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A notable number of cell phone towers around the United States are rogue that, according to latest report, could spoof legitimate towers and intercept calls. The research carried out by ESD America , a defense and law enforcement technology firm based in Las Vegas, shows that a rogue cell phone towers, also known as "interceptors", may process the call. ESD America, the company that makes the super-secure CryptoPhone, makes one of the oldest and most expensive high-security cell phones in the market. It provides equipment and training to more than 40 countries with a goal to provide technical security assistance to government and corporate clients across Asia. SEVERAL ROGUE CELL PHONE TOWERS DISCOVERED While field-testing its secure Android handset, the CryptoPhone 500 , the firm came across the existence of a series of fake base stations along the Eastern seaboard of the US. Les Goldsmith, the CEO of ESD America, told the US publication Popular Science tha

Good news for Firefox lovers! The Mozilla Foundation has introduced a bunch of new features in Firefox to improve browser security with the launch of Firefox 32, now available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android platforms. The new version of Firefox makes the browser even more competitive among others. Firefox version 32 has some notable security improvements, including a new HTTP cache for improved performance, public key pinning - a defense that would help protect its users from man-in-the-middle and other attacks, and easy language switching on Android. PUBLIC KEY PINNING ENABLED BY-DEFAULT In the latest Firefox version 32, Mozilla has enabled Public Key Pinning support by default that will protect its users from man-in-the-middle-attacks and rogue certificate authorities. Public key pinning is a security measure that ensures people that they are connecting to the websites they intend to. Pinning allows users to keep track of certificates in order to specify wh

Identities now transcend human boundaries. Within each line of code and every API call lies a non-human identity. These entities act as programmatic access keys, enabling authentication and facilitating interactions among systems and services, which are essential for every API call, database query, or storage account access. As we depend on multi-factor authentication and passwords to safeguard human identities, a pressing question arises: How do we guarantee the security and integrity of these non-human counterparts? How do we authenticate, authorize, and regulate access for entities devoid of life but crucial for the functioning of critical systems? Let's break it down. The challenge Imagine a cloud-native application as a bustling metropolis of tiny neighborhoods known as microservices, all neatly packed into containers. These microservices function akin to diligent worker bees, each diligently performing its designated task, be it processing data, verifying credentials, or

A group of security researchers has successfully discovered a method to hack into six out of seven popular Smartphone apps, including Gmail across all the three platforms - Android , Windows, and iOS operating systems - with shockingly high success rate of up to 92 percent. Computer scientists the University of California Riverside Bourns College of Engineering and the University of Michigan have identified a new weakness they believe to exist in Android, Windows, and iOS platforms that could allow possibly be used by hackers to obtain users' personal information using malicious apps. The team of researchers - Zhiyun Qian , of the University of California, Riverside, and Z. Morley Mao and Qi Alfred Chen from the University of Michigan - will present its paper, " Peeking into Your App without Actually Seeing It: UI State Inference and Novel Android Attacks " ( PDF ), at the USENIX Security Symposium in San Diego on August 23. The paper detailed a new type of

Pebble, a wristwatch that can connect to your phone - both iOS and Android - and interact with apps, has a hard-coded vulnerability that allows a remote attacker to destroy your Smartwatch completely. Pebble Smartwatch , developed and released by Pebble Technology Corporation in 2013, is considered as one of the most popular SmartWatches that had become the most funded project in the history of Kickstarter. Just two hours after its crowd-funding campaign launched, Pebble had already surpassed its $100,000 goal and at last had reached over $10.25 million pledged by nearly 70,000 Kickstarter backers. A security enthusiast Hemanth Joseph  claimed to have found that his Pebble SmartWatch with the latest v2.4.1 Firmware can be remotely exploited by anyone with no technical knowledge in order to delete all data stored in the device, apps, notes, and other information stored in it. HOW PEBBLE SMARTWATCH WORKS Before proceeding towards how he did this, let me explain how Peb

