Android | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A critical Android flaw could allow an attacker to run code on a phone without any user action remotely, Google said in its  November security bulletin . The flaw, CVE-2026-58868 , affects Android 14 through 17. Phones get the fix with security patch level 2026-11-01 or later, which phone makers and carriers send on their own schedules. As of November 4, Google's bulletin did not report any attacks exploiting its flaws. None of them was in the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, kept by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, as of its November 3 update. The flaw is a possible out-of-bounds write caused by a heap buffer overflow in the onOutputReceived function of the file FrameDecoder.cpp. Neither the bulletin nor the flaw's  CVE record  says how an attacker would reach that code. Google's Critical rating assumes that the protections built into Android and Google's services are turned off or bypassed. Older versions, such as Android...

A botnet of more than 1.3 million Android devices, mostly TV set-top boxes, lost control of its servers in late October in a takedown led by Google. Google says  it is highly confident that device maker Videostrong intentionally put a backdoor in the boxes and sold access to criminals. They used the boxes for ad fraud and to pass other people's internet traffic through owners' home connections. The backdoor is still on the boxes, and owners cannot remove it themselves. Videostrong, based in Shenzhen, China, makes Android TV boxes and other devices under its own name and for other brands. The backdoor, called x.cpe, was built into many device models and brands over several years. Google does not believe a rogue insider or a mistake was to blame. Google used legal action to take down the domains and servers that controlled the botnet. It also took down the control domains of more than a dozen malware families loaded through the backdoor. Japan's National Police Agenc...

A flaw in Telegram for Android could be chained with two other bugs to take full control of a victim's phone through a voice call, once the victim answered, according to security startup NebuSec. The attacker needed only an ordinary Telegram account. Telegram fixed the flaw in version 12.10.4 of the app, released in late September, and NebuSec  disclosed it on October 29 . Combined with an information-leak bug, the flaw gives the attacker an escape from the Telegram app to Android, NebuSec co-founder and chief executive Eten Zou told The Hacker News. Adding an Android root exploit then gives full control of the phone, including its messages, microphone and camera. The flaw can be triggered in every version from 8.6.2 through 12.10.3, Zou said. Those versions came out between March 2022 and September 2026. The company confirmed it in private voice calls on ARM64-based phones and has no evidence so far that it directly affects Telegram's iOS and desktop apps or group ca...

Third-party Android app stores can now apply to Google for permission to install apps with one tap, without Android's usual confirmation screens, and to update them in the background. To qualify, a store must pass identity checks and send Google  its full catalog , along with every new app and update, for ongoing malware scanning. Approved stores get the features from December 1, but only on devices running Android 17 QPR2 or later in  supported countries , which do not include the US. Today, a user installing apps from a third-party store must first enable the store to install apps, then confirm each install and each update. From December 1, a store in Google's  Registered App Stores program  gets that permission automatically once it is approved, and its updates run in the background under the user's own update settings. Google  announced the program in March , alongside changes it said resolved its disputes with Epic Games. Joining is optional, and sto...

Adobe has released patches to address multiple critical security flaws in Campaign Classic that, if successfully exploited, could result in arbitrary code execution, security feature bypass, and privilege escalation. The list of eight vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2026-104351 (CVSS score: 9.9) - A code injection vulnerability that could lead to arbitrary code execution. CVE-2026-104353 (CVSS score: 9.9) - An operating system code injection vulnerability that could lead to arbitrary code execution. CVE-2026-105780 (CVSS score: 9.9) - An incorrect authorization vulnerability that could lead to arbitrary code execution. CVE-2026-105489 (CVSS score: 9.9) - An SQL injection vulnerability that could lead to security feature bypass. CVE-2026-105781 (CVSS score: 9.8) - An SQL injection vulnerability that could lead to security feature bypass. CVE-2026-104350 (CVSS score: 9.3) - A reflected cross-site scripting vulnerability that could lead to privilege escalation....

Between November 2025 and March 2026, the Dutch security firm Eye Security pushed more than 2 million updates to computers it did not own to switch off a background updater that it said could have allowed an outsider to take over the machine. The updater belongs to Time4Popcorn , an abandoned copy of Popcorn Time, a free app that streamed pirated films and TV over BitTorrent. Popcorn Time was popular about a decade ago, and the original shut down in 2014, but several copies kept running under the same name. A separate, legal project that took the Popcorn Time name in early 2025 is unrelated to it. Eye Security, which monitors client networks for threats, found the updater during a routine threat hunt: a program called Updater.exe on one client's laptop kept trying to reach a web address that was no longer registered. The firm registered the address itself to see what would connect, and about 50 requests a second poured in. It later laid out the operation, which it named O...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new Android banking trojan called Hirudo that works by replacing legitimate banking apps with purpose-built patched versions designed to bypass security checks from inside the app itself, marking a new escalation in financial fraud.  Dutch mobile security company ThreatFabric said it identified replacements for eight Indonesian banking apps, while credential targeting in the malware spans Indonesia, China, India, Mexico, Morocco and Thailand. "The operation combines credential theft, device takeover, screen and camera capture, and SMS theft, in combination with a fairly mature backend," Eward Driehuis, vice president of fraud engineering at ThreatFabric, said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. Hirudo facilitates on-device credential theft and live remote control. The malware is delivered by shopping, adult video, and entertainment dropper apps that carry the trojan as a separate installation package, whic...

