Google+ | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Google has announced an update to its Play Protect with support for real-time scanning at the code level to tackle novel malicious apps prior to downloading and installing them on Android devices. "Google Play Protect will now recommend a real-time app scan when installing apps that have never been scanned before to help detect emerging threats," the tech giant  said . Google Play Protect is a  built-in, free threat detection service  that scans Android devices for any potentially harmful apps downloaded from the Play Store as well as other external sources. In extreme cases, an app may be blocked from being installed. The check expands on previous existing protections that alerted users when it identified an app known to be malicious from existing scanning intelligence or was identified as suspicious from heuristics gathered via on-device machine learning. With the latest safeguards, important signals from the app are extracted and sent to the Play Protect backend infr

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloudflare, and Google on Tuesday said they took steps to mitigate record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that relied on a novel technique called HTTP/2 Rapid Reset. The  layer 7 attacks  were detected in late August 2023, the companies said in a coordinated disclosure. The cumulative susceptibility to this attack is being tracked as  CVE-2023-44487 , and carries a CVSS score of 7.5 out of a maximum of 10. While the attacks aimed at Google's cloud infrastructure peaked at  398 million requests per second  (RPS), the ones that struck AWS and Cloudflare exceeded a volume of 155 million and 201 million RPS, respectively. HTTP/2 Rapid Reset refers to a zero-day flaw in the HTTP/2 protocol that can be exploited to carry out DDoS attacks. A significant feature of HTTP/2 is multiplexing requests over a single TCP connection, which manifests in the form of concurrent streams. What's more, a client that wants to abort a request can

Super Low RPO with Continuous Data Protection: Dial Back to Just Seconds Before an Attack Zerto , a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, can help you detect and recover from ransomware in near real-time. This solution leverages continuous data protection (CDP) to ensure all workloads have the lowest recovery point objective (RPO) possible. The most valuable thing about CDP is that it does not use snapshots, agents, or any other periodic data protection methodology. Zerto has no impact on production workloads and can achieve RPOs in the region of 5-15 seconds across thousands of virtual machines simultaneously. For example, the environment in the image below has nearly 1,000 VMs being protected with an average RPO of just six seconds! Application-Centric Protection: Group Your VMs to Gain Application-Level Control   You can protect your VMs with the Zerto application-centric approach using Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs). This logical grouping of VMs ensures that your whole applica

Google on Tuesday announced the ability for all users to set up passkeys by default, five months after it  rolled out support  for the FIDO Alliance-backed passwordless standard for Google Accounts on all platforms. "This means the next time you sign in to your account, you'll start seeing prompts to create and use passkeys, simplifying your future sign-ins," Google's Sriram Karra and Christiaan Brand  said . "It also means you'll see the ' skip password when possible ' option toggled on in your Google Account settings." Passkeys are a new form of authentication that entirely eliminate the need for usernames and passwords, or even provide any additional authentication factor. In other words, it's a passwordless login mechanism that leverages public-key cryptography to authenticate users' access to websites and apps, with the private key saved securely in the device and the public key stored in the server. Each passkey is unique and

Google on Wednesday rolled out fixes to address a new actively exploited zero-day in the Chrome browser. Tracked as  CVE-2023-5217 , the high-severity vulnerability has been described as a  heap-based buffer overflow  in the VP8 compression format in  libvpx , a free software  video codec  library from Google and the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia). Exploitation of such buffer overflow flaws can result in program crashes or execution of arbitrary code, impacting its availability and integrity. Clément Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw on September 25, 2023, with fellow researcher Maddie Stone  noting  on X (formerly Twitter) that it has been abused by a commercial spyware vendor to target high-risk individuals. No additional details have been disclosed by the tech giant other than to acknowledge that it's "aware that an exploit for CVE-2023-5217 exists in the wild." The latest discovery b

