mobile | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A group of academics from Tel Aviv University have disclosed details of now-patched "severe" design flaws affecting about 100 million Android-based Samsung smartphones that could have resulted in the extraction of secret cryptographic keys. The shortcomings are the result of an analysis of the cryptographic design and implementation of Android's hardware-backed Keystore in Samsung's Galaxy S8, S9, S10, S20, and S21 flagship devices, researchers Alon Shakevsky, Eyal Ronen, and Avishai Wool  said . Trusted Execution Environments ( TEEs ) are a secure zone that provide an isolated environment for the execution of Trusted Applications (TAs) to carry out security critical tasks to ensure confidentiality and integrity. On Android, the hardware-backed  Keystore  is a system that facilitates the creation and storage of cryptographic keys within the TEE, making them more difficult to be extracted from the device in a manner that prevents the underlying operating system fr

SIM cards are among the most widely-deployed computing platforms with over 7 billion cards in active use. Cracking SIM cards has long been the Holy Grail of hackers because the tiny devices are located in phones and allow operators to identify and authenticate subscribers as they use networks. A German cryptographer Karsten Nohl, the founder of Security Research Labs claims to have found encryption and software flaws that could affect millions of SIM cards, and allows hackers to remotely gain control of and also clone certain mobile SIM cards. This is the first hack of its kind in a decade. Nohl will be presenting his findings at the Black Hat security conference this year. He and his team tested close to 1,000 SIM cards for vulnerabilities, exploited by simply sending a hidden SMS. According to him, Hackers could use compromised SIMs to commit financial crimes or engage in espionage. Once a hacker copies a SIM, it can be used to make calls and send text messages impersona

Identities now transcend human boundaries. Within each line of code and every API call lies a non-human identity. These entities act as programmatic access keys, enabling authentication and facilitating interactions among systems and services, which are essential for every API call, database query, or storage account access. As we depend on multi-factor authentication and passwords to safeguard human identities, a pressing question arises: How do we guarantee the security and integrity of these non-human counterparts? How do we authenticate, authorize, and regulate access for entities devoid of life but crucial for the functioning of critical systems? Let's break it down. The challenge Imagine a cloud-native application as a bustling metropolis of tiny neighborhoods known as microservices, all neatly packed into containers. These microservices function akin to diligent worker bees, each diligently performing its designated task, be it processing data, verifying credentials, or

The capillary diffusion of mobile devices, the lack of security systems on these platforms and low level of awareness on principal cyber threats made them a privileged target for cybercrime. We have assisted in the recent year to an explosion of malware designed to hit principal mobile OSs, in a recent report Sophos security firm revealed that in Australia and the U.S. Android threat exposure rates exceeding those of PCs showing the urgency to implement proper countermeasures. The situation appears really critical that why I asked to the expert of Group-IB Forensics Lab to show me how these agents work with a really case study. Several month ago Group-IB Forensics Lab detected mobile-banking malware through Google Play by Sberbank request (Russian leading national bank).  The File associated to the malware was named sber.apk , it was an Android Package having size of 225,905 bytes and digest md5: F27D43DFEEDFFAC2EC7E4A069B3C9516 . Analyzing the functionality of the ag