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The National Security Agency (NSA) — the United States intelligence agency which is known for its secrecy and working in the dark — has finally joined GitHub and launched an official GitHub page. The NSA employs genius-level coders and brightest mathematicians, who continually work to break codes, gather intelligence on everyone, and develop hacking tools like EternalBlu e that was leaked by the Shadow Brokers in April and abused by the WannaCry ransomware last month to wreak havoc worldwide. The intelligence agency mostly works in secret, but after Edward Snowden leaks in 2013, the NSA has started (slowly) opening itself to the world. It joined Twitter in the same year after Snowden leaks and now opened a Github account. GitHub is an online service designed for sharing code amongst programmers and open source community, and so far, the NSA is sharing 32 different projects as part of the NSA Technology Transfer Program ( TTP ), while some of these are 'coming soon.'

Microsoft has announced to shut down CodePlex -- its website for hosting repositories of open-source software projects -- on December 15, 2017. Launched in 2006, CodePlex was one of the Microsoft's biggest steps towards the world of open source community -- where any programmer, anywhere can share the code for their software or download and tweak the code to their liking. However, Microsoft says that the service has dramatically fallen in usage and that fewer than 350 projects seeing a source code commit over the last 30 days, pointing to GitHub as the "de-facto place for open source sharing." GitHub – 'Facebook for Programmers' In a blog post published Friday, Microsoft Corporate VP Brian Harry wrote that the shutdown of CodePlex is because the open source community has almost entirely moved over to GitHub, which provides similar functionality for sharing code that people can collaborate on. "Over the years, we have seen a lot of amazing opti

Want to know what's the latest and greatest in SecOps for 2024? Gartner's recently released Hype Cycle for Security Operations report takes important steps to organize and mature the domain of Continuous Threat Exposure Management, aka CTEM. Three categories within this domain are included in this year's report: Threat Exposure Management, Exposure Assessment Platforms (EAP), and Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV). These category definitions are aimed at providing some structure to the evolving landscape of exposure management technologies. Pentera, listed as a sample vendor in the newly defined AEV category, is playing a pivotal role in increasing the adoption of CTEM, with a focus on security validation. Following is our take on the CTEM related product categories and what they mean for enterprise security leaders. The Industry is Maturing CTEM, coined by Gartner in 2022, presents a structural approach for continuously assessing, prioritizing, validating, and remediating expo

Last year Google employees took an initiative to help thousands of Open Source Projects patch a critical remote code execution vulnerability in a widely used Apache Commons Collections (ACC) library. Dubbed Operation Rosehub , the initiative was volunteered by some 50 Google employees, who utilized 20 percent of their work time to patch over 2600 open source projects on Github, those were vulnerable to "Mad Gadget vulnerability." Mad Gadget vulnerability ( CVE-2015-6420 ) is a remote code execution bug in the Java deserialization used by the Apache Commons Collections (ACC) library that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on a system. The ACC Library is widely deployed by many Java applications to decode data passed between computers. To exploit this flaw, all an unauthorized attacker need to do is submit maliciously crafted input to an application on a targeted system that uses the ACC library. Once the vulnerable ACC libra

WhatsApp and Facebook have so far the largest end-to-end encrypted video calling network of all, but now another popular end-to-end encrypted messaging app recommended by whistleblower Edward Snowden is ready to give them a really tough competition. The Signal app, which is widely considered the most secure of all other encrypted messaging apps, released video calling feature on Tuesday for both Android and iOS in a new update. Developed by open source software group Open Whisper System, Signal is a free and open source messaging application specially designed for Android and iOS users to make secure and encrypted messages and voice calls. Even the Signal Protocol powers the end-to-end encryption built into WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Google Allo's Incognito mode as well. Signal has already been providing fully end-to-end encrypted chat and voice calling features, but the newly added feature will make it even easier for privacy conscious people to convey their inf

You won't believe your eyes while reading this, but this is true. Microsoft just joined the Linux Foundation as a high-paying Platinum member. Microsoft's love with open source community is embracing as time passes. At its first Connect event in 2013, the company launched Visual Studio 2013. A year later, Microsoft open sourced .NET, and last year, it open sourced the Visual Studio Code Editor, as well. Not just that, Microsoft partnered with Canonical to bring Ubuntu on Windows 10 , worked with FreeBSD to develop a Virtual Machine image for its Azure cloud , and chosen Ubuntu as the OS for its Cloud-based Big Data services. And the big news for this year is… At its 2016 Connect developer event in New York today, Microsoft announced that the company is joining the Linux Foundation as a Platinum member – the highest level of membership, which costs $500,000 annually. Besides this, Microsoft also announced that tech giant Google has also joined on with the indepen

After TrueCrypt mysteriously discontinued its service, VeraCrypt became the most popular open source disk encryption software used by activists, journalists, as well as privacy conscious people. First of all, there is no such thing as a perfect, bug-free software. Even the most rigorously tested software, like the ones that operate SCADA Systems, medical devices, and aviation software, have flaws. Vulnerabilities are an unfortunate reality for every software product, but there is always space for improvements. Due to the enormous popularity of VeraCrypt, security researchers from the OSTIF (The Open Source Technology Improvement Fund) agreed to audit VeraCrypt independently and hired researchers from QuarksLab in August to lead the audit. And it seems like VeraCrypt is not exactly flawless either. Now after one month of the audit, researchers have discovered a number of security issues, including 8 critical, 3 medium, and 15 low-severity vulnerabilities in the popular

