encryption | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Go 1.27.3 and Go 1.26.10, released on October 20, make Go's certificate verifier reject any certificate chain that passes through one of  eight intermediate certificate authority keys. Programs built on the new release will refuse connections to sites and services whose certificates were issued under those keys. The Go team says the keys belong to one certificate authority it has not named, and that it is blocking them because of "specific security concerns around their operation." It handled the fix on its  URGENT track , the one reserved for its most serious issues, and recommends upgrading immediately. Two days earlier, on October 17, Mozilla added six intermediate certificates issued by eMudhra's emSign Root TLS CA - G3 to  OneCRL , the list Firefox uses to block certificates. The Mozilla bug behind those entries is  closed to the public , and neither Mozilla nor Go has said what prompted its action. Whether Chrome, Apple, or Microsoft have taken simil...

Anthropic says Claude Mythos Preview helped derive an end-to-end key-recovery attack against HAWK-256 and a 200- to 800-fold speedup for an attack on seven-round AES-128. The HAWK attack exploits a previously unused symmetry in the lattice behind the signature scheme. Anthropic's released implementation gives an expected end-to-end runtime of about three hours and 42 minutes on a 96-core server. The AES result removes a 256-way guessing step from an existing meet-in-the-middle attack. Anthropic said neither result affects production systems. HAWK remains a candidate in a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) post-quantum standardization process, and the public recovery code only targets the smaller HAWK-256 parameter. The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) result applies to seven of AES-128's ten rounds and still requires an impractical number of chosen plaintexts. The company said no production software needs to change as a result. Anthropic published...

Researchers ran 281 of the most popular free VPN apps on the Google Play Store through a new testing system and found that many fail at the basics people install a VPN for, i.e., keeping their traffic private and secure. The apps flagged with at least one problem have been installed more than 2.4 billion times. The problems are basic, not sophisticated. 29 apps let user traffic leak outside the encrypted tunnel, including the DNS lookups that reveal which websites you visit. 61 apps send some data in plain text that anyone watching the traffic on that network can read. Five of those send the app's configuration file in the clear, which lets an attacker on the network redirect the connection to a server they control. The system, called MVPNalyzer , was presented at the NDSS security conference in February 2026 by researchers at the University of Michigan, the University of New Mexico, and IIT Delhi. It is a mobile counterpart to the same lab's earlier VPNalyzer study ...

Microsoft on Tuesday said it's accelerating its quantum safe security roadmap, stating technology advances in quantum computing are making it essential to replace existing encryption standards sooner than previously expected. "Advances in quantum research and development have shifted the risk horizon," Mark Russinovich, chief technology officer of Microsoft Azure, said . "We believe cryptographically relevant quantum computers could arrive sooner than previously expected – and the work required to prepare is significant, so organizations need to start now." To that end, the Windows maker is speeding up the Microsoft Quantum Safe Program ( QSP ) timeline with the goal of transitioning critical products and services to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) by 2029. The company is also planning to incorporate PQC requirements into its Secure Future Initiative ( SFI ). Some key focus areas include upgrading network cryptography by adopting TLS 1.3, building crypt...

Russian authorities used Cellebrite's UFED forensic tools to break into the iPhone of detained opposition activist Andrey Pivovarov in June 2021, three months after Cellebrite said it would stop selling its tools and services to Russia and Belarus. The finding, published  June 25 by the Citizen Lab , rests on two things that rarely line up: traces on the phone itself and an official Russian government report that names the tool. Investigators searched the extracted data for political contacts, opposition figures, and the names of activist organizations. This was not remote spyware. It was a forensic tool run on a seized device in custody, used to build a case in a political prosecution. Pivovarov ran Open Russia , an opposition group the Kremlin had branded "undesirable," a label that turned continued involvement into a criminal offense. He was  pulled off a flight  at St. Petersburg airport on May 31, 2021, and his iPhone 12 and MacBook were confiscated. He neve...