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Millions of smartphones and smart gadgets, including Apple iOS and many Android handsets from various manufacturers, equipped with Broadcom Wifi chips are vulnerable to over-the-air hijacking without any user interaction. Just yesterday, Apple rushed out an emergency iOS 10.3.1 patch update to address a serious bug that could allow an attacker within same Wifi network to remotely execute malicious code on the Broadcom WiFi SoC (Software-on-Chip) used in iPhones, iPads, and iPods. The vulnerability was described as the stack buffer overflow issue and was discovered by Google's Project Zero staffer Gal Beniamini, who today detailed his research on a lengthy blog post , saying the flaw affects not only Apple but all those devices using Broadcom's Wi-Fi stack. Beniamini says this stack buffer overflow issue in the Broadcom firmware code could lead to remote code execution vulnerability, allowing an attacker in the smartphone's WiFi range to send and execute code on th

The Tencent Keen Security Lab Team from China has won a total prize money of $215,000 in the 2016 Mobile Pwn2Own contest run by Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) in Tokyo, Japan. Despite the implementation of high-security measures in current devices, the famous Chinese hackers crew has successfully hacked both Apple's iPhone 6S as well as Google's Nexus 6P phones. Hacking iPhone 6S For hacking Apple's iPhone 6S, Keen Lab exploited two iOS vulnerabilities – a use-after-free bug in the renderer and a memory corruption flaw in the sandbox – and stole pictures from the device, for which the team was awarded $52,500 . The iPhone 6S exploit successfully worked despite the iOS 10 update rolled out by Apple this week. Earlier this week, Marco Grassi from Keen Lab was credited by Apple for finding a serious remote code execution flaw in iOS that could compromise a victim's phone by just viewing "a maliciously crafted JPEG" image. However, a

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

Why waiting for researchers and bug hunters to know vulnerabilities in your products, when you can just throw a contest for that. Google has launched its own Android hacking contest with the first prize winner receiving $200,000 in cash. That's a Hefty Sum! The contest is a way to find and destroy dangerous Android vulnerabilities before hackers exploit them in the wild. The competition, dubbed ' The Project Zero Prize ,' is being run by Google's Project Zero, a team of security researchers dedicated to documenting critical bugs and making the web a safer place for everyone. What's the Requirements? Starting Tuesday and ending on March 14, 2017, the contest will only award cash prizes to contestants who can successfully hack any version of Android Nougat on Nexus 5X and 6P devices. However, the catch here is that Google wants you to hack the devices knowing only the devices' phone numbers and email addresses. For working of their exploits, contes

Google has released the February Security Update for Android that patches multiple security vulnerabilities discovered in the latest version of Android operating system. In total, there were five "critical" security vulnerabilities fixed in the release along with four "high" severity and one merely "moderate" issues. Remote Code Execution Flaw in WiFi A set of two critical vulnerabilities has been found in the Broadcom WiFi driver that could be exploited by attackers to perform Remote Code Execution (RCE) on affected Android devices when connected to the same network as the attacker. The vulnerabilities (CVE-2016-0801 and CVE-2016-0802) can be exploited by sending specially crafted wireless control message packets that can corrupt kernel memory, potentially leading to remote code execution at the kernel level. "These vulnerabilities can be triggered when the attacker and the victim are associated with the same network," read

Google reportedly fixed the latest round of Stagefright vulnerabilities in Android, pushing its latest over-the-air (OTA) update to Nexus devices. Last week, researchers warned of Stagefright 2.0 vulnerability that affected more than one Billion Android devices dating back to the latest versions of the Android operating system. The Stagefright bugs allowed hackers to take control of affected Android devices by sending a malicious audio or video file. In April, Zimperium researchers disclosed the first Stagefright vulnerability that allowed hackers to hijack any Android smartphones with just a simple text message ( exploit code ). As promised, Google on Monday pushed a patch that fixes the holes in Stagefright media playback engine used by Android to process, record and play multimedia files such as PDFs. The patch fixes 30 vulnerabilities in total, which includes: 14 critical vulnerabilities in Stagefright library 5 Remote Code Execution bugs 8 Eleva

Security researchers from Core Security has reportedly found a Denial of Service ( DoS ) attack vulnerability in Android WiFi-Direct. Android's WiFi-Direct is a wireless technology that allows two devices to establish a direct, peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connection without requiring a wireless router. Smartphones have been able to support Wi-Fi Direct for a while now. According to the advisory , the remotely exploitable denial-of-service vulnerability is affecting a wide number of Android mobile devices when it scans for WiFi Direct devices. If exploited, the vulnerability would let an attacker force a reboot of a device. " An attacker could send a specially crafted 802.11 Probe Response frame causing the Dalvik subsystem to reboot because of an Unhandle Exception on WiFiMonitor class ," advisory states. The Android WiFi-Direct vulnerability (CVE-2014-0997) affects: Nexus 5 - Android 4.4.4 Nexus 4 - Android 4.4.4 LG D806 - Android 4.2.2 Samsung SM-T310 - Android

The developers of one of the most advance open source operating system for penetration testing, ' KALI Linux ' have announced yesterday the release of a new Kali project, known as NetHunter , that runs on a Google Nexus device. Kali Linux is an open source Debian-based operating system for penetration testing and forensics, which is maintained and funded by Offensive Security, a provider of world-class information security training and penetration testing services. It comes wrapped with a collection of penetration testing and network monitoring tools used for testing of software privacy and security. After making its influence in hacker and security circles, Kali Linux has now been published with Kali Nethunter, a version of the security suite for Android devices. The tool is a mobile distribution designed to compromise systems via USB when installed and run on an Android phone. Kali Linux NetHunter project provides much of the power to Nexus users, those runni

Google's Nexus Smartphones are vulnerable to SMS-based DOS attack , where an attacker can force it to restart, freeze, or lose network connection by sending a large number of special SMS messages to them. The vulnerability, discovered by Bogdan Alecu , a system administrator at Dutch IT services company Levi9, and affects all Android 4.x firmware versions on Google Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4 and Nexus 5. The problem is with how the phones handle a special type of text message, known as a flash SMS. By sending around 30 Flash SMS ( Flash SMS is a type of message that normally is not stored by the system and does not trigger any audio alerts ) messages to Nexus phone an attacker can cause the phone to malfunction. He presented the vulnerability on Friday at the DefCamp security conference in Bucharest, Romania. In an email exchange with me, he said ' I was testing different message types and for the class 0 messages I noticed that the popup being displayed also adds an extra layer wh