#1 Trusted Cybersecurity News Platform
Followed by 5.20+ million
The Hacker News Logo
Subscribe – Get Latest News

iOS app development | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Category — iOS app development
iOS URL Scheme Could Let App-in-the-Middle Attackers Hijack Your Accounts

iOS URL Scheme Could Let App-in-the-Middle Attackers Hijack Your Accounts

Jul 15, 2019
Security researchers have illustrated a new app-in-the-middle attack that could allow a malicious app installed on your iOS device to steal sensitive information from other apps by exploiting certain implementations of Custom URL Scheme . By default on Apple's iOS operating system, every app runs inside a sandbox of its own, which prevent all apps installed on the same device from accessing each other's data. However, Apple offers some methods that facilitate sending and receiving very limited data between applications. One such mechanism is called URL Scheme, also known as Deep Linking, that allows developers to let users launch their apps through URLs, like facetime:// , whatsapp:// , fb-messenger:// . For example, when you click "Sign in with Facebook" within an e-commerce app, it directly launches the Facebook app installed on your device and automatically process the authentication. In the background, that e-commerce app actually triggers the URL Sch
WordPress iOS App Bug Leaked Secret Access Tokens to Third-Party Sites

WordPress iOS App Bug Leaked Secret Access Tokens to Third-Party Sites

Apr 03, 2019
If you have a "private" blog with WordPress.com and are using its official iOS app to create or edit posts and pages, the secret authentication token for your admin account might have accidentally been leaked to third-party websites. WordPress has recently patched a severe vulnerability in its iOS application that apparently leaked secret authorization tokens for users whose blogs were using images hosted on third-party sites, a spokesperson for Automattic confirmed The Hacker News in an email. Discovered by the team of WordPress engineers, the vulnerability resided in the way WordPress iOS application was fetching images used by private blogs but hosted outside of WordPress.com, for example, Imgur or Flickr. That means, if an image were hosted on Imgur and then when the WordPress iOS app attempted to fetch the image, it would send along a WordPress.com authorization token to Imgur, leaving a copy of the token in the access logs of the Imgur's web server. It sh
Cyber Story Time: The Boy Who Cried "Secure!"

Cyber Story Time: The Boy Who Cried "Secure!"

Nov 21, 2024Threat Detection / Pentesting
As a relatively new security category, many security operators and executives I've met have asked us "What are these Automated Security Validation (ASV) tools?" We've covered that pretty extensively in the past, so today, instead of covering the " What is ASV?" I wanted to address the " Why ASV?" question. In this article, we'll cover some common use cases and misconceptions of how people misuse and misunderstand ASV tools daily (because that's a lot more fun). To kick things off, there's no place to start like the beginning. Automated security validation tools are designed to provide continuous, real-time assessment of an organization's cybersecurity defenses. These tools are continuous and use exploitation to validate defenses like EDR, NDR, and WAFs. They're more in-depth than vulnerability scanners because they use tactics and techniques that you'll see in manual penetration tests. Vulnerability scanners won't relay hashes or combine vulnerabilities to further attacks, whic
Thousands of Mobile Apps Expose Their Unprotected Firebase Hosted Databases

Thousands of Mobile Apps Expose Their Unprotected Firebase Hosted Databases

Jun 21, 2018
Mobile security researchers have discovered unprotected Firebase databases of thousands of iOS and Android mobile applications that are exposing over 100 million data records, including plain text passwords, user IDs, location, and in some cases, financial records such as banking and cryptocurrency transactions. Google's Firebase service is one of the most popular back-end development platforms for mobile and web applications that offers developers a cloud-based database, which stores data in JSON format and synced it in the real-time with all connected clients. Researchers from mobile security firm Appthority discovered that many app developers' fail to properly secure their back-end Firebase endpoints with firewalls and authentication, leaving hundreds of gigabytes of sensitive data of their customers publicly accessible to anyone. Since Firebase offers app developers an API server, as shown below, to access their databases hosted with the service, attackers can gain acce
cyber security

Creating, Managing and Securing Non-Human Identities

websitePermisoCybersecurity / Identity Security
A new class of identities has emerged alongside traditional human users: non-human identities (NHIs). Permiso Security's new eBook details everything you need to know about managing and securing non-human identities, and strategies to unify identity security without compromising agility.
Apple will let users run iOS apps on macOS

Apple will let users run iOS apps on macOS

Jun 06, 2018
Apple is making it easier for mobile developers to port their iOS apps to the next-generation macOS Mojave desktop platform—a major step in bringing the two platforms closer together. However, at the same time, the company straightforward denied the idea of merging the iPhone and Mac operating systems into one platform, which was being speculated for years. So, Apple made it clear that iOS and macOS will continue to be separate products. Rumors of iOS apps coming to the Mac have been around since 2017, and yesterday at Apple's WWDC 2018 event, Apple senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi just confirmed this while concluding his keynote. Though iOS and macOS share similar underlying frameworks, both are separate operating systems with their own separate software libraries, called UIKit used by iOS and AppKit used by macOS, which have made porting iOS apps to Mac difficult, said Federighi. "iOS devices and macOS devices of course are different
More than 250 iOS Apps Caught Using Private APIs to Collect Users' Private Data

