Android | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

In a previous story, I reported about a new ransomware threat known as Simplocker discovered by researchers at the security firm ESET, targeting Android users in the UK, Switzerland, Germany, India and Russia, for ransom. Simplocker (Android/Simplocker.A) is the latest Android ransomware that has ability to encrypt the files using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) on the Android device SD cards demanding users pay a ransom of 260 UAH ( Ukrainian hryvnias ), which is roughly equal to $21 US, for those files to be decrypted. To hide their track, the malware author is using the Command-and-Control server hosted on TOR .onion domain, which makes it difficult to trace the server's physical location or determine who is operating it. The malware collects information about the users' phone such as IMEI number, Operating System, phone model and manufacturer to send it all to Command-and-Control server. STUDENT CRACKS SIMPLOCKER RANSOMWARE Now, an undergraduate stu

If US has banned its several major government departments, including NASA, Justice and Commerce Departments, from purchasing Chinese products and computer technology due to suspected backdoors, then they are not wrong at all. A popular Chinese Android Smartphone comes pre-installed with a Trojan that could allow manufacturer to spy onto their users' comprising their personal data and conversations without any restrictions and users knowledge. GOOGLE PLAY STORE OR A SPYING APP? According to the researchers at the German security firm G Data , the Star N9500 smartphone, a popular and cheap handset device in China, comes pre-installed with Uupay.D Trojan horse, disguising as a version of the Google Play Store. The trojan camouflage as the Google Play Store , so it enables Chinese Company to secretly install malicious apps, which creates the whole spectrum of abuse. STEALING WITHOUT RESTRICTIONS The nasty Spyware runs in the background and has capability to steal

It comes as no surprise that today's cyber threats are orders of magnitude more complex than those of the past. And the ever-evolving tactics that attackers use demand the adoption of better, more holistic and consolidated ways to meet this non-stop challenge. Security teams constantly look for ways to reduce risk while improving security posture, but many approaches offer piecemeal solutions – zeroing in on one particular element of the evolving threat landscape challenge – missing the forest for the trees.  In the last few years, Exposure Management has become known as a comprehensive way of reigning in the chaos, giving organizations a true fighting chance to reduce risk and improve posture. In this article I'll cover what Exposure Management is, how it stacks up against some alternative approaches and why building an Exposure Management program should be on  your 2024 to-do list. What is Exposure Management?  Exposure Management is the systematic identification, evaluation,

A vulnerability has been identified in Wiko Mobiles that could allow anyone to remotely  force it to shut down abruptly with a text message only. Wiko is  a two-year-old French Mobile manufacturing company known for its cheapest mobiles and smartphones. French  blogger Korben reported that just by sending a  Short Message Service (SMS) with text  "="  (without the quotes) to Wiko mobiles could force them to restart and  knock them off a cellular network. He demonstrated the flaw in a video as shown below: He successfully tested Wiko Mobile flaw with official Android operating system and also reproduced it with custom Android ROM i.e. CyanogenMod, which concludes that the flaw could be in Wiko Mobile Hardware, rather than software. The Flaw was accidentally discovered by a reader, so currently we have no technical explanation that why Wiko mobiles can't behave equal as other smartphones do after receiving 'equal' symbol in SMS. If y

Google just made a huge change to the way application permissions work on Android devices which has left a potential door open to malicious app developers and hackers. Google narrows down Android's 145 permissions into 13 broad categories and groups app permissions into ' groups of related permissions ', likely for Android users to have an easier time dealing with app permissions. Unfortunately, the new update has introduced a few potential security and privacy issues, as listed below: hiding permissions behind the group names auto-updating app with no warning for new permissions According to new update, once a user approves an app's permissions, he actually approves the whole respective permission groups. For example, if an app want to read your incoming SMS messages, then it requires the " Read SMS messages " permission. But now installing an app, you are actually giving it access to all SMS-related permissions. The app developer can then include

