iPhone | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Apple is temporarily hitting the pause button on its  controversial plans  to screen users' devices for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) after receiving sustained blowback over worries that the tool could be weaponized for mass surveillance and erode the privacy of users. "Based on feedback from customers, advocacy groups, researchers, and others, we have decided to take additional time over the coming months to collect input and make improvements before releasing these critically important child safety features," the iPhone maker  said  in a statement on its website. The announcement, however, doesn't make it clear as to the kind of inputs it would be gathering, the nature of changes it aims to devise, or how it intends to implement the system in a way that mitigates the privacy and security concerns that could arise once it's deployed. The changes were originally slated to go live with iOS 15 and macOS Monterey later this year, starting with the U.S. In ...

New research has uncovered privacy weaknesses in Apple's wireless file-sharing protocol that could result in the exposure of a user's contact information such as email addresses and phone numbers. "As an attacker, it is possible to learn the phone numbers and email addresses of AirDrop users – even as a complete stranger,"  said  a team of academics from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. "All they require is a Wi-Fi-capable device and physical proximity to a target that initiates the discovery process by opening the sharing pane on an iOS or macOS device." AirDrop  is a proprietary ad hoc service present in Apple's iOS and macOS operating systems, allowing users to transfer files between devices by making use of close-range wireless communication. While this feature shows only receiver devices that are in users' contact lists by an authentication mechanism that compares an individual's phone number and email address with entrie...

Prominent Apple supplier Quanta on Wednesday said it suffered a ransomware attack from the REvil ransomware group, which is now demanding the iPhone maker pay a ransom of $50 million to prevent leaking sensitive files on the dark web. In a post shared on its deep web "Happy Blog" portal, the threat actor said it came into possession of schematics of the U.S. company's products such as MacBooks and Apple Watch by infiltrating the network of the Taiwanese manufacturer, claiming it's making a ransom demand to Apple after Quanta expressed no interest in paying to recover the stolen blueprints. "Our team is negotiating the sale of large quantities of confidential drawings and gigabytes of personal data with several major brands," the REvil operators said. "We recommend that Apple buy back the available data by May 1." Since first detected in June 2019,  REvil  (aka Sodinokibi or Sodin) has emerged as one of the most prolific ransomware-as-a-servic...

If you invite guest users into your Entra ID tenant, you may be opening yourself up to a surprising risk.  A gap in access control in Microsoft Entra's subscription handling is allowing guest users to create and transfer subscriptions into the tenant they are invited into, while maintaining full ownership of them.  All the guest user needs are the permissions to create subscriptions in their home tenant, and an invitation as a guest user into an external tenant. Once inside, the guest user can create subscriptions in their home tenant, transfer them into the external tenant, and retain full ownership rights. This stealthy privilege escalation tactic allows a guest user to gain a privileged foothold in an environment where they should only have limited access. Many organizations treat guest accounts as low-risk based on their temporary, limited access, but this behavior, which works as designed, opens the door to known attack paths and lateral movement within the resource t...

Cybersecurity researchers on Thursday disclosed two distinct design and implementation flaws in Apple's crowdsourced Bluetooth location tracking system that can lead to a location correlation attack and unauthorized access to the location history of the past seven days, thereby deanonymizing users. The  findings  are a consequence of an exhaustive review undertaken by the Open Wireless Link (OWL) project, a team of researchers from the Secure Mobile Networking Lab at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, who have historically taken apart Apple's wireless ecosystem with the goal of identifying security and privacy issues. In response to the disclosures on July 2, 2020, Apple is said to have partially addressed the issues, stated the researchers, who used their own data for the study citing privacy implications of the analysis. How Find My Works? Apple devices come with a feature called  Find My  that makes it easy for users to locate other Apple devices...

Apple on Tuesday released updates for iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS with fixes for three security vulnerabilities that it says may have been actively exploited in the wild. Reported by an anonymous researcher, the three  zero-day   flaws  — CVE-2021-1782, CVE-2021-1870, and CVE-2021-1871 — could have allowed an attacker to elevate privileges and achieve remote code execution. The iPhone maker did not disclose how widespread the attack was or reveal the identities of the attackers actively exploiting them. While the privilege escalation bug in the kernel (CVE-2021-1782) was noted as a race condition that could cause a malicious application to elevate its privileges, the other two shortcomings — dubbed a "logic issue" — were discovered in the WebKit browser engine (CVE-2021-1870 and CVE-2021-1871), permitting an attacker to achieve arbitrary code execution inside Safari. Apple said the race condition and the WebKit flaws were addressed with improved locking and restrictions, ...