call interception | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

If you own a Samsung Galaxy Phone – S6, S6 Edge or Note 4 , in particular – there are chances that a skilled hacker could remotely intercept your voice calls to listen in and even record all your voice conversations. Two security researchers, Daniel Komaromy of San Francisco and Nico Golde of Berlin, have demonstrated exactly the same during a security conference in Tokyo. The duo demonstrated a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack on an out-of-the-box and most updated Samsung handset that allowed them to intercept voice calls by connecting the device to fake cellular base stations. The issue actually resides in the Samsung's baseband chip , which comes in Samsung handsets, that handles voice calls but is not directly accessible to the end user. How to Intercept Voice Calls? The researchers set up a bogus OpenBTS base station that nearby Samsung devices, including the latest Samsung S6 and S6 Edge , think is a legitimate cellular tower. Once connected to

Yes, you heard it right. It's the dirty truth that's featuring what is being called the largest privacy breach ever. Billions of cell phone users are at risk of a vulnerability in the SS7 inter-carrier network that allows hackers and spies agencies to track locations and intercept all voice calls from anywhere in the world. This is something we already know from the last year's Snowden leaks that explained the National Security Agency (NSA) capabilities to gather nearly 5 Billion records a day on mobile phone locations around the world. But, it's worse than we have thought. The famous Australian TV programme " 60 Minutes " demonstrated that it is possible for anyone to track cell phone location and intercept calls and text messages. This time, not due to a security vulnerability in the phone's operating system, but due to a serious flaw in the very system our cell phones use to communicate with each other around the world – The globa

Shadow apps, a segment of Shadow IT, are SaaS applications purchased without the knowledge of the security team. While these applications may be legitimate, they operate within the blind spots of the corporate security team and expose the company to attackers.  Shadow apps may include instances of software that the company is already using. For example, a dev team may onboard their own instance of GitHub to keep their work separate from other developers. They might justify the purchase by noting that GitHub is an approved application, as it is already in use by other teams. However, since the new instance is used outside of the security team's view, it lacks governance. It may store sensitive corporate data and not have essential protections like MFA enabled, SSO enforced, or it could suffer from weak access controls. These misconfigurations can easily lead to risks like stolen source code and other issues. Types of Shadow Apps  Shadow apps can be categorized based on their interac

Soon in December this year, India's new surveillance program - Centralized Monitoring System (CMS) will be able to analyze all telecommunications and Internet communications in India by the government and its agencies.  This means that everything we say or text over the phone, write, post or browse over the Internet will be centrally monitored by Indian authorities. Law enforcement and government agencies intercept, monitor, and analyze communications in order to uncover leads and build the evidence needed to neutralize terrorism and crime. Few days back, BlackBerry has given the necessary permissions for the Indian government to intercept messages sent from BlackBerry devices . According to latest reports - Verint Systems , Israel's cyber intelligence solutions provider , are soon to get a contract from the Indian government to track encrypted communication services such as Gmail, Yahoo . mail, BlackBerry services, Skype and so on. " Verint's leade

A group of  hackers from security firm iSEC found a way to tap right into verizon wireless cell phones using a signal-boosting devices made by Samsung for Verizon and cost about $250. They hack Verizon's signal-boosting devices, known as femtocells or network extenders, which anyone can buy online, and turned it into a cell phone tower small enough to fit inside a backpack capable of capturing and intercepting all calls, text messages and data sent by mobile devices within range. " This is not about how the NSA would attack ordinary people. This is about how ordinary people would attack ordinary people, " said Tom Ritter, a senior consultant, iSEC. They declined to disclose how they had modified the software on the device and but they plan to give more elaborate demonstrations in various hacking conferences this year. Verizon Wireless already released a Linux software update in March to fix the flaw that prevents its network extenders