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Qualcomm Snapdragon | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

How to Crack Android Full Disk Encryption on Qualcomm Devices

How to Crack Android Full Disk Encryption on Qualcomm Devices

Jul 01, 2016
The heated battle between Apple and the FBI provoked a lot of talk about Encryption – the technology that has been used to keep all your bits and bytes as safe as possible. We can not say a lot about Apple's users, but Android users are at severe risk when it comes to encryption of their personal and sensitive data. Android's full-disk encryption can be cracked much more easily than expected with brute force attack and some patience, affecting potentially hundreds of millions of mobile devices. And the worst part: There may not be a full fix available for current Android handsets in the market. Google started implementing Full Disk Encryption on Android by default with Android 5.0 Lollipop. Full disk encryption (FDE) can prevent both hackers and even powerful law enforcement agencies from gaining unauthorized access to device's data. Android's disk encryption, in short, is the process of encoding all user's data on an Android device before ever wri
Critical Qualcomm flaw puts millions of Android devices at risk

Critical Qualcomm flaw puts millions of Android devices at risk

May 07, 2016
Google has patched a high-severity vulnerability that has been around for the last five years, potentially leaving users' text messages, call histories, and other sensitive data open to snooping. The vulnerability, CVE-2016-2060, affects Android versions 4.3 and earlier that use the software package maintained by mobile chipmaker Qualcomm, according to a blog post published by security firm FireEye . The issue was first introduced in 2011 when Qualcomm released a set of new APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) for a network manager system service to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and later the "netd" daemon. Qualcomm modified the netd daemon for providing additional networking capabilities to your smartphone, including additional tethering capabilities, among other things. But unfortunately, the modification introduced a critical bug to the Android operating system that could allow low-privileged apps to gain access to your private data that is sup
Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Mar 21, 2024Operational Technology / SCADA Security
When you read reports about cyber-attacks affecting operational technology (OT), it's easy to get caught up in the hype and assume every single one is sophisticated. But are OT environments all over the world really besieged by a constant barrage of complex cyber-attacks? Answering that would require breaking down the different types of OT cyber-attacks and then looking back on all the historical attacks to see how those types compare.  The Types of OT Cyber-Attacks Over the past few decades, there has been a growing awareness of the need for improved cybersecurity practices in IT's lesser-known counterpart, OT. In fact, the lines of what constitutes a cyber-attack on OT have never been well defined, and if anything, they have further blurred over time. Therefore, we'd like to begin this post with a discussion around the ways in which cyber-attacks can either target or just simply impact OT, and why it might be important for us to make the distinction going forward. Figure 1 The Pu
More than a Billion Snapdragon-based Android Phones Vulnerable to Hacking

More than a Billion Snapdragon-based Android Phones Vulnerable to Hacking

Mar 16, 2016
More than a Billion of Android devices are at risk of a severe vulnerability in Qualcomm Snapdragon chip that could be exploited by any malicious application to gain root access on the device. Security experts at Trend Micro are warning Android users of some severe programming blunders in Qualcomm's kernel-level Snapdragon code that if exploited, can be used by attackers for gaining root access and taking full control of your device. Gaining root access on a device is a matter of concern, as it grants attackers access to admin level capabilities, allowing them to turn your device against you to snap your pictures, and snoop on your personal data including accounts' passwords, emails, messages and photos. The company's own website notes that Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs (systems on a chip) power more than a Billion smart devices, including many Internet of Things (IoTs) as of today. Thus, the issue puts many people at risk of being attacked. Although Google has pus
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Automated remediation solutions are crucial for security

websiteWing SecurityShadow IT / SaaS Security
Especially when it comes to securing employees' SaaS usage, don't settle for a longer to-do list. Auto-remediation is key to achieving SaaS security.
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