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You probably have come across many websites that let you install browser extensions without ever going to the official Chrome web store. It's a great way for users to install an extension, but now Google has decided to remove the ability for websites to offer "inline installation" of Chrome extensions on all platforms. Google announced today in its Chromium blog that by the end of this year, its Chrome browser will no longer support the installation of extensions from outside the Web Store in an effort to protect its users from shady browser extensions. "We continue to receive large volumes of complaints from users about unwanted extensions causing their Chrome experience to change unexpectedly — and the majority of these complaints are attributed to confusing or deceptive uses of inline installation on websites," says ​James Wagner, Google's extensions platform product manager. Google's browser extensions crackdown will take place in three ph

Security of Android devices has been a nightmare since its inception, and the biggest reason being is that users don't receive latest security patch updates regularly. Precisely, it's your device manufacturer (Android OEMs) actually who takes time to roll out security patches for your devices and sometimes, even has been caught lying about security updates , telling customers that their smartphones are running the latest updates. Since Google did not have direct control over the OEM branded firmware running on billions of devices, it brought some significant changes to the Android system architecture last year with Project Treble gain more control over the update process. Although Google and device manufacturers have made some progress in the past year, the problem with the security update remains because of OEMs not delivering all patches regularly and on a timely basis, leaving parts of the Android ecosystem exposed to hackers. But here's good news—starting wi

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo

Google has finally been rolling out its new massively redesigned Gmail  for desktop and mobile to 1.4 billion of users worldwide, which might be the most significant single upgrade in Gmail's history. This huge revamped version of the email service now offers plenty of new features such as confidential mode, offline support, email snoozing and more, to make Gmail more smarter, secure, and easier to use. In this article, I have listed details of the most significant changes that you need to know and how to use them. Give it a quick read. New 'Confidential Mode' Features For Security & Privacy Are you afraid of sending sensitive documents in an email due to fear of hacking or being forwarded? Well, now you can simply click the lock icon at the bottom of an email to enable the new Confidential Mode, which lets you add a bunch of extra layers of security (as mentioned below) to the emails of your choice. 1) Self-Destructing Emails:  This feature lets you se

Phishing — is an older style of cyber-attack but remains one of the most common and efficient attack vectors for attackers, as a majority of banking malware and various ransomware attacks begin with a user clicking on a malicious link or opening a dangerous attachment in an email. Phishing has evolved than ever before in the past few years – which is why it remains one of those threats that we have been combating for many years. We have seen phishing campaigns that are so convincing and effective that even tech-savvy people can be tricked into giving away their credentials to hackers. And some that are " almost impossible to detect " and used to trick even the most careful users on the Internet. To help combat this issue, Google has introduced a security defence for it's over a billion users that will help users weed out phishing emails from their Gmail inbox. Google has rolled out new anti-phishing security checks for its Gmail app for iPhone users that will

From past few years, spammers and cyber criminals were buying web extensions from their developers and then updating them without informing their users to inject bulk advertisements into every website user visits in order to generate large revenue. But now they have shifted their business model—instead of investing, spammers have started a new wave of phishing attacks aimed at hijacking popular browser extensions. Just two days ago, we reported how cyber criminals managed to compromise the Chrome Web Store account of a German developer team and hijacked Copyfish extension , and then modified it with ad-injection capabilities to distribute spam correspondence to users. Now just yesterday, another popular Chrome extension ' Web Developer ' was hijacked by some unknown attackers, who updated the software to directly inject advertisements into the web browser of over its 1 million users. Chris Pederick , the creator of Web Developer Chrome extension that offers various w

Digital currencies have emerged as a favourite tool for hackers and cyber criminals, as digital currency transactions are nearly anonymous, allowing cyber criminals to use it in underground markets for illegal trading, and to receive thousands of dollars in ransomware attacks— WannaCry , Petya , LeakerLocker , Locky and Cerber to name a few. Also, every other day we hear about some incidents of hacking of crypto currency exchange or digital wallets, in which hackers stole millions of dollars in Bitcoin or Ethereum. The latest back-to-back series of thefts of Ethereum —one of the most popular and increasingly valuable cryptocurrencies—in which around half a billion dollars in total were stolen is the recent example of how much hackers are after crypto currencies. It's obvious that after ripping off hundreds of thousands of cryptocurrencies from exchanges, wallets and ransomware victims, cyber criminals would not hold them in just digital form—the next step is to cash the

