Qatar Down, SEA hijack Major Qatar Websites.

The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) is at it again. The hacktivist group, who are known to back Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, has hacked many high profile Qatar based websites, including the Google, Facebook, Aljazeera and Government - Military websites.

Starting at about 4:25 am (GMT 5:30+), the Syrian Electronic Army shared this message on Twitter: Qatar is #down and following that, they went about switching off government and private websites using the .qa extension.

The domains are managed by Qatar’s Ministry of Information and Communication (ictQatar). Apparently, the Syrian Electronic Army gained access to Qatar Domain Registrar (portal.registry.qa) and modifies the DNS entires to redirects the targeted websites to servers controlled by hackers serving defacement page, that include a picture of Assad and the groups logo, as shown.

The List of the targeted websites is posted on Twitter by hackers - these include:

moi.gov.qa

facebook.qa

gov.qa

vodafone.qa

aljazeera.net.qa

google.com.qa

ooredoo.com.qa

diwan.gov.qa

qaf.mil.qa

mofa.gov.qa

Another tweet from SEA shows that they have unauthorized access to Domain Registrar of Qatar:

The SEA's high-profile media hacking spree began earlier this year. Among the victims of the group are The Financial Times, The Guardian, and the Associated Press. Most recently, the Washington Post got hit. The common running theme: the papers reported stories SEA didn't like.

At the time of reporting, most of the hijacked websites are still showing the deface page while other are now down. These attacks are one more example of why companies need to implement properly layered defense strategies.

Unbreakable Apples iMessage encryption is vulnerable to eavesdropping attack

By Unknown in android, anonymous, apple, cyber attack, encryption, exploit code, hacking, iMessage, iOS, iPhone, NSA, security, SSL keys, Vulnerability

Knowledgehutt.blogspot.com

Though Apple claims iMessage has end-to-end encryption, But researchers claimed at a security conference that Apple’s iMessage system is not protected and the company can easily access it.

Cyril Cattiaux - better known as pod2g, who has developed iOS jailbreak software, said that the company’s claim about iMessage protection by unbreakable encryption is just a lie, because the weakness is in the key infrastructure as it is controlled by Apple: they can change a key anytime they want, thus read the content of our iMessage.

Basically, when you send an iMessage to someone, you grab their public key from Apple, and encrypt your message using that public key. On the other end, recipients have their own private key that they use to decrypt this message. A third-party won’t be able to see the actual message unless they have access to the private key.

Trust and public keys always have a problem, but the researchers noted that there's no evidence that Apple or the NSA is actually reading iMessages, but say that it's possible. "Apple has no reason to do so. But what of intelligence agencies?" he said.

The researchers were able to create a bogus certificate authority and then add it to an iPhone Keychain to proxify SSL encrypted communications to and from the device, and in the process discovered that their AppleID and password was being transmitted in clear text.

He says that since Apple controls the public key directory that gives you the public key for every user, it could perform a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack to intercept your messages if asked to by a government agency.

A solution for Apple would be to store public keys locally in a protected database within iOS, as then the keys could be compared.

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Qatar Down, SEA hijack Major Qatar Websites.

Unbreakable Apples iMessage encryption is vulnerable to eavesdropping attack

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