Android hacking | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The heated battle between Apple and the FBI provoked a lot of talk about Encryption – the technology that has been used to keep all your bits and bytes as safe as possible. We can not say a lot about Apple's users, but Android users are at severe risk when it comes to encryption of their personal and sensitive data. Android's full-disk encryption can be cracked much more easily than expected with brute force attack and some patience, affecting potentially hundreds of millions of mobile devices. And the worst part: There may not be a full fix available for current Android handsets in the market. Google started implementing Full Disk Encryption on Android by default with Android 5.0 Lollipop. Full disk encryption (FDE) can prevent both hackers and even powerful law enforcement agencies from gaining unauthorized access to device's data. Android's disk encryption, in short, is the process of encoding all user's data on an Android device before ever wri

A large number of third-party Android apps have reportedly been discovered grabbing copies of all text messages received or sent to infected devices and sending them to the attackers' server. More than 63,000 Android applications use Taomike SDK – one of the biggest mobile advertisement solutions in China – to help developers display ads in their mobile apps and generate revenue. However, around 18,000 of these Android apps contains a malicious code that spy on users text messages, according to researchers at Palo Alto Networks, who made the discovery . Taomike provides a Software Development Toolkit (SDK) and services to the Android app developers using which they can: Displaying advertisements to users Offer in-app purchases (IAPs) Android Apps Stealing SMS Messages Focussing on distributing the app and techniques for building revenue, "Not all apps that use the Taomike library steal SMS messages," security researchers said. The security

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

This time Everything is Affected! Yet another potentially dangerous vulnerability has reportedly been disclosed in the Google's mobile operating system platform – Android . Android has been hit by a number of security flaws this month, including:   Stagefright vulnerability that affects 950 Million Android devices worldwide A critical mediaserver vulnerability that threatened to crash more than 55 percent of Android devices Another critical flaw (CVE-2015-3842) discovered last week, affected almost all the versions of Android devices This time the issue resides in the multitasking capability of the Android phones, the ability to run more than one app at a time. The security flaw gives hacker ability to spy on Android smartphone owners, steal login credentials, install malware , and many more, according to the latest research conducted by the researchers at the Pennsylvania State University and FireEye . How the Attack Works? According to security

Two weeks ago, we reported about a critical mediaserver vulnerability that threatened to crash more than 55 percent of Android devices, making them unresponsive and practically unusable to perform most essential tasks. Now, security researchers at Trend Micro have uncovered another flaw in the Android's mediaserver component that could be remotely exploited to install malware onto a target device by sending a specially crafted multimedia message. The vulnerability ( CVE-2015-3842 ) affects almost all the versions of Android devices from Android 2.3 Gingerbread to Android 5.1.1 Lollipop, potentially putting hundreds of Millions of Android devices open to hackers. Since Google has patched this issue, but hopefully the patch issued by Google this time isn't incomplete like its patch for the Stagefright vulnerability that affects 950 Million Android devices worldwide. How the Vulnerability Works? The security flaw involves a mediaserver component called Aud

Bad week for Android. Just days after a critical Stagefright vulnerability was revealed in the widely popular mobile platform, another new vulnerability threatens to make most Android devices unresponsive and practically unusable to essential tasks. Security researchers at Trend Micro have developed an attack technique that could ultimately crash more than 55 percent of Android phones , almost making them completely unresponsive and useless to perform very basic functions, including to make or receive calls. The dangerous security flaw affects any device running Android 4.3 Jelly Bean and later, including the latest Android 5.1.1 Lollipop , potentially putting hundreds of millions of Android users vulnerable to hackers. The flaw surfaced two days after Zimperium researchers warned that nearly 950 Million Android phones can be hijacked by sending a simple text message. Dubbed Stagefright , the vulnerability is more serious because it required no end-user interaction at

