Android | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

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...