The ultra secure NSA-Proof Blackphone titled as, " world's first Smartphone which places privacy and control directly in the hands of its users, " has been rooted within 5 minutes at the BlackHat security conference in Las Vegas this weekend. Blackphone , a joint venture between encrypted communications firm Silent Circle and Spanish Smartphone maker Geeksphone , has a fully customized version of Android known as PrivatOS and pre-installed with lots of privacy-enabled applications, which claims to offer its users a high-end security at consumer level. A security researcher with twitter handle @TeamAndIRC took only 5 minutes to achieve root access on the Blackphone without having the need to unlock the device' bootloader. The hacker even mocked Blackphone's team by saying that "It is apparent no one ran CTS [ compatibility test suite ] on this device." The so-called " secure " Android phone that was promising security given the fact that its basically a suite of secure

Researchers have warned users of Android devices to avoid app downloads from particularly unauthorized sources, since a new and sophisticated piece of malware is targeting Android users through phishing emails . The malware, dubbed SandroRAT , is currently being used by cybercriminals to target Android users in Poland via a widely spread email spam campaign that delivers a new variant of an Android remote access tool (RAT). The emails masquerade itself as a bank alert that warns users of the malware infection in their mobile device and offers a fake mobile security solution in order to get rid of the malware infection. The mobile security solution poses as a Kaspersky Mobile Security , but in real, it is a version of SandroRAT, a remote access tool devised for Android devices, whose source code has been put on sale on underground Hack Forums since December last year. A mobile malware researcher at McAfee, Carlos Castillo, detailed the new variant of Android remot

Due to the majority in the mobile platform, Google's Android operating system has been a prior target for cybercriminals and a recently exposed weakness in the way the operating system handles certificate validation, left millions of Android devices open to attack. Researchers at BlueBox security , who identified the vulnerability, dubbed the flaw as Fake ID , which affects all versions of Android operating system from 2.1 ( released in 2010 ) up to Android 4.4, also known as KitKat . ALL VERSIONS ARE VULNERABLE UPTO KITKAT Researchers marked the vulnerability as critical because it could allow a fake and malicious app to masquerade as a legitimate and trusted application, enabling an attacker to perform various actions such as inserting malicious code into a legitimate app, infiltrating your personal information or even take complete control of an affected device. Specifically, devices running the 3LM administration extension are at risk for a complete compromise, whic

In the era of Government surveillance, ensuring the security and safety of our private communications regardless of platform – email, VOIP, message, even cookies stored – should be the top priority of the Internet industry. Some industry came together to offer Encryption as the protection against government surveillance, but some left security holes that may expose your personal data. A critical issue on Instagram's Android Application has been disclosed by a security researcher that could allow an attacker to hijack users' account and successfully access private photos, delete victim's photos, edit comments and also post new images. Instagram , acquired by Facebook in April 2012 for approximately US$1 billion, is an online mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing and social networking service that enables its users to take pictures and videos, apply digital filters, and share them on a variety of social networking services, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Flickr.

A leading provider of advanced threat, security and compliance solutions, Tripwire , has announced that Craig Young , a security researcher from its Vulnerability and Exposure Research Team (VERT) , is working on a paper about SSL vulnerabilities that will be presented at DEF CON 22 Wireless Village . There are thousands of websites over Internet that contain serious mistakes in the way that Secure Sockets Layer and Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) is implemented, leaving them vulnerable to man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks that could compromise sensitive user data such as banking credentials, credit card numbers and other information. MitM attack is one of the common and favorite techniques of attackers used to intercept wireless data traffic. Cyber criminals could able to intercept sensitive user data, including credit card numbers, PayPal credentials and social network credentials as well. Young has unearthed various situations where poor SSL implementations in co

A major vulnerability believed to be present in most versions of Android can allow a malicious Android applications on the Android app store to make phone calls on a user's device, even when they lack the necessary permissions. The critical vulnerability was identified and reported to Google Inc. late last year by researchers from German security firm Curesec. The researchers believe the virus was first noticed in Android version 4.1, also known as " Jelly Bean ." APPS CAN MAKE CALLS FROM YOUR PHONE " This bug can be abused by a malicious application. Take a simple game which is coming with this code. The game won't ask you for extra permissions to do a phone call to a toll number – but it is able to do it ," Curesec's CEO Marco Lux and researcher Pedro Umbelino said Friday in a blog post. " This is normally not possible without giving the app this special permission. " By leveraging these vulnerabilities, malicious applications could initiate unauthorized phone call