Security researchers at Google have discovered a new family of deceptive Android spyware that can steal a whole lot of information on users, including text messages, emails, voice calls, photos, location data, and other files, and spy on them. Dubbed Lipizzan , the Android spyware appears to be developed by Equus Technologies, an Israeli startup that Google referred to as a 'cyber arms' seller in a blog post published Wednesday. With the help of Google Play Protect , the Android security team has found Lipizzan spyware on at least 20 apps in Play Store, which infected fewer than 100 Android smartphones in total. Google has quickly blocked and removed all of those Lipizzan apps and the developers from its Android ecosystem, and Google Play Protect has notified all affected victims. For those unaware, Google Play Protect is part of the Google Play Store app and uses machine learning and app usage analysis to weed out the dangerous and malicious apps. Lipizzan: Soph

How often do you click the 'back' or the 'Home' button on your mobile device to exit an application immediately? I believe, several times in a single day because a large number of apps do not have an exit button to directly force-close them instead of going back and back and back until they exit. Sometimes Android users expect the back button to take them back to the back page, but sometimes they really want to exit the app immediately. Often this has severe usability implications when a majority of users are already dealing with their low-performance mobile devices and believe that clicking back button multiple times would kill the app and save memory, but it doesn't. Google has now addressed this issue and silently included a feature within Android 7.1 Nougat that allows users to exit from apps by pressing the 'back' key successively within 0.3 seconds for over four times. Dubbed " Panic Detection Mode ," the feature runs in the background o

As a punishment announced last October, Google will no longer trust SSL/TLS certificate authorities WoSign and its subsidiary StartCom with the launch of Chrome 61 for not maintaining the "high standards expected of CAs." The move came after Google was notified by GitHub's security team on August 17, 2016, that Chinese Certificate Authority WoSign had issued a base certificate for one of GitHub's domains to an unnamed GitHub user without authorization. After this issue had been reported, Google conducted an investigation in public as a collaboration with Mozilla and the security community, which uncovered several other cases of WoSign misissuance of certificates. As a result, the tech giant last year began limiting its trust of certificates backed by WoSign and StartCom to those issued before October 21st, 2016 and has been removing whitelisted hostnames over the course of several Chrome releases since Chrome 56. Now, in a Google Groups post published

Google has just lost its biggest regulatory battle! Google has been hit with a record-breaking $2.7 billion (€2.42 billion) fine by the European antitrust officials for unfairly manipulating search results since 2008. After a lengthy seven-year investigation that was launched in 2010 after several rivals complaint, the European Commission on Tuesday imposed this 'biggest even financial penalty' against the internet tech giant for breaking EU competition law. by using its search dominance to distort search-engine results to promote own shopping comparison service at the top of all search results. "Comparison shopping services rely to a large extent on traffic to be competitive." European Commission says in a press release . "The evidence shows that consumers click far more often on results that are more visible, i.e. the results appearing higher up in Google's search results. More traffic leads to more clicks and generates revenue." The Comm

An Android version of one of the most sophisticated mobile spyware has been discovered that remained undetected for at least three years due to its smart self-destruction capabilities. Dubbed Chrysaor , the Android spyware has been used in targeted attacks against activists and journalists mostly in Israel, but also in Georgia, Turkey, Mexico, the UAE and other countries. Chrysaor espionage malware, uncovered by researchers at Lookout and Google, is believed to be created by the same Israeli surveillance firm NSO Group Technologies, who was behind the Pegasus iOS spyware initially detected in targeted attacks against human rights activists in the United Arab Emirates last year. NSO Group Technologies is believed to produce the most advanced mobile spyware on the planet and sold them to governments, law enforcement agencies worldwide, as well as dictatorial regimes. The newly discovered Chrysaor spyware has been found installed on fewer than three-dozen Android devices, al

