Google Has Rewarded Over $6 Million To Security Researchers Since 2010 For Finding Flaws

January 29, 2016

Google recently announced that it has paid over $6 million to security researchers since launching its bug bounty program in 2010. Google claims that financial rewards help them to make their services, and the web as a whole, safer and more secure.

Also Read : Google Confirms Security Issue in the Mainline Linux Kernel is Not a Major Threat for Android

LogBook : Google Paid Over $6 Million To Security Researchers

Google Vulnerability Reward Program (VRP) has been started from the year 2010.

Since 2010, Google has paid $6 million to security researchers for finding flaws.

In 2015 alone, Google has rewarded more than 300 different security researchers over $2 million for finding more than 750 bugs.

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Security researchers from around the world—Great Britain, Poland, Germany, Romania, Israel, Brazil, United States, China, Russia, India to name a few countries—participated in Google’s bug bounty program in 2015

Google’s security team has expanded the program time and time again to encompass more products and offer more lucrative rewards.

In June 2015, Google launched Android Vulnerability Reward Program, where the company paid more than $200,000 to security researchers for their work, including the company’s largest single payment of $37,500 to an Android security researcher.

Google also began to provide researchers with Vulnerability Research Grants, lump sums of money that researchers receive before starting their investigations.

The purpose of these grants is to ensure that researchers are rewarded for their hard work, even if they don’t find a vulnerability. Google said they already found positive result from Vulnerability Research Grant program.

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Google said that : “Kamil Histamullin a researcher from Kasan, Russia received a VRP grant early last year. Shortly thereafter, he found an issue in YouTube Creator Studio which would have enabled anyone to delete any video from YouTube by simply changing a parameter from the URL. After the issue was reported, our teams quickly fixed it and the researcher was was rewarded $5,000 in addition to his initial research grant. Kamil detailed his findings on his personal blog in March.”

Google also shared two interesting stories about its bug bounty program in 2015.

Tomasz Bojarski, the most prolific researcher of the year, found 70 bugs on Google in 2015. He even found a bug in Google’s vulnerability submission form.
Sanmay Ved, a researcher who bought google.com for one minute on Google Domains, received $6,006.13 (“google” spelled-out numerically). Google doubled the amount when Ved donated his reward to charity.

Since these types of bug bounty programs will help to motivate individuals and groups of hackers not only to find flaws, but to disclose them properly, instead of using them maliciously or selling them to parties that will.

Also Read : Researchers from Google Discovered How to Hack a Corporate Network just by Sending an Email

ISIS Offering $10,000 To Indian Hackers To Steal Government Data

Jenna Jose

January 27, 2016

Recent reports states that ISIS is now luring Indian hackers with top dollar to hack into government websites and steal sensitive data. Experts believe that many Indian hackers are already picked up the offer because of the attractive salary package.

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LogBook : ISIS Offers $10,000 To Indian Hackers

It is being reported that ISIS is willing to pay Indian hackers thousands of dollars to hack into government websites and gain access to sensitive documents.

For each successful ‘ job ‘, ISIS is ready to pay $10,000 and more to Indian hackers.

Experts are saying this has been the most anyone has been offered in the hacking community.

The hackers are being asked to create a database of potential Indian candidates from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

“There are various underground communities online where hackers interact regularly. Our investigation reveals that for the past six months, lucrative offers for stealing government data came pouring in and hackers were offered a huge sum. Such amount has never been offered to any Indian hackers before. We found that the offers were being made to spread ISIS reach in the country,” said Kislay Choudhary, a cyber crime expert who works with several security agencies. Kislay also added that stealing a government secured data is a part of ISIS’s intelligence gathering exercise.

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ISIS supporters are using Facebook and Twitter to propagate its radical ideology and brainwash the youth.

Experts believe that unfortunately many of the hackers have already accepted the offer as over 30,000 have been reportedly in contact with the extremist organisation in India till now.

The recruited hackers are communicating on internet-based services like Skype, Silent Circle, Telegram, and WhatsApp with their Syrian handlers, say experts.

Security agencies say they have initiated counter measures and have taken down ISIS-related content on web and also the Indian government is all set to create a 24/7 war room to monitor social media.

Also Read : Twitter Sued Over ISIS Attacks

Do You Want To Speed Up Your Android Smartphone, Then First Uninstall Official Facebook App

Sabarinath

January 26, 2016

Spammers Are Using Facebook Messenger To Spread The Notorious Locky Ransomware

Most of us are using official Facebook App to connect with our loved ones through the smartphone. But the bad news is it sucks our device battery life, eating up more RAM and more.

