The Hacker News - Cybersecurity News and Analysis: Mobile spying

If you think you are downloading apps from Google Play Store and you are secure, then watch out! Someone has managed to flood third-party app stores and Google Play Store with more than a thousand malicious apps, which can monitor almost anything a user does on their mobile device from silently recording calls to make outbound calls without the user's interaction. Dubbed SonicSpy , the spyware has been spreading aggressively across Android app stores since at least February and is being distributed by pretending itself to be a messaging app—and it actually offers a messaging service. SonicSpy Can Perform a Whole Lots of Malicious Tasks At the same time, the SonicSpy spyware apps perform various malicious tasks, including silently recording calls and audio from the microphone, hijacking the device's camera and snap photos, making outbound calls without the user's permission, and sending text messages to numbers chosen by the attacker. Besides this, the SonicSpy sp

We just cannot imagine our lives without smartphones, even for a short while, and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden had not owned a smartphone since 2013 when he began leaking NSA documents that exposed the government's global surveillance program. Snowden fears that cellular signals of the smartphone could be used to locate him, but now, to combat this, he has designed an iPhone case that would detect and fight against government snooping. With help from renowned hardware hacker Andrew "Bunnie" Huang, Snowden has devised the design, which they refer to as an " Introspection Engine, " that would keep journalists, activists, and human rights workers from being tracked by their own devices leaking their location details. "This work aims to give journalists the tools to know when their smartphones are tracking or disclosing their location when the devices are supposed to be in airplane mode," Huang and Snowden wrote in a blog post published Thu

The U.S. government is reportedly using spy airplanes equipped with special military-grade snooping equipment to eavesdrop on cell phone information from millions of smartphone users in U.S, according to a new report. This little device, nicknamed " Dirtbox ", is being used to mimic mobile phone tower transmissions from the sky and gather data from millions of mobile phones, helping the US Marshals Service track criminals while recording innocent citizens' information. The purpose of the device is supposedly to track a specific target, but if active, all mobile devices in the particular area will respond to the signal. The Dirtbox causes smartphones to transmit back the users' location, registration information and identity data – uniquely identifying IMEI numbers stored in every mobile device, The Wall Street Journal reported . The name Dirtbox is given after the initials of Digital Receiver Technology, Inc. (DRT) , a Boeing Company subsidiary that allegedly ma

Chinese telecoms equipment suppliers have previously been criticized by some countries due to suspected backdoors in its products, and if United States has banned its several major government departments, including NASA, Justice and Commerce Departments, from purchasing Chinese products and computer technology, then they are not wrong at all. In the latest claim against Chinese smartphone manufacturers is the allegation that the popular Chinese smartphone brand, Xiaomi has been suspected of "secretly" stealing users' information — including SMS messages and photos —from the device without the user's permissions and sending it back to a server in Beijing, despite of turning off the data backup functions, according to Apple Insider . Security Researchers from  F-Secure Antivirus firm  has shown that the Xiaomi phones (RedMi 1S handset) send quite a lot of personal and sensitive data to " api.account.xiaomi.com "  server located in China, including following information