OSquery , an open-source framework created by Facebook that allows organizations to look for potential malware or malicious activity on their networks, was available for Mac OS X and Linux environments until today. But now the social network has announced that the company has developed a Windows version of its osquery tool , too. When Facebook engineers want to monitor thousands of Apple Mac laptops across their organization, they use their own untraditional security tool called OSquery. OSquery is a smart piece of cross-platform software that scans every single computer on an infrastructure and catalogs every aspect of it. Then SQL-based queries allow developers and security teams to monitor low-level functions in real-time and quickly search for malicious behavior and vulnerable applications on their infrastructure. In simple words, OSquery allows an organization to treat its infrastructure as a database, turning OS information into a format that can be queried using SQL

In past few months, Microsoft opened the source code of a lot of its projects, convincing people that the company loves Linux . But a new report shows that Microsoft is not really a big supporter of Linux. Microsoft has banned Linux on some Windows 10 powered Signature Edition PCs, which provides the cleanest Windows experience on the market. Signature Edition PCs are different from other systems because it is carefully and meticulously configured by Microsoft to run Windows 10 with no bloatware, paid promotional web shortcuts, or other pre-installed apps, for providing better performance. But besides bloatware and other pre-installed apps, Microsoft won't allow you to install Linux (or any operating system) on it. This news is not a rumor as a Reddit user BaronHK reported that he found it impossible to install Linux on the Signature Edition Lenovo Yoga 900 ISK2 UltraBook because Microsoft has locked the SSD in a proprietary RAID mode that can only be read by Window

Researchers have designed a new computer chip that promises to boost the performance of computers and data centers while processing applications in parallel. Princeton University researchers have developed a 25-core open source processor, dubbed Piton named after the metal spikes used by rock climbers, which has been designed to be flexible, highly scalable, fast and energy-efficient to satisfy the demands of massive-scale data centers. Every computer has a processor, but it's the core, a processing unit, which defines its actual efficiency and performance. A Processor can have a single core or multiple cores, which receive instructions, then performs calculations on it based on those instructions, and gives the results back. For example, the four independent processing units i.e. Cores of a quad-core processor can run multiple instructions at the same time, increasing the overall performance for applications compatible with parallel processing. Your Future Desktop

'Microsoft loves Linux' and this has never been so true than now. Microsoft today made its PowerShell scripting language and command-line shell available to the open source developer community on GitHub under the permissive MIT license. The company has also launched alpha versions of PowerShell for Linux (specifically Red Hat, Ubuntu, and CentOS) and Mac OS X, in addition, of course, to Windows. Now, people can download binaries of the software, as well as access source code of the app from the new PowerShell GitHub page. "Users across Windows and Linux, current and new PowerShell users, even application developers can experience a rich interactive scripting language as well as a heterogeneous automation and configuration management that works well with your existing tools," Microsoft says in its blog post . "Your PowerShell skills are now even more marketable, and your Windows and Linux teams, who may have had to work separately, can now work toge

Do you have any idea what the software you have installed is doing stealthily in the background? If it's not an open source software, can you find out? Usually, the answer is no. After Edward Snowden's revelations, it's clear that how desperately government agencies wants to put secret backdoors in your network, devices, and software. However, Bulgaria has come forward with an all new set of laws that would be appreciated by privacy lovers and open-source community. Also Read:  Top Best Password Managers . The Bulgarian Parliament has passed legislative amendments to its Electronic Governance Act that require all software written for the country's government to be fully open-sourced and developed in the public Github repository . This means that source code of software developed for the Bulgarian government would be accessible to everyone and provided free for use without limitations. Article 58A of the Electronic Governance Act states that administrative

Hacking into computer, networks and websites could easily land you in jail. But what if you could freely test and practice your hacking skills in a legally safe environment? Facebook just open-sourced its Capture The Flag (CTF) platform to encourage students as well as developers to learn about cyber security and secure coding practices. Capture the Flag hacking competitions are conducted at various cyber security events and conferences, including Def Con, in order to highlight the real-world exploits and cyber attacks. The CTF program is an effective way of identifying young people with exceptional computer skills, as well as teaching beginners about common and advanced exploitation techniques to ensure they develop secure programs that cannot be easily compromised. Facebook  CTF Video Demo: Since 2013, Facebook has itself hosted CTF competitions at events across the world and now, it is opening the platform to masses by releasing its source code on GitHub. "

The 21st century is witnessing a great change over in the daily life of folks with the advent of IoT devices that are capable of talking to each other without any human intervention. Yeah! Now you do not have to individually cascade an instruction to each of your home devices to accomplish a task. All have gone automated with the actuators and sensors which are infused into the home appliances. The fact is that your IoT devices would only comply within the family of same manufacturers. For example, if you have a Samsung smart refrigerator, and your wearable device is from Apple or any other vendors, then it couldn't sync as both are from different genres. No need to worry now! Zephyr: Future of IoTs The Linux Foundation has broken all the barriers of compatibility issues by releasing a Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) for Internet of Things devices , dubbed " Zephyr ". This OS enables connected devices to communicate with the same protocol.