Own an Android phone? Beware, Your Android smartphones can be hacked by just a malformed text message. Security researchers have found that 95% of Android devices running version 2.2 to 5.1 of operating system, which includes Lollipop and KitKat, are vulnerable to a security bug, affecting more than 950 Million Android smartphones and tablets. Almost all Android smart devices available today are open to attack that could allow hackers to access the vulnerable device without the owners being aware of it, according to Joshua Drake, vice president of platform research and exploitation at security firm Zimperium. The vulnerability actually resides in a core Android component called " Stagefright ," a multimedia playback library used by Android to process, record and play multimedia files such as PDFs. A Text Message Received...Your Game is Over The sad news for most of the Android users is that the fix will not help Millions of Android users that owned o

So you love Minecraft ? You might want to be very careful before downloading the cheats for the popular Minecraft game from Google Play Store. Nearly 3 Million users have downloaded malicious Minecraft Android applications for their smartphone and tablets from the Google Play store, security researchers warned. The security researchers from IT security firm ESET have uncovered as many as 33 fake "scareware" applications that have been uploaded to the Google Play store in the course of the past 9 months, masquerading as Minecraft cheats and tip guides. These malicious applications have been downloaded between 660,000 and 2.8 million times. "All of the discovered apps were fake in that they did not contain any of the promised functionality and only displayed banners that tried to trick users into believing that their Android system is infected with a dangerous virus," ESET researcher Lukas Stefanko wrote in a blog post . Once downloaded, these mali

Security researchers have unearthed a new Android Trojan that tricks victims into believing they have switched their device off while it continues " spying " on the users' activities in the background. So, next time be very sure while you turn off your Android smartphones. The new Android malware threat, dubbed PowerOffHijack , has been spotted and analyzed by the researchers at the security firm AVG. PowerOffHijack because the nasty malware has a very unique feature - it hijacks the shutdown process of user's mobile phone. MALWARE WORKS AFTER SWITCHING OFF MOBILES When users presses the power button on their device, a fake dialog box is shown. The malware mimics the shutdown animation and the device appears to be off, but actually remains on, giving the malicious program freedom to move around on the device and steal data. "After pressing the power button, you will see the real shutdown animation, and the phone appears off. Although the screen is bl

We all have Internet-connected smartphones in our pockets, but it's very hard to find a place on Internet to feel secure and private. No doubt, there is data Encryption on cell phones, but what's the use if it is cracked by hackers or law enforcement? What if the encrypted files don't exist in the first place for law enforcement to decrypt it? That's the motive behind DroidStealth , a new Android encryption tool that not only protects sensitive data with obfuscation, but ​also hides its existence on your phone as if it has nothing to hide. DroidStealth Android app has been developed by security researchers from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and would come as a windfall to both the privacy lovers and the cyber criminals. STEALTH LOGIN MECHANISM DroidStealth Android encryption tool creates a hidden folder in your phone in which it stores your all encrypted files. The app itself can be opened by simply dialing a phone number of any length which is

Security researchers have warned of a pair of vulnerabilities in the Google Play Store that could allow cyber crooks to install and launch malicious applications remotely on Android devices. Tod Beardsley, technical lead for the Metasploit Framework at Rapid7 warns that an X-Frame-Options (XFO) vulnerability – when combined with a recent Android WebView (Jelly Bean) flaw – creates a way for hackers to quietly install any arbitrary app from the Play store onto victims' device even without the users consent. USERS AFFECTED The vulnerability affects users running Android version 4.3 Jelly Bean and earlier versions of Android that no longer receive official security updates from Android security team for WebView , a core component used to render web pages on an Android device . Also, users who have installed third party browsers are affected. According to the researcher, the web browser in Android 4.3 and prior that are vulnerable to a Universal Cross-Site Scripting (

