Android Security Bulletin | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Google has started rolling out this month's security updates for its mobile operating system platform to address a total of 33 new security vulnerabilities affecting Android devices, 9 of which have been rated critical in severity. The vulnerabilities affect various Android components, including the Android operating system, framework, library, media framework, as well as Qualcomm components, including closed-source components. Three of the critical vulnerabilities patched this month reside in Android's Media framework, the most severe of which could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on a targeted device, within the context of a privileged process, by convincing users into opening a specially crafted malicious file. "The severity assessment is based on the effect that exploiting the vulnerability would possibly have on an affected device, assuming the platform and service mitigations are turned off for development purposes or if successfully bypas...

In Brief Google has released its monthly security patches for Android this week, addressing 17 critical vulnerabilities, 6 of which affect Android Mediaserver component that could be used to execute malicious code remotely. Besides patches for Mediaserver, Google also fixed 4 critical vulnerabilities related to Qualcomm components discovered in Android handsets, including Google's Nexus 6P, Pixel XL, and Nexus 9 devices. According to the Google security bulletin for Android  published Monday, this month's security update is one of the largest security fixes the company ever compiled in a single month. Google has split Android's monthly security bulletin into security "patch levels": Partial security patch level (2017-05-01) covers patches for vulnerabilities that are common to all Android devices. Complete security patch level (2017-05-05) includes additional fixes for hardware drivers as well as kernel components that are present only in some d...

The latest Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 Cloud Threat Report found that sensitive data is found in 66% of cloud storage buckets. This data is vulnerable to ransomware attacks. The SANS Institute recently reported that these attacks can be performed by abusing the cloud provider's storage security controls and default settings. "In just the past few months, I have witnessed two different methods for executing a ransomware attack using nothing but legitimate cloud security features," warns Brandon Evans, security consultant and SANS Certified Instructor. Halcyon disclosed an attack campaign that leveraged one of Amazon S3's native encryption mechanisms, SSE-C, to encrypt each of the target buckets. A few months prior, security consultant Chris Farris demonstrated how attackers could perform a similar attack using a different AWS security feature, KMS keys with external key material, using simple scripts generated by ChatGPT. "Clearly, this topic is top-of-mind for both threat actors and ...