Stingray spying tool | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

At NDSS Symposium 2019, a group of university researchers yesterday revealed newly discovered cellular network vulnerabilities that impact both 4G and 5G LTE protocols. According to a paper published by the researchers, " Privacy Attacks to the 4G and 5G Cellular Paging Protocols Using Side Channel Information, " the new attacks could allow remote attackers to bypass security protections implemented in 4G and 5G, re-enabling IMSI catching devices like " Stingrays " to intercept users' phone calls and track their location. Here below, we have described all the three attacks, how they work, what are their impacts, and why you should be concerned about these attacks. ToRPEDO Attack — Location Verification, DoS, Inject Fake Alerts Short for "TRacking via Paging mEssage DistributiOn," TorPEDO is the most concerning attack that leverages paging protocol, allowing remote attackers to verify a victim device's location, inject fabricated paging mess...

The New York Police Department (NYPD) has admitted that it used controversial cell phone spying tool " Stingrays " more than 1,000 times since 2008 without warrants. In the documents obtained by the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) , the NYPD acknowledged that the department has used Stingrays to intercept personal communications and track the locations of nearby mobile phone users. What are Stingrays? In my previous article , I have explained the scope of Stingrays along with its working, how it cracks encryption and how the police agencies are using these cell phone spying devices equipped in its military surveillance technology DRTBox  in order to: Track people Intercept thousands of cellphone calls Quietly eavesdrop on conversations Eavesdrop on emails and text messages Stingrays are small cell phone surveillance devices that work by imitating cellphone towers, forcing all nearby phones to connect to them and revealing the owners' locat...

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 ...

The Anaheim Police Department of California — Home of Disneyland — admitted that they used special Cell Phone surveillance technology, known as DirtBox , mounted on aircraft to track millions of mobile users activities. More than 400 pages of new documents [ PDF ] published Wednesday revealed that Local Police and federal authorities are using, DRTBox , an advanced version of Dirtbox developed by Digital Receiver Technology ( Boeing's  Maryland-based  subsidiary ). DRTBox — Spies in the Sky DRTBox is a military surveillance technology that has capabilities of both Stingray as well as Dirtbox, allowing the police to track, intercept thousands of cellphone calls and quietly eavesdrop on conversations, emails, and text messages. According to the report, DRTBox model is also capable of simultaneously breaking the encryption hundreds of cellphone communications at once, helping Anaheim Police Department track criminals while recording innocent citizens' infor...

By now, everyone knows that the major federal agencies and big organisations like FBI, NSA and CIA are spying on you under their massive global surveillance programmes. But here's the Kicker: Your local police might be spying on your activities, too. According to the recent details published by the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), the police department of Erie County, New York, has used the controversial " Stingray " spying tool nearly 46 times since 2010 without any warrant. Also, the police department of Baltimore used the latest version of the Stingray surveillance device, called Hailstorm , more than 4,000 times in recent years, reports the Baltimore Sun. Late last year, we reported how US Marshals Service gathered data from millions of mobile phones by using a little device, nicknamed " Dirtbox ," in order to track criminals while recording innocent citizens' information. Dirtbox was used in spy airplanes to mimic mobile phone ...