iOS app development | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

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...

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...

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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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...