mobile security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

More than 600 Million users of Samsung Galaxy smartphones, including the newly released Galaxy S6, are potentially vulnerable to a software bug that allows hackers to secretly monitor the phone's camera and microphone, read text messages and install malicious apps. The vulnerability is due to a problem with the Samsung built-in keyboard app that enables easier predictive text. One of the keyboard app version, SwiftKey IME , that comes prepackaged with Samsung's latest Galaxy smartphones could allow a malicious hacker to remotely execute code on user's phone even when if they are not using the keyboard app. Users cannot get rid of this Flaw The app cannot be uninstalled or disabled by the users of the Samsung smartphone devices, so it is up to Samsung to fix the critical bug. The vulnerability was discovered by NowSecure mobile security researcher Ryan Welton, who notified Samsung about the bug in December last year. The keyboard app periodic

Google has changed the way it managed apps on the Google Play Store . After years of depending on the automated app check process, the company just made some changes to its Play Store policies  that will successfully weed out malicious and undesirable apps from Google Play store. Google has introduced an update for developers and users that's sure to make some parents happy and some developers sad. The new features are — Better App Review Process Age-Based Rating System BETTER APP REVIEW PROCESS The search engine giant announced on Tuesday that it has started employing humans to review apps before they go live on the Google Play Store , a move intended to " better protect the community " and " improve the app catalog ." The new approach would definitely affect app developers, as they'll have to wait for their apps to be approved by Google after they submit them to the Play Store. But, it would keep users safe from harmful malware or offensive content.

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo

Recently a mobile-security firm Bluebox claimed that the brand new Xiaomi Mi4 LTE comes pre-installed with spyware /adware and a " forked " vulnerable version of Android operating system on top of it, however, the company denies the claim. Xiaomi , which is also known as Apple of China, provides an affordable and in-budget smartphones with almost all features that an excellent smartphone provides. On 5th March, when Bluebox researchers claimed to have discovered some critical flaws in Mi4 LTE smartphone, Xiaomi issued a statement to The Hacker News claiming that " There are glaring inaccuracies in the Bluebox blog post " and that they are investigating the matter. RESEARCHERS GET TROLLED BY CHINESE SELLERS Now, Xiaomi responded to Bluebox Labs by preparing a lengthy denial to their claims and said the new Mi4 smartphone purchased by Bluebox team in China (known as the birthplace of fake smartphones) was not an original Xiaomi smartphone but a coun

Bad news for AT&T customers! You all are vulnerable to phishing scams – thanks to AT&T's text protocols. The actual problem lies in the way AT&T handles its customer alerts via text messages, as it's very easy for cybercriminals to mimic. In "Phishing" attacks , scammers attempt to trick victims into revealing their personal and financial information by sending email or text messages that appear to be from legitimate companies. Instead of emails, here hackers have targeted AT&T users with the text messages. According to Dani Grant , the computer programmer who discovered the flaw and reported to the company, AT&T is making use of plethora for short codes, due to which its customers unable to distinguish between the legitimate and phishing messages . The second issue is that some of AT&T's real links directs its users to att.com while others take you to dl.mymobilelocate.com. " Another problem is that AT&T directs cu

Malware authors are trying hard to create malicious software with more innovative ways to infect victims. A new mobile Trojan horse infection has been discovered by security researchers that comes pre-loaded onto low-cost Chinese-made Android smartphones popular in Asia and Africa. The trojan, dubbed DeathRing , is a Chinese Trojan that masquerades as a ringtone app and comes pre-installed onto some cheap Android smartphones most popular in Asian and African countries including Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Nigeria, Taiwan, and China. DeathRing malware app cannot be uninstalled or removed by the end user or by antimalware software because it comes pre-installed in the system directory of the handsets at an unknown point within the supply chain, making the threat even more severe. WHAT DOES DEATHRING DO? Though the malware pretends to be a genuine ringtone app, but actually downloads SMS and WAP content from its command-and-control server to the victim's handset, which

Users might have praised the technology companies for efforts to encrypt their latest devices that would prevent law enforcement agencies' hands on users' private data, but the FBI is not at all happy with Apple and Google right now. The Federal Bureau of Investigation director, James Comey , said Thursday he was " very concerned " over Apple and Google using stronger or full encryption in their Smartphones and Tablets that makes it impossible for law enforcement to collar criminals. According to Comey, the Silicon Valley tech giants are "marketing something expressly to allow people to place themselves above the law." " There will come a day – well it comes every day in this business – when it will matter a great, great deal to the lives of people of all kinds that we be able to with judicial authorization gain access to a kidnapper's or a terrorist or a criminal's device, " Comey told reporters . " I just want to make sure we

