A DEMO ON HOW TO HACK SSL

A researcher has found a convincing way to hack the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol used to secure logins to a range of Websites, including e-commerce and banking sites.
Using a specially-created app, 'SSLstrip', a researcher calling himself Moxie Marlinspike demonstrated to Black Hat Arlington, Va attendees at last weekend's conference how vulnerable many SSL connections were to an involved but clever man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack where a hacker could proxy traffic from users accessing genuine secure https:// website logins.
To prove the usefulness of the attack to a hypothetical criminal, he claimed the hack had given him access to 117 e-mail accounts, 16 credit card numbers, 7 PayPal log-ins and over 300 other "miscellaneous secure logins" in a 24-hour period. Sites involved included Ticketmaster, Paypal, LinkedIn, Hotmail, and Gmail.
The clever bit is that the attack didn't need to touch the encrypted SSL traffic at all, simply exploit the fact that users almost never call https directly, instead accessing that by calling a conventional http web page first. That fact makes it possible to monitor and map the traffic between the browser and website before the SSL is set up securely, putting itself between the two so that neither site is aware that anything is amiss.
According to Marlinspike, the hack is also able to overcome the possibility that the browser will generate invalid certificate warnings from the fake proxy site, even passing back convincing if bogus favicons such as the traditional https padlock. The only signal that something is wrong would be the lack of the https:// address in the toolbar, something few users would likely notice, he said.

"Lots of times the security of HTTPS comes down to the security of HTTP, and HTTP is not secure," says Marlinspike in his presentation summary . "If we want to avoid the dialogs of death, start with HTTP not HTTPS."
Importantly, the visual indicators that help ordinary users detect such attacks should once again be emphasised, overturning some years in which developers, including browser developers, had downplayed such reinforcement.
"Once we've got control of that, we can do all kinds of stuff to re-introduce the positive indicators people might miss," he says.
An indirect hack on the secure web infrastructure was reported some weeks ago, whereby a flaw in the MD5 encryption algorithm was used to fool certificate authorities into accepting a bogus certificate as the real thing.

MILEY CYRUS VICTIM OF TWITTER HACK

Following the news that hackers took control of Twitter accounts belonging to a number of celebrities including Barack Obama and Britney Spears, security firm Sophos has revealed that Miley Cyrus is the latest celebrity to have her account with the micro-blogging service compromised.
Cyrus, who stars in the Disney Channel show 'Hannah Montana' and is the daughter of country-music legend Billy Ray Cyrus, found hackers had left poorly-spelt offensive messages on her Twitter page, after accessing her account details. The micro-blogging service has since shut down the page.
"This is just the latest hacking incident to happen on Twitter and chances are it's not going to be the last," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos.
"Cybercriminals are only ever one step behind the latest computer craze and as tweeting has been growing in popularity, the hackers have been quick to realise the potential in hacking these accounts."
"It appears that Miley didn't learn the lesson last year and hasn't been taking enough care over her password security," Cluely added in reference to an incident last year when hackers broke into her email account and stole photographs of the star, which were later posted on the web.