We have seen cybercriminals targeting PCs with Ransomware malware that encrypts your files or lock down your computer and ask for a ransom amount to be paid in a specified duration of time to unlock it. To deliver the Ransomware malwares to the mobile devices, cyber criminals have already started creating malicious software programs for android devices. Last month, we reported about a new Police Ransomware malware that locks up the devices until the victims pay a ransom to get the keys to unlock the phone. But, the malware just lock the mobile screen and a loophole in the its implementation allowed users to recover their device and data stored on SDcard. Now, in an effort to overcome this, threat actors have adopted encryption in the development of mobile Ransomware malwares. Recently, the security firm ESET has discovered a new Android ransomware, dubbed as Android/Simplocker.A , that has ability to encrypt the files on the device SD card and then demand a ransom from the victim

The development of self own languages has become emblematic of the hot new trend in business as every big Internet service provider is now developing their own and unique programming languages. Two months ago, Facebook released its modern programming language called ' HACK ', which is specially designed to make the process of writing and testing code of complex websites and other software faster, and the company already drives almost all of the its social networking site to HACK over the last year. This Monday, Apple surprises the gathering of people who build software applications for Apple hardware devices at its World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) by introducing its whole new programming language called Swift , which probably replace Apple's main programming language - Objective-C that is being loved by the developers who build software applications for Apple hardware devices, from iPhone, iPad to Macintosh. The first app built on Swift is the WWDC ap

Today, the popular Music streaming service Spotify said the company has suffered a Data breach and warned users of its Android app to upgrade it in the wake of a potential data breach in their servers. Spotify is a commercial music streaming service launched in October 2008 by Swedish start-up Spotify AB and is freely available for Android and iOS devices as well as for desktop computers with more than 40 million active users, out of which about 10 million users are its paid subscribers. It offers offline listening and ad-free playback are also available for Premium subscribers of the service. The company announced that a hacker had allegedly broken into its systems and gained unauthorized access to the internal company data. So far only one of its users' accounts has been accessed in the data breach, but the company believes that there is no harm to the financial information, payment details or password of the affected user. " Our evidence shows that only one Spot

It has been months ago since the release of Samsung's latest Smartphone, Galaxy S5 and we have seen a portion of International units receive root, but a couple of the carrier variants including the developer edition of Samsung Galaxy S5 for Verizon and At&T hasn't been in the list, sadly. The Interesting part is that till now no hacker has found a way out to gain the root-rights of the Verizon as well as AT&T version of the Samsung Galaxy S5. Now, the Verizon and AT&T users who own Samsung Galaxy S5 are reportedly itching to get Android rooting technique for their devices, so that they can do tons of things such as customizations, patching apps, installing third-party ROMs etc. This situation is something unacceptable to the developers and Galaxy S5 users, and finally the senior members of XDA developers in collaboration with the group of Verizon and AT&T customers have started a Crowd funded Bounty program for achieving the root on Verizon and AT&

If you have an account with Microsoft's popular free email service Outlook.com, and using Outlook app for Android, then there is a bad news for you. Microsoft's Android app for Outlook.com,  provides users to access their Outlook emails on their Android devices, fails to provide security and encryption. LOOPHOLES DISCOVERED Researchers from ' Include Security ' firm claims to have found multiple vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Outlook app for Android, that leaves users' email data vulnerable to hackers and other malicious third party apps. By default, Email attachments are stored into easily accessible folders on the Android filesystem Email Database ( Body, Subject ) is stored locally in an unencrypted manner App's 'Pin Code' feature doesn't protect or encrypt email data. EMAIL ATTACHMENTS ARE ACCESSIBLE TO ANY OTHER APPS Today almost every applications available at Google Play Store generally ask for  READ_EXTERNAL_STORA

We are quite aware of the Android malware scanner Google's Bouncer that tests the apps by running them in a virtualized environment i.e. a simulated phone created in software which automatically scans the apps to watch its real behaviour on users' devices, before approving them to the Play Store market. To protect its users and their devices from harm, Google launched this apps scanning software tool, two year ago. Bouncer is a security feature for the Android Play store Market that is designed to protect the Android users to not to be a victim of any malicious Android malware app. But does the security tool go far enough? Despite having protective shield factor, we have seen Google play store market is surrounded by many malicious apps which easily by-passes the Bouncer scan test and targets Android users. Security Research from Columbia University have exploited weaknesses in Google's Bouncer service to sneak malicious apps on to the Android market. They publish

