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The governments of Australia, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Israel, and Singapore are likely customers of spyware developed by Israeli company Paragon Solutions, according to a new report from The Citizen Lab. Paragon, founded in 2019 by Ehud Barak and Ehud Schneorson, is the maker of a surveillance tool called Graphite that's capable of harvesting sensitive data from instant messaging applications on a device. The interdisciplinary lab said it identified the six governments as "suspected Paragon deployments" after mapping the server infrastructure suspected to be associated with the spyware. The development comes nearly two months after Meta-owned WhatsApp said it notified around 90 journalists and civil society members that it said were targeted by Graphite. The attacks were disrupted in December 2024. Targets of these attacks included individuals spread across over two dozen countries, including several in Europe such as Belgium, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Austria,...

Google has stepped in to clarify that a newly introduced Android System SafetyCore app does not perform any client-side scanning of content. "Android provides many on-device protections that safeguard users against threats like malware, messaging spam and abuse protections, and phone scam protections, while preserving user privacy and keeping users in control of their data," a spokesperson for the company told The Hacker News when reached for comment. "SafetyCore is a new Google system service for Android 9+ devices that provides the on-device infrastructure for securely and privately performing classification to help users detect unwanted content. Users are in control over SafetyCore and SafetyCore only classifies specific content when an app requests it through an optionally enabled feature." SafetyCore (package name "com.google.android.safetycore") was first introduced by Google in October 2024, as part of a set of security measures designed to...

The latest Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 Cloud Threat Report found that sensitive data is found in 66% of cloud storage buckets. This data is vulnerable to ransomware attacks. The SANS Institute recently reported that these attacks can be performed by abusing the cloud provider's storage security controls and default settings. "In just the past few months, I have witnessed two different methods for executing a ransomware attack using nothing but legitimate cloud security features," warns Brandon Evans, security consultant and SANS Certified Instructor. Halcyon disclosed an attack campaign that leveraged one of Amazon S3's native encryption mechanisms, SSE-C, to encrypt each of the target buckets. A few months prior, security consultant Chris Farris demonstrated how attackers could perform a similar attack using a different AWS security feature, KMS keys with external key material, using simple scripts generated by ChatGPT. "Clearly, this topic is top-of-mind for both threat actors and ...