The search engine giant Google will soon come up with its next version of Android operating system, dubbed as Android L , with full-disk encryption enabled by default, Google confirmed Thursday. This will be for the first time that Google's Android OS will be encrypting your information, preventing both hackers and law enforcement agencies from gaining access to users' personal and highly sensitive data on their devices running the Android operating system. While Android has been offering data encryption options for some Android devices since 2011. However the options are not enabled by default, so users have had to activate the functionality manually. But Android L will have new activation procedures that will encrypt data automatically. Although Google is yet to provide more details about Android L, which is set to be released next month. But the move by the web giant will surely provide an extra layer of security on the personal data that users typically have on t

Due to the majority in the mobile platform, Google's Android operating system has been a prior target for cybercriminals and a recently exposed weakness in the way the operating system handles certificate validation, left millions of Android devices open to attack. Researchers at BlueBox security , who identified the vulnerability, dubbed the flaw as Fake ID , which affects all versions of Android operating system from 2.1 ( released in 2010 ) up to Android 4.4, also known as KitKat . ALL VERSIONS ARE VULNERABLE UPTO KITKAT Researchers marked the vulnerability as critical because it could allow a fake and malicious app to masquerade as a legitimate and trusted application, enabling an attacker to perform various actions such as inserting malicious code into a legitimate app, infiltrating your personal information or even take complete control of an affected device. Specifically, devices running the 3LM administration extension are at risk for a complete compromise, whic

Google has failed to provide a very important security measure in its Gmail application for iOS that left millions of its Apple device users to Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks capable of monitoring encrypted email communications. Researcher at mobile security firm Lacoon has discovered that Google's Gmail iOS application, run on Macintosh mobile devices, does not perform what's known as "certificate pinning" when establishing a trusted connection between the mobile applications and back-end web services, which means an attacker can view plaintext emails and steal credentials in MitM attack. WHAT IS CERTIFICATE PINNING Certificate Pinning is a process designed to prevent user of the application from being a victim of an attack made by spoofing the SSL certificate . Certificate pinning automatically rejects the whole connection from sites that offer bogus SSL certificates and allow only SSL connections to hosts signed with certificates stored inside the application, whic

Quite Surprisingly, a team of Chinese hackers, Pangu have released an untethered jailbreak for iOS 7.1 and iOS 7.1.1. This untethered jailbreak is compatible with iPhone 5s, iPhone 5c, iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, iPad Air, iPad 4, iPad 3, iPad 2, iPad mini, Retina iPad mini and iPod touch 5G running iOS 7.1-iOS 7.1.1. The jailbreak tool is currently available for Windows but works on every iOS devices. Many iOS users have posted on Reddit that the tool works successfully. Jailbreaking is a process of removing limitations on iOS devices , Apple's operating system, so you can install third party software not certified by Apple. Such devices include the iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, and second-generation Apple TV. One question rises in my mind that when Apple 's system root protections have been greatly enhanced in an effort to make jailbreaks more difficult, then what's the whole story behind the unexpectedly release of this jailbreak tool? STEPS TO JAILBREAK iOS 7.1 &a

A vulnerability has been identified in Wiko Mobiles that could allow anyone to remotely  force it to shut down abruptly with a text message only. Wiko is  a two-year-old French Mobile manufacturing company known for its cheapest mobiles and smartphones. French  blogger Korben reported that just by sending a  Short Message Service (SMS) with text  "="  (without the quotes) to Wiko mobiles could force them to restart and  knock them off a cellular network. He demonstrated the flaw in a video as shown below: He successfully tested Wiko Mobile flaw with official Android operating system and also reproduced it with custom Android ROM i.e. CyanogenMod, which concludes that the flaw could be in Wiko Mobile Hardware, rather than software. The Flaw was accidentally discovered by a reader, so currently we have no technical explanation that why Wiko mobiles can't behave equal as other smartphones do after receiving 'equal' symbol in SMS. If y