Google has announced a new security measure that limits access to Android's accessibility services to verified applications classified as Accessibility Tools when Advanced Protection is enabled. With malicious Android applications abusing the API serving as the main conduit for malware and financial fraud, the tech giant said the move would block a major attack pathway. Advanced Protection is a security setting that turns on all Android's security features to secure the device against potential threats. "In Android 17, enabling Advanced Protection automatically restricts AccessibilityService access exclusively to verified applications categorized as Accessibility Tools, closing off a major avenue of attack while preserving vital assistive technology," Google said Thursday. The Android AccessibilityService API is a powerful framework that allows an application to run in the background, intercept user interface events, and interact with other applications on...

RatHat's operators build and publish the Android banking trojan and control infected phones from a web console, according to security company Cleafy. Cleafy has  traced nearly 100 deployments  of that console since April 2026. It said this fits a malware-as-a-service model, in which each customer runs a separate copy. The console stores what the malware collects from each phone, including text messages and passwords entered into fake login screens overlaid on banking apps. Its latest version asks Google's Gemini AI model to estimate each victim's bank balance from those messages and sorts the phones into high-value and mid-value groups. Nothing in the samples Cleafy analyzed uses the model to move money. Its role is "deciding which victims are worth an operator's time," the company said. One Console, Three Versions The malware on victims' phones has changed little since late 2025, Cleafy said. The console behind it has been replaced. Samples f...

A OnePlus 15 running the latest OxygenOS can be rooted by a malicious app the owner installs, one that asks for no special permissions. A researcher, Rasmus Moorats,  chained two flaws in OnePlus's own software  to gain root access, the highest level of control over an Android phone. OnePlus told him the same flaws affect many more of its own devices and those of OPPO, though it has not said which. OnePlus confirmed both flaws in May. In the same reply, the company told Moorats that it alone decides when to make a flaw public and warned that publishing without its permission could result in legal liability. He published on September 24 anyway, when OnePlus had released no fix. OnePlus set out its position in the reply,  which Moorats published in full . It said a fix was scheduled, but claimed "the exclusive final right of vulnerability disclosure," and told him that even after a fix ships, researchers may not publish full technical details on their own. The comp...

Google has been  fined €403 million  for breaking the EU's data protection law, the GDPR, in the way three of its features handled people's location data from May 2018 to February 2020. Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC), Google's lead regulator in the EU, also ordered the company to make its processing comply with the law within 6 months. The DPC has not said publicly which processing the order covers, and it says its full decision will be published later. The three features are Web & App Activity, Location History and Location Accuracy. Web & App Activity is a Google account setting that, when turned on, lets Google process data about a user's activity on its sites and apps. That data can include location. Location History, which users must opt in to, keeps track of where they go with their signed-in mobile devices, even when they are not using a Google service. For both cases, the DPC found that Google breached the GDPR's rules on law...

Bad actors are misusing Google Play's Early Access program to push deceptive apps that claim to offer money, rewards, casino winnings, and premium content. Early Access apps are apps that haven't been released on the official Android app marketplace. The main idea behind the program is for developers to solicit user feedback for new applications or features they may be working on before their release. One aspect worth highlighting is that users cannot leave public reviews or star ratings for apps that are available in Early Access. This has opened the door to a new kind of abuse where threat actors are pushing thousands of Early Access applications with deceptive content, including fake casino games and reward apps, as well as misleading utilities and titles that may infringe on third-party trademarks. Among the identified apps is a Grand Theft Auto imitator named "Vice Streets: Open World" (APK package:com.gamblechaos.withfriends.game), which has more than 1 ...

The Gigabud banking trojan now installs a second Android app that creates a work profile on an infected phone and drops a tampered banking app inside it, security firm Group-IB said in a report published on September 9. A work profile is a separate space that Android typically reserves for employer apps, and what's inside it is kept separate from everything in the personal space. That split hides the trojan from the banking app's own malware checks, Group-IB said, so a fraudulent payment can look unrelated to the alert already raised on the phone. It has confirmed the full chain on infected devices in Indonesia. Android's  platform documentation  says any app in the phone's main profile can start the setup for a work profile, and that the user is told what a work profile does before one is created. Group-IB said banking apps carry security code that looks for known malware on the phone. From inside a work profile, that scan does not reach the personal space wher...

