Android Smart Lock | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The importance of increasing online security around personal information has risen due to the increase in cyber attacks and data breaches over recent years. I find it hilarious people are still choosing terrible passwords to protect their online accounts. The massive LinkedIn hack is the latest in the example that proves people are absolutely awful at picking passwords. The data breach leaked 167 Million usernames and passwords online, out of which "123456" was used by more than 750,000 accounts, followed by "LinkedIn" ( 172,523 accounts ), and "password" ( 144,458 accounts ). In a typical authentication mechanism, two-factor verification is the second layer of security that is designed to ensure that you are the only person who can access your account, even if someone knows your password. Project Abacus: Password-free Logins Now Instead of just relying on uniquely generated PINs, Google intends to use your biometrics data – like your typi...

Today device unlocking has become far more secure over the years, from PIN number unlock to Pattern unlock and biometric unlocks including fingerprinting and facial recognition. But... ...What If Your Android Device Can Identify Your Voice before authenticating any access? This exactly what Google is trying to provide its Android 5.0 Lollipop users. Users running Android 5.0 Lollipop on their smartphone devices may soon be able to unlock their devices simply by saying " OK Google ." " Smart Lock " is one of the most convenient security features provided in Lollipop that offers a handful of clever ways to unlock an Android device automatically, which yet includes: Trusted Device Trusted Places Trusted Face However, Google is now rolling out a new smart lock, dubbed " Trusted Voice ," that uses your voice as a password to unlock your device. Just as your fingerprint or face recognition is considered distinctive enough for biom...

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 ...