third attack happened in France, but with an unfortunate US involvement as the attack occurred on a US owned Gas cylinder plant. Although everything is still under investigation it seems certain that all three attacks which were all carried out by lone gunmen, were connected to Islamic State, possibly to 'celebrate' the one year anniversary of the IS declaration of its caliphate. The attacks seemed to coordinated to seem just like a coincidence with it being revealed a fourth attack was supposed to occur in England but luckily the attack was stopped. The attacks that happened on Friday are far from the worst we've seen causality-wise, but the mass panic they caused will be hard to dispel. >>Source
Greek Exit Near?
In what EU commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker is calling "betrayal" and "egotism" with the proposed Greece debt talks delayed or as many are calling it "deliberately altered". A surprise referendum was called in Greece and all banks and ATM machines have been shut down for a week while we wait for the voting on the July 5. The leave seems inveitable but is causing a headache to the EU that have invested millions in trying to protect Greece and more importantly the Euro. Mrs Merkel, the German Chancellor, says "EU leaders had made compromises in their offer to Athens to tackle the debt crisis, but it became clear that the Greek government was not willing to do the same. However, she promises that everything necessary will be done to protect the euro." >>Source
Japanese Cat Given Lavish Send-Off
In some more bizarre news from Japan, a cat which was made station master at a Japanese train station passed away on June 22 due to heart failure, and thousands of tourists, fans and staff have turned up to its funeral giving it one of the most lavish send-offs an animal has ever had. Tama was a stray cat until 8-years-ago when it took over at an unmanned station and named station master. Being paid in cat food and having a custom outfit and hat made for it specially. Wakayama Electric Railway which owned the station had been in a sharp decline in revenue but due to the fame and tourists Tama brought in the company began earning money again and the president, Mitsunobu Kojima, also gave her the special title of "honorary permanent stationmaster". He said Tama had contributed an estimated 1.1 billion yen ($8.9m; £5.7m) to the local economy. Since her death another local cat named Nitama has since become an apprentice station master. >>Source
Every week - assuming we get enough submissions - the HF News will feature the best submitted battlestation.
Send iHydra a message by clicking here and including an imgur link of your battlestation!
I made the news even though it was because a ban. Love reading the news every week.
An erstwhile gamer with several thousand dollars in donations and multiple group leaderships to his name, in March 2016 Red Sox was closed after his account, Skype, and BTC Wallet were allegedly compromised and used to scam other users.
Though it's cold and lonely in the deep dark night.
I can see paradise by the dashboard light.
Though it's cold and lonely in the deep dark night.
Paradise by the dashboard light.
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