The iPhone belonging to a member of Serbia's student protest movement was infected with NSO Group's Pegasus spyware , according to new findings from the Citizen Lab in collaboration with the SHARE Foundation. "Our analysis confirmed that an iMessage zero-click exploit was used to infect the device with NSO Group's Pegasus spyware," the Citizen Lab said . "We found high-confidence indicators of infection from a period across December 2025 – January 2026; however, this does not preclude the possibility of additional infections." It's assessed that the zero-click exploit used in the attack targeted Apple iMessage, and has been addressed by Apple with iOS 18.4.1 , which was released in April 2025. The discovery comes in the aftermath of Apple sending a new set of threat notifications to customers whom it suspected may have been targeted by mercenary spyware attacks. The alerts were sent to an unspecified number of users in 110 countries. In a...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new Android banking trojan called StreamRat that was promoted to Spanish-speaking users through a fake television-streaming campaign on Meta and can give operators near-complete control of infected devices. ThreatFabric said the campaign's advertisement focused on Spain and reached an estimated 570,950 Meta accounts in the European Union that saw it at least once, with totals for infected devices and confirmed victims remaining unreported. Device takeover requires the victim to grant a succession of controls after sideloading the Android Package (APK). Users should stop the installation when a streaming app requests system controls unrelated to streaming. "There is little doubt that StreamRat is a new and technically sophisticated threat, developed by individuals with prior experience in the Android malware ecosystem," ThreatFabric said in its  StreamRat analysis . ThreatFabric did not attribute the campaign t...

Google on Thursday announced new network security protections in Android 17 to bolster connection privacy, address cellular vulnerabilities, and safeguard the privacy of users' home networks. Topping the list is support for Encrypted Client Hello ( ECH ), a privacy standard that prevents networks from eavesdropping on which websites a user is visiting. "This new privacy standard works in tandem with private DNS to obscure the domain names you visit, hiding metadata that can be used to profile you," Google's Bram Bonné and Shuaibo Huang said . "By encrypting the destination website name from the very start, ECH helps ensure that, for supported websites and apps, network providers and network snoopers can no longer easily see which websites or apps you are accessing."

Meta on Tuesday announced a set of WhatsApp account security features, including support for multiple passkeys to a single account to help users with both iOS and Android devices sign into their accounts using the phishing-resistant method. The tech giant said more than 1 billion people use a passkey to log into WhatsApp. Support for passkeys was first introduced in Android in October 2023, before expanding to iOS in early 2024. Meta also followed it up by integrating passkeys into Facebook logins in June 2025. Users can manage their passkeys by navigating to Settings > Account > Passkeys. Along with the update, WhatsApp said it's adding a full password option as part of two-step verification, and users on Android will see more context on calls from people who aren't in their contacts. "Two-step verification is an extra protection layer that helps prevent someone from taking over your account, even if they get hold of your one-time passcode," WhatsApp...

Threat actors are acquiring expired domains to inherit their website traffic and reputation with an aim to redirect victims to scams and malware on a large scale. DNS threat intelligence firm Infoblox has given the name dropcatch domains to those that get a second chance, where an expired domain becomes available for registration and is then snapped up by another party. During the first half of 2026, 50,400 dropcatch domains were re-registered each day in the generic top-level domains (gTLDs) like ".com" alone, a figure that jumps to around 65,000 when country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) are taken into consideration. These account for nearly 20% of all daily gTLD and ccTLD registrations, meaning one out of five newly registered domains is a dropcatch domain. "These domains can be particularly interesting, even dangerous, because they inherit reputation and sometimes connections from their previous life," Infoblox said in an exhaustive three-part report ...

A malicious SIM card can order the device it sits in to run commands of the attacker's choosing. On the cellular modules built into electric-vehicle chargers, industrial routers, and car telematics units, that is enough to take the whole device over. Researchers at the University of Birmingham and the security firm Fuzzware tested 26 phones and cellular modules for the capability, found it switched on in 9 of them, and used it to run their own code on a commercial EV charger. Six of the eight cellular modules they tested accepted the command. Only 3 of 18 phones did: the OPPO Find X5, the OPPO Reno 14 F 5G, and the ASUS Zenfone 9. No iPhone or Pixel was among them. The exposure is in machine-to-machine hardware. Five of the six were Quectel parts, three of them pulled from an EV charger, an industrial router, and a car's telematics control unit. Knowing the victim's number is not enough: every attack starts with a hostile card already in the slot, swapped by hand,...

Nebula Security says a patched Firefox JIT flaw could be triggered by simply visiting a malicious webpage and was also used to compromise Tor Browser. Tracked as CVE-2026-10702 , the bug provides arbitrary code execution inside the browser's renderer process. Mozilla rated it High and fixed it in the Firefox 151.0.3 update . "No settings or additional user interaction are required," Eten Zou, CEO of Nebula Security, told The Hacker News. "Visiting a malicious webpage is enough to trigger it," Zou said every Tor Browser release that incorporated a vulnerable Firefox version was affected, though researchers have not identified the exact Tor releases. On its own, the bug runs code only inside Firefox's sandboxed content process. Nebula released public exploit material and used the flaw as the first stage of IonStack, a browser-to-kernel chain built for an ARM64 device running Android 17. The released end-to-end code targets one supported Google build, a...