More than 250 iOS Apps Caught Using Private APIs to Collect Users' Private Data

Oct 20, 2015
Apple is cleaning up its iTunes App Store again – for the third time in two months – following another flood of iOS apps that secretly collect users' personal information. Researchers discovered more than 250 iOS apps that were violating Apple's App Store privacy policy , gathering personal identifiable data from almost one Million users estimated to have downloaded those offending apps. The offending iOS applications have been pulled out of the App Store after an analytics service SourceDNA reported the issue. After XcodeGhost , this is the second time when Apple is cleaning its App Store. Malicious iOS Apps Stealing Users' Private Info The malicious applications were developed using a third-party software development kit (SDK) provided by Youmi, a Chinese advertising company. Once compiled and distributed on Apple's official App Store, those apps secretly accessed and stored users' personal information, including: A list of apps installed on the victim's phone Serial nu
Warning! Popular Apple Store Apps Infected with Data-Theft Malware

Warning! Popular Apple Store Apps Infected with Data-Theft Malware

Sep 21, 2015
Unlike Google Play Store, Apple App Store is well known for not allowing any malformed apps to enter its Apple ecosystem because of its tight security checks. But, not anymore. Hundreds of malicious apps managed to get hosted on Apple's official App store and subsequently downloaded by  several hundred Million iPad and iPhone owners . Out of them, Palo Alto Networks published a list of 39 malicious yet legitimate apps that made ways to the App Store.  First Major Malware Attack on Apple's App Store Yes, Apple App Store is targeted by a malware attack in which some versions of software used by software developers to build their apps for iOS and OS X were infected with malware, named XcodeGhost . XcodeGhost secretly sniffs off data from customer's device and uploads it to the attacker's servers without the user's knowledge, according to security firm Palo Alto Networks. Apps were infected after developers used a malicious version of the X
Microsoft Open-Sources Tool for Porting iOS Apps to Windows

Microsoft Open-Sources Tool for Porting iOS Apps to Windows

Aug 07, 2015
At its Build developers conference in April this year, Microsoft announced " Project Islandwood " - the " Windows Bridge for iOS " that lets iOS and Android developers port their apps to Windows. Microsoft finally made another surprise move on Thursday by open sourcing an early version of its toolkit for iOS to help iOS developers move their apps more easily to Windows 10. The source code for an early preview of " Windows Bridge for iOS " is now available on GitHub under the MIT open-source license. By releasing the preview of iOS Bridge, Microsoft wants the open-source community to contribute code, comments, testing, vulnerability reports, before the company launch the final version later this fall. iOS Toolkit for Building Windows 10 Apps The iOS Bridge enables developers to create apps that work with both Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 operating systems. Currently, Microsoft only targets the standard X86 and X64 processor archi
Facebook Messenger Platform Launches at F8 Developer Conference

Facebook Messenger Platform Launches at F8 Developer Conference

Mar 26, 2015
Yesterday at its annual F8 Developer Conference in San Francisco, Facebook officially turned its Messenger app into a Platform. Facebook's Messenger Platform allows third-party app developers to integrate their apps with Facebook messenger app. However, other popular messaging apps are already offering similar features, like Chinese WeChat, but Facebook release is much bigger than any other platform. At F8 Developer Conference, Facebook released SDK v4.0 for iOS and Android along with Graph API v2.3 that enable app developers to add new messenger platform features to their custom apps quickly. Facebook users can install these compatible third-party apps from the messenger app, which offers users to send animated GIFs, images, videos, and more content within the Facebook Messenger app easily. BOON FOR BOTH FACEBOOK AND THIRD PARTY DEVELOPERS Facebook Messenger Platform will offer third party app developers to reach out Facebook's 600 Millions of users. So, the move will be a
Masque Attack — New iOS Vulnerability Allows Hackers to Replace Apps with Malware

Masque Attack — New iOS Vulnerability Allows Hackers to Replace Apps with Malware

Nov 11, 2014
Android have been a long time target for cyber criminals, but now it seems that they have turned their way towards iOS devices. Apple always says that hacking their devices is too difficult for cyber crooks, but a single app has made it possible for anyone to hack an iPhone. A security flaw in Apple's mobile iOS operating system has made most iPhones and iPads vulnerable to cyber attacks by hackers seeking access to sensitive data and control of their devices, security researchers warned. The details about this new vulnerability was published by the Cyber security firm FireEye on its blog on Monday, saying the flaw allows hackers to access devices by fooling users to download and install malicious iOS applications on their iPhone or iPad via tainted text messages, emails and Web links. MASQUE ATTACK - REPLACING TRUSTED APPS The malicious iOS apps can then be used to replace the legitimate apps, such as banking or social networking apps, that were installed thro
Expert Insights / Articles Videos
Cybersecurity Resources