Android Kernel | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Watch out! If you have any of the below-mentioned file managers and photography apps installed on your Android phone—even if downloaded from the official Google Store store⁠—you have been hacked and being tracked. These newly detected malicious Android apps are Camero , FileCrypt , and callCam that are believed to be linked to Sidewinder APT, a sophisticated hacking group specialized in cyber espionage attacks. According to cybersecurity researchers at Trend Micro, these apps were exploiting a critical use-after-free vulnerability in Android at least since March last year⁠—that's 7 months before the same flaw was first discovered as zero-day when Google researcher analysed a separate attack developed by Israeli surveillance vendor NSO Group. "We speculate that these apps have been active since March 2019 based on the certificate information on one of the apps," the researchers said . Tracked as CVE-2019-2215 , the vulnerability is a local privilege escalation...

Google has added a new security feature to the latest Linux kernels for Android devices to prevent it against code reuse attacks that allow attackers to achieve arbitrary code execution by exploiting control-flow hijacking vulnerabilities. In code reuse attacks, attackers exploit memory corruption bugs (buffer overflows, type confusion, or integer overflows) to take over code pointers stored in memory and repurpose existing code in a way that directs control flow of their choice, resulting in a malicious action. Since Android has a lot of mitigation to prevent direct code injection into its kernel, this code reuse method is particularly popular among hackers to gain code execution with the kernel because of the huge number of function pointers it uses. In an attempt to prevent this attack, Google has now added support for LLVM's Control Flow Integrity (CFI) to Android's kernel as a measure for detecting unusual behaviors of attackers trying to interfere or modify the contr...

Every week seems to bring news of another data breach, and it's no surprise why: securing sensitive data has become harder than ever. And it's not just because companies are dealing with orders of magnitude more data. Data flows and user roles are constantly shifting, and data is stored across multiple technologies and cloud environments. Not to mention, compliance requirements are only getting stricter and more elaborate.  The problem is that while the data landscape has evolved rapidly, the usual strategies for securing that data are stuck in the past. Gone are the days when data lived in predictable places, with access controlled by a chosen few. Today, practically every department in the business needs to use customer data, and AI adoption means huge datasets, and a constant flux of permissions, use cases, and tools. Security teams are struggling to implement effective strategies for securing sensitive data, and a new crop of tools, called data security platforms, have appear...