About a week back we reported about a popular paid Antivirus application on the Google Play Store which was actually a scam, dubbed as ' Virus Shield '. This First paid fake app managed to become one of the most popular anti-virus app in less than a week, and apparently more than 10,000 Smartphones users purchased it in $3.99 from Google Play Store and hence scammed more than $40,000. The Virus Shield Android App claimed to protect users' personal information from harmful viruses, malware and spyware, but in actual app doesn't scan anything and was removed from the store once the fraud had been uncovered. If you were one that had downloaded the Virus Shield Antivirus app , then don't worry, just check your email inbox, because Google cares about you and reaching out all those affected android users who purchased the app, in order to refund their money in full. REFUND WITH $5 BONUS CREDIT According to Android Police , Google has decided to refund $3.99 back to us

When it comes to Android apps, even the simplest app could greatly compromise your privacy and security. Injecting malicious JavaScript into Android applications has drawn an increased attention from the hacking community as its market share spikes. According to security researcher Jeremy S. from Singapore, a critical vulnerability in the Feedly app left millions of android app users vulnerable to the JavaScript infections. Feedly is a very popular app available for iOS and Android devices, also integrated into hundreds of other third party apps, which offers its users to browse the content of their favourite blogs, magazines, websites and more at one place via RSS feed subscriptions. According to Google Play Store, more than 5 Million users have installed Feedly app into their Android devices. In a blogpost , the researcher reported that Feedly is vulnerable to JavaScript injection attack, which is originally referred as 'cross-site scripting' or XSS vulnerability, allows

iBanking is nothing but a mobile banking Trojan app which impersonates itself as a so-called ' Security App ' for Android devices and distributed through HTML injection attacks on banking sites, in order to deceive its victims. Recently, its source code has been leaked online through an underground forum that gave the opportunities to a larger number of cyber criminals to launch attacks using this kind of ready-made mobile malware. The malicious iBanking app installed on victims' phone has capabilities to spy on user's communications. The bot allows an attacker to spoof SMS, redirect calls to any pre-defined phone number, capture audio using the device's microphone and steal other confidential data like call history log and the phone book contacts. According to new report from ESET security researchers, now this iBanking Trojan ( Android/Spy.Agent.AF ) is targeting Facebook users by tricking them to download a malware application. The malware uses

If you're one of the 400 million Android users out there who have installed Adobe Reader app that helps you to view PDF documents on mobile devices, then you should immediately update your app from Google Play Store. Adobe has released an updated Adobe Reader 11.2.0 version to addresses an important vulnerability that could be exploited to gain 'remote code execution' ability on the affected system. According to the Adobe  advisory , vulnerability ( CVE-2014-0514 ) resides in the implementation of JavaScript APIs on Adobe Reader 11.2 that could be exploited to execute arbitrary code within Adobe Reader. Adobe vulnerability discovered by security researcher  Yorick Koster of Securify BV , claimed that an attacker can create a specially crafted PDF file containing malicious JavaScript code that triggers when the victim will try to open it using affected Adobe Reader for Android Operating System. Multiple attack vectors are available to deploy a malicio

Heartbleed – I think now it's not a new name for you, as every informational website, Media and Security researchers are talking about probably the biggest Internet vulnerability in recent history. It is a critical bug in the OpenSSL's implementation of the TLS/DTLS heartbeat extension that allows attackers to read portions of the affected server's memory, potentially revealing users data, that the server did not intend to reveal. After the story broke online, websites around the world flooded with the heartbleed articles, explaining how it works, how to protect, and exactly what it is. Yet many didn't get it right. So based on the queries of Internet users, we answered some frequently asked questions about the bug. 1.) IS HEARTBLEED A VIRUS? Absolutely NO, It's not a virus. As described in our previous article , The Heartbleed bug is a vulnerability resided in TLS heartbeat mechanism built into certain versions of the popular open source encryption standard Open