Google has assigned a new CVE identifier for a critical security flaw in the libwebp image library for rendering images in the  WebP format  that has come under active exploitation in the wild. Tracked as  CVE-2023-5129 , the issue has been given the maximum severity score of 10.0 on the CVSS rating system. It has been described as an issue rooted in the  Huffman coding algorithm  - With a specially crafted WebP lossless file, libwebp may write data out of bounds to the heap. The ReadHuffmanCodes() function allocates the HuffmanCode buffer with a size that comes from an array of precomputed sizes: kTableSize. The color_cache_bits value defines which size to use. The kTableSize array only takes into account sizes for 8-bit first-level table lookups but not second-level table lookups. libwebp allows codes that are up to 15-bit (MAX_ALLOWED_CODE_LENGTH). When BuildHuffmanTable() attempts to fill the second-level tables it may write data out-of-bounds. The OOB write to the undersized ar

Google has agreed to pay $93 million to settle a lawsuit filed by the U.S. state of California over allegations that the company's location-privacy practices misled consumers and violated consumer protection laws. "Our investigation revealed that Google was telling its users one thing – that it would no longer track their location once they opted out – but doing the opposite and continuing to track its users' movements for its own commercial gain," California Attorney General Rob Bonta  said .  The lawsuit is in response to disclosures that the company continued to track users' locations despite stating to the contrary that such information would not be stored if the "Location History" setting was disabled. The complaint filed by California alleged that Google collected location data through other sources and that it deceived users about their ability to opt out of personalized advertisements targeted to their location. With Google making over $220

Mozilla on Tuesday released security updates to resolve a critical zero-day vulnerability in Firefox and Thunderbird that has been actively exploited in the wild, a day after Google released a fix for the issue in its Chrome browser. The shortcoming, assigned the identifier  CVE-2023-4863 , is a heap buffer overflow flaw in the WebP image format that could result in arbitrary code execution when processing a specially crafted image. "Opening a malicious WebP image could lead to a heap buffer overflow in the content process," Mozilla  said  in an advisory. "We are aware of this issue being exploited in other products in the wild." According to the description on the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), the flaw could allow a remote attacker to perform an out-of-bounds memory write via a crafted HTML page. Apple Security Engineering and Architecture (SEAR) and the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk School have been credited with reporting the s

Google has announced plans to add a new feature in the upcoming version of its Chrome web browser to proactively alert users when an extension they have installed has been removed from the Chrome Web Store. The feature, set for release alongside Chrome 117, allows users to be notified when an add-on has been unpublished by a developer, taken down for violating Chrome Web Store policy, or marked as malware. The tech giant said it intends to highlight such extensions under a "Safety check" category in the "Privacy and security" section of the browser settings page. "When a user clicks 'Review,' they will be taken to their extensions and given the choice to either remove the extension or hide the warning if they wish to keep the extension installed," Oliver Dunk, a developer relations engineer for Chrome extensions,  said . "As in previous versions of Chrome, extensions marked as malware are automatically disabled." The development co

Google on Tuesday announced the first quantum resilient FIDO2 security key implementation as part of its OpenSK security keys initiative. "This open-source hardware optimized implementation uses a novel ECC/Dilithium hybrid signature schema that benefits from the security of ECC against standard attacks and Dilithium's resilience against quantum attacks," Elie Bursztein and Fabian Kaczmarczyck  said . OpenSK  is an open-source implementation for security keys written in Rust that supports both FIDO U2F and FIDO2 standards. The development comes less than a week after the tech giant  said  it plans to add support for quantum-resistant encryption algorithms in Chrome 116 to set up symmetric keys in TLS connections. It's also part of broader efforts to switch to cryptographic algorithms that can withstand quantum attacks in the future, necessitating the need to incorporate such technologies early on to facilitate a gradual rollout. "Fortunately, with the rece

Google has announced plans to add support for quantum-resistant encryption algorithms in its Chrome browser, starting with version 116. "Chrome will begin supporting  X25519Kyber768  for establishing symmetric secrets in  TLS , starting in Chrome 116, and available behind a flag in Chrome 115," Devon O'Brien  said  in a post published Thursday. Kyber was  chosen  by the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as the candidate for general encryption in a bid to tackle future cyber attacks posed by the advent of quantum computing.  Kyber-768  is roughly the security equivalent of  AES-192 . The encryption algorithm has already been adopted by  Cloudflare ,  Amazon Web Services , and IBM. X25519Kyber768 is a hybrid algorithm that combines the output of  X25519 , an elliptic curve algorithm widely used for key agreement in TLS, and Kyber-768 to create a strong session key to encrypt TLS connections. "Hybrid mechanism