Google appears to be no longer using Java application programming interfaces (APIs) from Oracle in future versions of its Android mobile operating system, and switching to an open source alternative instead. Google will be making use of OpenJDK – an open source version of Oracle's Java Development Kit (JDK) – for future Android builds. This was first highlighted by a "mysterious Android codebase commit" submitted to Hacker News. However, Google confirmed to VentureBeat that the upcoming Android N will use OpenJDK, rather its own implementation of the Java APIs. Google and Oracle have been fighting it out for years in a lawsuit, and it is hard to imagine that such a massive change is not related to the search engine giant's ongoing legal dispute with Oracle, however. What Google and Oracle are Fighting About The dispute started when Oracle sued Google for copyright in 2010, claiming that Google improperly used a part of its programming language

Microsoft has announced the plans to open source the core components of its " Chakra " – the JavaScript engine behind the new Edge browser – to GitHub code-sharing and collaboration repository next month. The company made this announcement at the JSConf US Last Call conference in Florida this weekend. What is Chakra? " Chakra ," developed in 2008, is a self-contained JavaScript virtual machine that Microsoft now lets developers implement in their own products and applications. Though Chakra is at the core of only Microsoft's Edge, it is used across the Microsoft's newest operating system Windows 10 to power Universal Apps on Xbox, Windows Phone and tablets. Chakra Going Open Source as ChakraCore ChakraCore – is what Microsoft is calling the open source version of its Chakra – will be made available on GitHub under an MIT open source license in January 2016, with support from Intel, AMD, and NodeSource. According to the Microsof

We are back with our last week's top cyber security threats and challenges, just in case you missed any of them ( ICYMI ). THN Weekly Round Up is The Hacker News efforts to help you provide all important stories of last week in one shot. We recommend you read the full story ( just click 'Read More' because there's some valuable advice in there as well ). Here's the list: 1. Quantum Teleportation — Scientists Teleported Quantum Data over 60 Miles While the world is battling between Quantum computers and Encryption , the NIST Scientists have set a new record in the field of " Quantum Teleportation "... …by successfully Teleporting a small amount of data (qubit) inside light particles over a distance of 60 Miles (100 km) through a network of optical fiber – the record which is four times faster than previous one. To know how the Quantum Teleportation works and how the researchers able to reach this record, Read More … 2. Pirate Bay co-fo

Sit Tight on your seats, because you're gonna get a Shock. Microsoft has developed an Operating System powered by LINUX. Close your mouth first. It's True! Microsoft has built its own Linux-based operating system called Azure Cloud Switch (ACS ) and believe me, under Satya Nadella, Microsoft has become more open than ever. According to the announcement made through an official blog post on Microsoft website, Azure Cloud Switch (ACS) describes as "cross-platform modular operating system for data center networking built on Linux." or Simply, " Commodity switch software stack for data center networks". The Purpose of developing Linux-based Azure Cloud Switch (ACS) operating system at Microsoft is to make it simpler to control the hardware from multiple vendors ( such as Switches ) that powers their cloud-based services. And here's the Kicker: "Running on Linux, ACS [Azure Cloud Switch] is able to make use of its vibrant eco

After, Facebook open sourced Thrift Technology ( an internally used tool by Facebook ) in 2007, rival entity Twitter brings Diffy , an internal Twitter service to the world. Yesterday, Twitter introduced " Diffy ," an open source tool, acting as a helping hand for the software developers to catch bugs, test and compare results without writing much code. Diffy plays a vital part in Twitter's development. As a service - Twitter modifies portions of its complex code on a timely basis, and Diffy is packed with such advanced automated techniques that it helps Twitter in its smooth workflow and optimized performance. Diffy simultaneously relieves programmers from writing separate codes to test flaws in the modified code. As, Diffy's minimal setup requirements are adaptable to any kind of environment. Apache Thrift and HTTP-based communication are such elaborate environments where Diffy catches bugs automatically . But, What exactly Diffy is? D

At its Build developers conference in April this year, Microsoft announced " Project Islandwood " - the " Windows Bridge for iOS " that lets iOS and Android developers port their apps to Windows. Microsoft finally made another surprise move on Thursday by open sourcing an early version of its toolkit for iOS to help iOS developers move their apps more easily to Windows 10. The source code for an early preview of " Windows Bridge for iOS " is now available on GitHub under the MIT open-source license. By releasing the preview of iOS Bridge, Microsoft wants the open-source community to contribute code, comments, testing, vulnerability reports, before the company launch the final version later this fall. iOS Toolkit for Building Windows 10 Apps The iOS Bridge enables developers to create apps that work with both Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 operating systems. Currently, Microsoft only targets the standard X86 and X64 processor archi