In fact, Android Central recently noticed that an end user could improve the Android experience pretty drastically by simply uninstalling the app.

Uninstall Official Facebook App To Speed Up Your Smartphone

According to Android Central, simply uninstalling official Facebook App can speed up your smartphone. Reddit user “pbrandes_eth” has run some tests that point to just having the Facebook app as slowing down their device.

“Pbrandes_eth” open 15 different apps on an LG G4 were started 3 times in a row, ranging from Kindle to Gmail, and timed how long it took to execute each task with Facebook installed, and again with it uninstalled.

The end result found that it took an average of 7 seconds to open the apps with Facebook and Facebook Messenger installed on the system. And after removing Facebook and Facebook Messenger Apps from the system it took 6 seconds to complete the same tasks.

6 seconds might not seem like much all things considered, but it actually shows a 15 percent increase in speed, all because the user removed two apps.

Many users claim that the app even runs when their device is not connected to any data source. According to some users, Facebook-owned app WhatsApp also has the same issue, to a minor degree. Facebook is not the only culprit to slow down your device, there may be much more Apps in this category.

The best alternative for official Facebook App is Facebook Lite, a low data usage app from Facebook or you can use any mobile web browser to access Facebook. Like Facebook Lite there are also many other lightweight Android apps that use less RAM and save your battery from draining.

Skype Now Hides IP Address By Default In PC And Mobile

Avinash A

January 24, 2016

With new update Skype will now hides IP address by default in PC and mobile. This measure will help prevent individuals from obtaining a Skype ID and resolving to an IP address. This was the feature that was requested by many users – especially gamers.

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LogBook : Skype Now Hides IP Address By Default

Microsoft has announced that the skpe will now hides IP address of users by default.

The latest change is very significant that will benefit Skype gamers playing online. Gamers sometimes struggle to prevent distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks as rivals can look at their Skype ID, find the IP address via resolver service and attack the IP address with traffic so that the gamer is thrown offline.

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“Skype is fully committed to delivering as safe and secure of an experience as possible to our customers. We have recently introduced the ability to hide a Skype user’s IP address and we’ve set this as a default status in the latest versions of Skype,” says Skype. “Starting with this update to Skype and moving forward, your IP address will be kept hidden from Skype users. This measure will help prevent individuals from obtaining a Skype ID and resolving to an IP address.”

The problem did not affect only gamers. However, gamers were the most targeted group of attacks. The latest update will definitely help many users, but gamers will appreciate the change in particular.

Also Read : WhatsApp Now Wants To Share Your Data With Facebook

A Group Of Gamers Recreating Entire GTA 5 In Minecraft

Jenna Jose

January 23, 2016

Another awesome insane work with Minecraft. Recently a group of gamers are working in the recreation of entire GTA 5 in Minecraft, block for block and the results are pretty impressive.

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LogBook : GTA 5 In Minecraft

GTA 5 in Minecraft comes from Youtube user N11ck, who decided to team up with a bunch of friends and rebuild the city of Los Santos, as well as the surrounding areas, from scratch.

They began the project back in January of 2015, which means now they are celebrating first year of GTA 5 in Minecraft.

Following is a clip the team recently put together called “GTA 5 In Minecraft Cinematic #1,” which sums up much of the work the team has pulled together so far.

The team isn’t making a world that looks like the game world of Grand Theft Auto V, but are instead building the entire map in a 1:1 scale.

The whole shebang measures around 7,500 by 7,500 blocks and it includes Los Santos itself, as well as the mountainous region of the surrounding Blaine County.

There are also certain underwater parts of the game which have to be replicated as well in order to make this a true one to one recreation.

N11ck regularly updates his channel with progress reports on the project.

Earlier we’ve seen people create games within the game, a working cell phone, a recreation of the lands of Westeros from A Game of Thrones, , the Starship Enterprise, and even Minis Tirith from The Lord of the Rings.

WhatsApp Now Wants To Share Your Data With Facebook

Sabarinath

January 23, 2016

WhatsApp Now Wants To Share Your Data With Facebook

As many of you guys know, Facebook owns WhatsApp, and for the longest time ever both apps and platforms remained relatively independent of each other, but that could soon change. In recent update WhatsApp drops its yearly subscription fee and now they are going to share your data with Facebook.

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LogBook : WhatsApp Want To Share Your Data With Facebook

According to a recent discovery by developer Javier Santos (via Cult of Android), it seems that in a future version of WhatsApp, there is mention about sharing data with Facebook.