Google has introduced a new security feature in Android 14 that allows IT administrators to disable support for 2G cellular networks in their managed device fleet. The search giant said it's introducing a second user setting to turn off support, at the model level, for  null-ciphered cellular connections . "The Android Security Model assumes that all networks are hostile to keep users safe from network packet injection, tampering, or eavesdropping on user traffic," Roger Piqueras Jover, Yomna Nasser, and Sudhi Herle  said . "Android does not rely on link-layer encryption to address this threat model. Instead, Android establishes that all network traffic should be end-to-end encrypted (E2EE)." 2G networks, in particular, employ weak encryption and lack mutual authentication,  rendering  them  susceptible  to over-the-air interception and traffic decryption attacks by impersonating a real 2G tower. The  threat posed by rogue cellular base stations  means th

Google has announced that it intends to add support for Message Layer Security ( MLS ) to its Messages service for Android and open source an implementation of the specification. "Most modern consumer messaging platforms (including Google Messages) support end-to-end encryption, but users today are limited to communicating with contacts who use the same platform," Giles Hogben, privacy engineering director at Google,  said . "This is why Google is strongly supportive of regulatory efforts that require interoperability for large end-to-end messaging platforms." The development comes as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)  released  the core specification of the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) protocol as a Request for Comments ( RFC 9420 ). Some of the other major companies that have thrown their weight behind the protocol are Amazon Web Services (AWS) Wickr, Cisco, Cloudflare, The Matrix.org Foundation, Mozilla, Phoenix R&D, and Wire. Notably missing f

At least half of dozen GitHub accounts from fake researchers associated with a fraudulent cybersecurity company have been observed pushing malicious repositories on the code hosting service. All seven repositories, which are still available as of writing, claim to be a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for purported zero-day flaws in Discord, Google Chrome, and Microsoft Exchange Server. VulnCheck, which discovered the activity,  said , "the individuals creating these repositories have put significant effort into making them look legitimate by creating a network of accounts and Twitter profiles, pretending to be part of a non-existent company called High Sierra Cyber Security." The cybersecurity firm said it first came across the rogue repositories in early May when they were observed releasing similar PoC exploits for zero-day bugs in Signal and WhatsApp. The repositories hosting the two PoCs have since been taken down. Besides sharing some of the purported findings on Tw

Google on Monday released security updates to patch a high-severity flaw in its Chrome web browser that it said is being actively exploited in the wild. Tracked as  CVE-2023-3079 , the vulnerability has been described as a type confusion bug in the V8 JavaScript engine. Clement Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has been credited with reporting the issue on June 1, 2023. "Type confusion in V8 in Google Chrome prior to 114.0.5735.110 allowed a remote attacker to potentially exploit heap corruption via a crafted HTML page,"  according  to the NIST's National Vulnerability Database (NVD). The tech giant, as is typically the case, did not disclose details of the nature of the attacks, but  noted  it's "aware that an exploit for CVE-2023-3079 exists in the wild." With the latest development, Google has addressed a total of three actively exploited zero-days in Chrome since the start of the year - CVE-2023-2033  (CVSS score: 8.8) - Type Co

A new security flaw has been disclosed in the Google Cloud Platform's (GCP) Cloud SQL service that could be potentially exploited to obtain access to confidential data. "The vulnerability could have enabled a malicious actor to escalate from a basic Cloud SQL user to a full-fledged sysadmin on a container, gaining access to internal GCP data like secrets, sensitive files, passwords, in addition to customer data," Israeli cloud security firm Dig  said . Cloud SQL  is a fully-managed solution to build MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server databases for cloud-based applications. The multi-stage attack chain identified by Dig, in a nutshell, leveraged a gap in the cloud platform's security layer associated with SQL Server to escalate the privileges of a user to that of an administrator role. The elevated permissions subsequently made it possible to abuse another critical misconfiguration to obtain system administrator rights and take full control of the database server.