Unless you are a human supercomputer, remembering password is not so easy, and that too if you have a different password for each site. But luckily to make the whole process very easy, there is a growing market out there for password managers and lockers with extra layers of security. But, if you are using the mobile version of most popular password manager from Password management company RoboForm to manage your passwords then you might be at a risk, claimed a UK based Security researcher. I am personally using RoboForm from last few months, which is a great password manager application developed by Siber Systems Inc. for various platforms that stores your sensitive data all in one place, protected at RoboForm account and encrypted by a secret master password. RoboForm user be able to then quickly access those passwords and notes anytime, anywhere. But a IT security consultant and tech enthusiast Paul Moore discovered one critical vulnerability in its app and one Pri

Security researchers from MetaIntell, the leader in intelligent led Mobile Risk Management (MRM), have discovered a major security vulnerability in the latest version of Facebook SDK that put millions of Facebook user's Authentication Tokens at risk. Facebook SDK for Android and iOS is the easiest way to integrate mobile apps with Facebook platform, which provides support for Login with Facebook authentication, reading and writing to Facebook APIs and many more. Facebook OAuth authentication or ' Login as Facebook ' mechanism is a personalized and secure way for users to sign into 3rd party apps without sharing their passwords. After the user approves the permissions as requested by the application, the Facebook SDK implements the OAuth 2.0 User-Agent flow to retrieve the secret user's access token required by the apps to call Facebook APIs to read, modify or write user's Facebook data on their behalf. ACCESSING UNENCRYPTED ACCESS TOKEN It is important that

Cybercriminals have rolled out a new malicious Android application that wraps different varieties of banking fraud trick into a single piece of advanced mobile malware . GOOGLE SERVICE FRAMEWORK - APPLICATION OR MALWARE? Security researchers at the security firm FireEye have came across a malicious Android application that binds together the latest and older hijacking techniques. The malicious Android app combines private data theft, banking credential theft and spoofing, and remote access into a single unit, where traditional malware has had only one such capability included in it. Researchers dubbed the malware as HijackRAT , a banking trojan that comes loaded with a malicious Android application which disguises itself as "Google Service Framework," first and the most advanced Android malware sample of its kind ever discovered, combining all the three malicious activities together. MALWARE FEATURES By giving the remote control of the infected device to hackers,

A 20 year old critical subtle integer overflow vulnerability has been discovered in Lempel-Ziv-Oberhumer (LZO), an extremely efficient data compression algorithm that focuses on decompression speed, which is almost five times faster than zlib and bzip compression algorithms. Lempel-Ziv-Oberhumer (LZO) was developed in 1994 by Markus Oberhumer and currently it is one of the most popular and widespread compression algorithm used in the Linux kernel , some Samsung Android mobile devices, other embedded devices and several open-source libraries including OpenVPN, MPlayer2, Libav, FFmpeg. 20 YEAR OLD VULNERABILITY IN LZO ALGORITHM Don A. Bailey, founder and CEO of Lab Mouse Security, who disclosed the technical details of the buffer overrun vulnerability in LZO/LZ4 algorithm, explains that if an attacker carefully craft a piece of compressed data that would run malicious code when the software attempted to decompress it. According to advisory, if buffers of 16MB or more

A critical code-execution vulnerability almost affecting everyone those are not running the most updated version of Google Android , i.e. Android version 4.4 also known as KitKat. After nine months of vulnerability disclosure to the Android security team, researchers of the Application Security team at IBM have finally revealed all the possible details of a serious code-execution vulnerability that still affects the Android devices running versions 4.3 and earlier, which could allow attackers to exfiltrate sensitive information from the vulnerable devices. " Considering Android's fragmented nature and the fact that this was a code-execution vulnerability, we decided to wait a bit with the public disclosure ," said Roee Hay, a security research group leader at IBM. The researchers found the stack buffer overflow vulnerability that resides in the Android's KeyStore storage service, which according to the Android developers' website is the service code running in Androi