Surf The Cyber

When Social Networking website Facebook was started 10 years ago, it was coded in PHP by Mark Zuckerberg and team, but as the company grew, PHP Programming platform became difficult to manage and bug-free.

Thus, Hack was born! Facebook Team decides to develop a new programming language that could combine elements of static-type programming languages such as C or C++ with dynamic-type languages like PHP, now called "HACK Programming Language".

HACK is a new version of PHP, requires Facebook’s HHVM (Hip Hop Virtual Machine) which is designed to execute programs written in Hack and PHP. The top 20 open source frameworks on Github run on HHVM.

Ironically, it has now been revealed that the National Security Agency conducted a major offensive cyber operations against the Chinese government and networking company Huawei, in early 2009.

Code-named as "Operation Shotgiant" was conducted with the involvement of the CIA, White House intelligence coordinator and the FBI; aimed to find a link between Huawei and China’s People’s Liberation Army. NSA accessed the emails of many Huawei employees' for this purpose.

The reports show the NSA spying on former Chinese President Hu Jintao, the country’s trade ministry, banks, telecoms firms and also tracking more than 20 Chinese hacking groups, where more than half of them Chinese Army or Navy units.

NSA- 'WE HACK FOR NATIONAL SECURITY'

Upgrading an operating system patches the security holes in the previous versions.  However, researchers found a bug in upgrading process of Android itself, which can be exploited by malicious apps.

You all are quite aware of phishing attacks, and for those who are not, Phishing scams are typically fraudulent email messages, masquerading as a well known and trustworthy entity in an attempt to gather personal and financial information from victims. However, phishing attacks have become more sophisticated recently.

The Pro-hacker group, Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) is also popular for its advance phishing attack and had purposely targeted twitter account and websites of various popular brands like Forbes, Microsoft, Obama, Facebook, CNN, eBay and PayPal in the past using phishing techniques.

Security researchers have seen an increase in the number of phishing attacks every day, but recently a tricky scam came across by the researchers at the Symantec, which is targeting Google Docs and Google Drive users.

Under this phishing scam, an email with a subject of "Documents", tricks recipient to view an ‘important document’ stored on the Google Docs by clicking the included link in the email. But supposed to be directed to important Google doc, the user is redirected to a fake login page, where he is required to enter his Google account information, i.e. Username and Password.

The invoices above shows that Microsoft charged the DITU $145,100 in December 2012, at a rate of $100 per data request. In August 2013, the per-request rate increased to $200 and the latest Invoice dated November 2013, showed a charge of $281,000.

These documents show how frequently the government calls on tech companies for information and could be possible that Microsoft isn't the only company that charges the government for compliance with data requests.

The group aligned with president Bashar al-Assad, is popular for targeting western countries and media and had victimized various high-profile brands and VIPs’ twitter accounts and websites, like Forbes, Obama, Facebook, CNN, eBay and PayPal in the past using phishing techniques, and recently claimed to compromise central repository of US central command (CENTCOM).