A new strain of malicious software that's engineered to penetrate and disrupt critical systems in industrial environments has been unearthed. Google-owned threat intelligence firm Mandiant dubbed the malware  COSMICENERGY , adding it was uploaded to the VirusTotal public malware scanning utility in December 2021 by a submitter in Russia. There is no evidence that it has been put to use in the wild. "The malware is designed to cause electric power disruption by interacting with IEC 60870-5-104 (IEC-104) devices, such as remote terminal units ( RTUs ), that are commonly leveraged in electric transmission and distribution operations in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia," the company  said . COSMICENERGY is the latest addition to  specialized   malware  like Stuxnet, Havex, Triton, IRONGATE, BlackEnergy2, Industroyer, and PIPEDREAM, which are capable of sabotaging critical systems and wreaking havoc. Mandiant said that there are circumstantial links that it may have bee

Google on Wednesday announced the  0.1 Beta version  of  GUAC  (short for Graph for Understanding Artifact Composition) for organizations to secure their software supply chains. To that end, the search giant is  making available  the open source framework as an API for developers to integrate their own tools and policy engines. GUAC  aims to aggregate software security metadata from different sources into a graph database that maps out relationships between software, helping organizations determine how one piece of software affects another. "Graph for Understanding Artifact Composition ( GUAC ) gives you organized and actionable insights into your software supply chain security position," Google  says  in its documentation. "GUAC ingests software security metadata, like SBOMs, and maps out the relationship between software so that you can fully understand your software security position." In other words, it's designed to bring together Software Bill of M

Google has removed a screen recording app named "iRecorder - Screen Recorder" from the Play Store after it was found to sneak in information stealing capabilities nearly a year after the app was published as an innocuous app. The app (APK package name "com.tsoft.app.iscreenrecorder"), which accrued over 50,000 installations, was first uploaded on September 19, 2021. The malicious functionality is believed to have been introduced in version 1.3.8, which was released on August 24, 2022. "It is rare for a developer to upload a legitimate app, wait almost a year, and then update it with malicious code," ESET security researcher Lukáš Štefanko  said  in a technical report. "The malicious code that was added to the clean version of iRecorder is based on the open source  AhMyth  Android RAT (remote access trojan) and has been customized into what we named AhRat." iRecorder was  first flagged  as harboring the AhMyth trojan on October 28, 2022, by

Google has announced plans to officially flip the switch on its twice-delayed  Privacy Sandbox  initiatives as it slowly works its way to deprecate support for third-party cookies in Chrome browser. To that end, the search and advertising giant said it intends to phase out third-party cookies for 1% of Chrome users globally in the first quarter of 2024. "This will support developers in conducting real world experiments that assess the readiness and effectiveness of their products without third-party cookies," Anthony Chavez, vice president of Privacy Sandbox at Google,  said . Prior to rolling this out, Google said it would introduce the ability for third-party developers to simulate the process for a configurable subset of their users (up to 10%) in Q4 2023. Google further emphasized that the plans have been designed and developed with regulatory oversight and input from the U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority ( CMA ), which is overseeing the implementation to

A financially motivated cyber actor has been observed abusing Microsoft Azure  Serial Console  on virtual machines (VMs) to install third-party remote management tools within compromised environments. Google-owned Mandiant attributed the activity to a threat group it tracks under the name  UNC3944 , which is also known as Roasted 0ktapus and Scattered Spider. "This method of attack was unique in that it avoided many of the traditional detection methods employed within Azure and provided the attacker with full administrative access to the VM," the threat intelligence firm  said . The emerging adversary, which first came to light late last year, is known to  leverage SIM swapping attacks  to breach telecommunications and business process outsourcing (BPO) companies since at least May 2022. Subsequently, Mandiant also  found  UNC3944 utilizing a loader named STONESTOP to install a malicious signed driver dubbed POORTRY that's designed to terminate processes associated