After introducing the Fingerprint scanner to its new release, Samsung next plans to add IRIS scanning technology to its future smartphones to better improve the security of smartphones and for being more innovative too. According to a report released by The Wall Street Journal, Samsung senior Vice President Rhee In-jong told analysts and investors at a forum in Hong Kong that the company is planning to incorporate biometric sensors such as eye scanners into more of its products as a part of its enterprise security software. " We're looking at various types of biometric mechanisms and one of things that everybody is looking at is iris detection, " Rhee said. The move is no doubt in order to bring an added layer of security to its devices. A Smartphone with an eye-scanning feature would most likely to be used in the front-facing camera to scan the unique patterns of the user's iris and once the pattern get matched with the already stored user's iris image in the phon

Well, we all are very conscious, when it comes to the security of our personal information, security of our financial data and security of everything related to us. In the world of Smart devices where our Smartphones knows more than we know ourselves. To keep our device protected from harmful viruses, malware or spyware, we totally depend on various security products such as antivirus, firewall and privacy guard apps, that we typically install from some trusted sources, Google Play Store. Most Antivirus apps are available to download for free, but some of them are paid with extra premium features like advance firewall protection, anti theft, App Locker or Cloud Backup etc. But do you believe that just because you're downloading an application from an official app store and also if its a premium paid version, you're safe from malicious software? Think twice. PAID, BUT FAKE ANTIVIRUS APP In Past, Mobile Security Researchers had spotted numerous fake mobile anti

The Android operating system has hardened its security with application Sandboxing features to ensure that no application can access sensitive information held by another without proper privileges. Android applications communicate with each other through Intents and these intents can be abused by hackers to provide a channel for a malicious application to inject malicious data into a target, potentially vulnerable application. Security Researchers at IBM have discovered multiple vulnerabilities in Firefox for Android platform that allow a malicious application to leak the sensitive information related to the user's profile. Android's Firefox app stores the personal data at following location: / data /data/org . mozilla . firefox /files/mozilla/<RANDOM-STRING >. default . Where the random name for user's profile is used to prevent unwanted access to this directory in case of Firefox exploitation. Researchers developed an exploit to brute-force the &

Smartphones are always ready to connect to the Internet and contains sensitive information such as Contacts, SMS, Photos, and GPS information and this sensitive information is always in danger of leakage. According to a report, Cyber criminals and state-sponsored hackers are developing 55,000 new malware variants, each and every day; and many of them try to elevate privileges for unfettered control of the user device. North Carolina State University Researchers have developed a new software, called Practical Root Exploit Containment ( PREC ) , with the sole purpose of detecting mobile malware that attempts to run Root exploits in Android devices. Root exploits take control of system administration functions of the operating system that gives the hacker an unrestricted control of user's Smartphone. That means, an application has not permission to read your messages or contacts or the GPS location, but after getting root access it will be able to steal any data from your d

Android platform is becoming vulnerable day by day and hackers always try to manipulate android by applying novel techniques. In this regard, Symantec researchers have found a new android malware toolkit named " Dendroid ". Previously Symantec found an Android Remote admin tool named AndroRAT is believed to be the first malware APK binder. However, Dendroid runs on HTTP with many malicious features. Dendroid toolkit is able to generate a malicious apk file that offers amazing features like: Can delete call logs Open web pages Dial any number Record calls SMS intercepting Upload images, video Open an application Able to perform DoS attack Can change the command and control server The author of Dendroid also offers 24/7 customer support for this RAT and Android users can buy this toolkit at $300 by paying Bitcoin , Lifecoin. Experts at Symantec said that Dendroid has some connection with the previous AndroRAT toolkit . Dendroid being an HTTP RAT offers PHP

Looking for a Secure Smartphone? World's biggest Aerospace company - Boeing is finally close to the launch of its high-security Android Smartphone, called " Boeing Black (H8V-BLK1) ", primarily designed for secure communication between Governmental agencies and their contractors. Encrypted email, Secure Instant Messaging and Other privacy services and tools are booming in the wake of the National Security Agency's recently revealed surveillance programs. Encryption isn't meant to keep hackers out, but when it's designed and implemented correctly, it alters the way messages look. Boeing is the company which is already providing secure communications for US Government officials, including the president. Don't mess with it, It can  Self-Destruct:  Boeing Black Smartphone can Self-Destruct  if it is tampered with, destroying all the data on it. The device is delivered in complete sealed form, any attempt to open the seal of the device will destruct the operati