It's an impressive milestone for Google — For the first time in decades, Android has been crowned as the world's most popular operating system in terms of Internet usage, knocking Microsoft Windows off the top spot. According to a new report from web traffic analytics firm StatCounter, Google's Android is the most popular operating system worldwide in terms of total internet usage across desktop, laptop, tablet, and mobile combined. Looking at overall internet usage, Android represented 37.93 percent of the global OS Internet usage market share in March, while Windows accounted for 37.91 percent. Although Windows is still not far behind, Android taking the lead is being described by StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen as a "milestone in technology history." This achievement is due to the fact that mobile devices are used to connect to the Internet far more frequently than desktops and laptops, and people are spending more time on smartphones surfing the Inter

This week WikiLeaks published "Vault 7" — a roughly 8,761 documents and files claiming to detail surveillance tools and tactics of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The leak outlined a broad range of flaws in smartphones and other devices that the agency uses to intercept communications and spy on its targets, making even China and Germany worried about the CIA's ability to hack all manner of devices. While WikiLeaks promised the "Vault 7" release is less than one percent of its 'Year Zero' disclosure, and there's more to come, we are here with some new developments on the CIA leak. But, before knowing about the latest developments in the CIA hacking tool leak, I would suggest you read my previous piece to know 10 important things about 'WikiLeaks-CIA Leak .' We believe the US intelligence agencies have access to much bigger technical resources and cyber capabilities than the leak exposed in the leak. The dump so far just

This month has yet been kind of interesting for cyber security researchers, with Google successfully cracked SHA1 and the discovery of Cloudbleed bug in Cloudflare that caused the leakage of sensitive information across sites hosted behind Cloudflare. Besides this, Google last week disclosed an unpatched vulnerability in Windows Graphics Device Interface (GDI) library, which affects Microsoft's Windows operating systems ranging from Windows Vista Service Pack 2 to the latest Windows 10. While the Windows vulnerability has yet to be patched by the company, Google today released the details of another unpatched Windows security flaw in its browser, as Microsoft did not act within its 90-day disclosure deadline. The vulnerability (CVE-2017-0037), discovered and disclosed by Google Project Zero team's researcher Ivan Fratric, is a so-called " type confusion flaw " in a module in Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer that potentially leads to arbitrary code exec

In this world of global mass surveillance by not the only US, but also intelligence agencies across the world, every other country wants tech companies including Google, Apple, and Microsoft to set-up and maintain their servers in their country to keep their citizen data within boundaries. Last year, Microsoft won a case which ruled that the US government cannot force tech companies to hand over their non-US customers' data stored on servers located in other countries to the FBI or any other federal authorities. However, a new notable ruling just goes against the court judgment last year, raising concerns regarding people's privacy. A US magistrate reportedly ruled Friday that Google has to comply with FBI search warrants seeking customer emails stored on servers outside of the United States, according to RT . U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Rueter in Philadelphia noted that transferring emails from outside servers so FBI could read them locally as part of a domestic f

In an effort to expand its certificate authority capabilities and build the "foundation of a more secure web," Google has finally launched its root certificate authority. In past few years, we have seen Google taking many steps to show its strong support for sites using HTTPS, like: Giving more preference to HTTPS websites in its search rankings than others. Warning users that all HTTP pages are not secure. Starting an industry-wide initiative, Certificate Transparency − an open framework to log, audit, and monitor certificates that CAs have issued. However, Google has been relying on an intermediate Certificate Authority (Google Internet Authority G2 - GIAG2) issued by a third party, with the latest suppliers being GlobalSign and GeoTrust, which manages and deploys certificates to Google's products and services. Google announced Thursday the creation of its own certified, and independent Root Certificate Authority called Google Trust Services , allowing

Google announced a Developers Preview of " Android Things " — an Android-based operating system platform for smart devices and Internet of Things (IoT) products. The Android-based Internet of Things OS is designed to make it easier for developers to build a smart appliance since they will be able to work with Android APIs and Google Services they're already familiar with. As the Developers page of Android Things says: " If you can build an app, you can build a device ." The Android-based Internet of Things operating system is supposed to run on products like security cameras, connected speakers, and routers. Android Things is a rebranded version Google Brillo , an Android-based IoT OS that Google announced in 2015, with added tools like Android Studio, the Android Software Development Kit (SDK), Google Play Services, and Google Cloud Platform. Unlike Brillo, development on Android Things can be achieved with " the same developer tools as stan