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

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

Many Smartphone applications support, installation or app data storage to an external SD Card, that can be helpful in saving space on the internal memory, but also vulnerable to hackers. Typically, an app that has permission to read and write data from an SD card has the permission to read all data on that card, including information written by other apps. This means that if you install a malicious application by mistake, it can easily steal any sensitive data from your Phone's SD Card. To prevent the data from being misused by any other app, the best implementation is to encrypt the data, but that will drop the performance of the device. On its 10th birthday, as a treat for mobile developers, Facebook has unveiled the source code of its Android security tool called ' Conceal ' cryptographic API Java library, that will allow app developers to encrypt data on disk in the most resource efficient way, with an easy-to-use programming interface. Smaller th

In September, Google added the remote Device locking Capability to its Android Device Manager , allowing users to lock their phone if it's stolen or lost. The mechanism allows user to override the existing device lock scheme and set password scheme for better security. But Recently, Curesec Research Team  from Germany has discovered an interesting vulnerability ( CVE-2013-6271 ) in   Android 4.3 that allows a rogue app to remove all existing device locks activated by a user. ' The bug exists on the "com.android.settings.ChooseLockGeneric class". This class is used to allow the user to modify the type of lock mechanism the device should have. ' CRT team says in a blog post Android OS has several device lock mechanisms like PIN, Password, Gesture and even faces recognition to lock and unlock a device. For modification in password settings, the device asks the user for confirmation of the previous lock. But if some malicious application is installed on the device, it coul

The most common approach to protect data during communication on the Android platform is to use the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols. Thousands of applications in the Google Play market that are using these implementations. A group of researchers including Sascha Fahl, Marian Harbach, Thomas Muders, Matthew Smith from Distributed Computing & Security Group - Leibniz University of Hannover, Hannover, Germany and Lars Baumgärtner, Bernd Freisleben from Department of Math. & Computer Science - Philipps University of Marburg, Marburg, Germany, have presented a paper that  most of these applications contain serious mistakes in the way that SSL/TLS is implemented, that leaving them vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks that could compromise sensitive user data such as banking credentials, credit card numbers and other information. Tests performed on 100 selected apps confirmed that 41 of them were vulnerable to known attacks.  The

Android's App store is currently facing a new dilemma as its security has been compromised once again. Researchers from security firm TrustGo have recently spotted on Google Play a bogus app that supposedly automatizes the updating of a batch of other apps. The malicious code was hidden within an app named, "Updates" by developer Good Byte Labs (Package name: com.updateszxt) and was designed to look like an update to the Lookout™ mobile security application. The malware detected as Trojan!FakeLookout.A  is capable of stealing SMS and MMS messages and upload them to a remote server via FTP. This virus has the potential to steal all personal business sensitive data from the users' device. Though there are no reports of being infected by the users, it is believed that the infected users are not aware of it yet. " New approach being attempted by malware makers, " TrustGo said the site in question " contains a Trojan file that targets multiple platfo

A French hacker has been arrested for spreading a virus through fake smartphone applications. Prosecutors say he stole tiny sums from 17,000 people, amassing about 500,000 euros (£405,000) since 2011. Working from the basement of his parents' home in Amiens, France, he created malicious software that looked like normal smartphone apps, but these programs stole money through hidden transactions. He also used programs that sent him the usernames and passwords for gambling and gaming websites. The man admitted his crimes to police after he was arrested in the northern French city of Amiens. He told officials that he was motivated by a strong interest in computers and the desire to be a software developer.

Users should be aware that Cyber criminals are finding new ways to install malicious software on devices. The latest threat to Android phone users, according to the FBI , is a "work-at-home opportunity that promises a profitable payday just for sending out email." The IC3 has been made aware of various malware attacking Android operating systems for mobile devices. Some of the latest known versions of this type of malware are Loozfon and FinFisher .  Loozfon is an information-stealing piece of malware. Criminals use different variants to lure the victims. One version is a work-at-home opportunity that promises a profitable payday just for sending out email. A link within these advertisements leads to a website that is designed to push Loozfon on the user's device. The malicious application steals contact details from the user's address book and the infected device's phone number . FinFisher is a spyware capable of taking over the components of a mobile device. When in