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According to the message in the screenshot above, in the Account settings page now you have new option, “Share my WhatsApp account information with Facebook to improve my Facebook experience.”

If you enable the “Share my account info” option, WhatsApp will start share your data with Facebook.

But it is unclear as to what kind of information is shared with Facebook, but it sounds like maybe it might have something to do with finding more friends on Facebook via your WhatsApp contacts, and possibly vice versa as well.

If you’re a regular user of both Facebook and WhatsApp, then this might not be all that worrying for you. But if you don’t use Facebook regularly, you might not like the idea of sharing your private WhatsApp data with it.

The good news is that in the discovery the feature was disabled by default, meaning that users still had the choice of turning it on if they wanted to.

Another new feature found in beta include a new end-to-end encryption option, which makes your messages even more secure “so WhatsApp and third parties can’t see it.”

And also there’s a new “Documents” section where you’ll be able to find all of the files you receive from your WhatsApp contacts.

Since its a beta release so it is unclear if any of these things will make it into a final version of the WhatsApp app.

Also Read : Why we are Addicted to Facebook ? – Interesting Survey Results

Samsung Begins Mass Producing World’s Fastest 4GB HBM2 DRAM

Avinash A

January 22, 2016

Samsung Electronics has announced that it will begin mass producing the industry’s first 4 GB DRAM package based on the second-generation High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2) interface for use in high-performance computing (HPC), advanced graphics and network systems, as well as enterprise servers.

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LogBook : Fastest 4GB HBM2 DRAM from Samsung

It calls the industry’s first 4GB DRAM package based on the second-generation High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2) interface.

Samsung said to offer DRAM performance that is “seven times faster than the current DRAM performance limit”.

The new RAM is meant for use in high performance computing (HPC), advanced graphics and network systems, as well as enterprise servers.

“By mass producing next-generation HBM2 DRAM, we can contribute much more to the rapid adoption of next-generation HPC systems by global IT companies,” said Sewon Chun, senior vice president, Memory Marketing, Samsung Electronics in a statement.

Also Read : Samsung Going To Power Next Generation Smartphones With 6GB RAM Chips

Newly introduced 4GB HBM2 DRAM based on the company’s 20-nanometer process.

The new DRAM features 256GBps of bandwidth, which is double that of a HBM1 DRAM package.

Samsung’s 4GB HBM2 also enables enhanced power efficiency by doubling the bandwidth per watt over a 4Gb-GDDR5-based solution, and embeds ECC (error-correcting code) functionality to offer high reliability.

Samsung plans to produce an 8GB HBM2 DRAM package later in 2016, the company disclosed.

By specifying 8GB HBM2 DRAM in graphics cards, designers will be able to enjoy a space savings of more than 95%, compared to using GDDR5 DRAM, offering more optimal solutions for compact devices that require high-level graphics computing capabilities, the company said.

Also Read : LG, Samsung to Supply OLED Display to Apple iPhone 7, Says Report

With Google’s New Compression Algorithm Chrome is Going to Get a Lot Faster

Sabarinath

January 21, 2016

Happy news, your favourite browser is going to boost its browsing speed, yes Chrome is going to implement a new compression algorithm from Google to load web pages a lot faster than you’ve experienced up until now.

Also Read : All Available Google Chrome Shortcuts List For Windows,Mac And Linux Users

LogBook: New Compression Algorithm in Chrome

The new compression algorithm called Brotli, which Google introduced last September.

Using compression algorithm Brotli, Chrome will be able to compress data up to 26 percent more than its existing compression engine, which is an impressive jump.

The existing compression algorithm in Chrome is called Zopfli, that was launched just over three years ago.

While Zopfli is Deflate-compatible, Brotli is a whole new data format.

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Google says that Brotli is a “whole new data format” that squeezes in more data than other compression formats, while decompressing at comparable speeds.

As a result, “the smaller compressed size allows for better space utilization and faster page loads,” according to the team.

The company added that mobile users will also benefit from “lower data transfer fees and reduced battery use,” which should help those who eat up their data allowance all too quickly.

According to Google’s web performance engineer Ilya Grigorik, Brotli is ready to roll out, so Chrome users should expect to see a bump in load times once the next version of Chrome is released.

Google also hopes that other browsers will eventually support Brotli.

Firefox will be the first non-Chrome browser to use the algorithm, as it has said it will adopt Brotli in a future update, Firefox 44.

Also Read : Watch How Chrome Dominates Over Internet Explorer and Other Browsers in Last Seven Years

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