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Mozilla has revealed that a critical security flaw impacting Firefox and Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-9680 (CVSS score: 9.8), has been described as a use-after-free bug in the Animation timeline component. "An attacker was able to achieve code execution in the content process by exploiting a use-after-free in Animation timelines," Mozilla said in a Wednesday advisory.  "We have had reports of this vulnerability being exploited in the wild." Security researcher Damien Schaeffer from Slovakian company ESET has been credited with discovering and reporting the vulnerability. The issue has been addressed in the following versions of the web browser -  Firefox 131.0.2 Firefox ESR 128.3.1, and Firefox ESR 115.16.1. There are currently no details on how the vulnerability is being exploited in real-world attacks and the identity of the threat actors behind them. T...

Vienna-based privacy non-profit noyb (short for None Of Your Business) has filed a complaint with the Austrian data protection authority (DPA) against Firefox maker Mozilla for enabling a new feature called Privacy-Preserving Attribution (PPA) without explicitly seeking users' consent. "Contrary to its reassuring name, this technology allows Firefox to track user behavior on websites," noyb said . "In essence, the browser is now controlling the tracking, rather than individual websites." Noyb also called out Mozilla for allegedly taking a leaf out of Google's playbook by "secretly" enabling the feature by default without informing users. PPA, which is currently enabled in Firefox version 128 as an experimental feature, has its parallels in Google's Privacy Sandbox project in Chrome. The initiative, now abandoned by Google , sought to replace third-party tracking cookies with a set of APIs baked into the web browser that advertisers can t...

Google has announced that it will be switching from KYBER to ML-KEM in its Chrome web browser as part of its ongoing efforts to defend against the risk posed by cryptographically relevant quantum computers ( CRQCs ). "Chrome will offer a key share prediction for hybrid ML-KEM (codepoint 0x11EC)," David Adrian, David Benjamin, Bob Beck, and Devon O'Brien of the Chrome Team said . "The PostQuantumKeyAgreementEnabled flag and enterprise policy will apply to both Kyber and ML-KEM." The changes are expected to take effect in Chrome version 131, which is on track for release in early November 2024. Google noted that the two hybrid post-quantum key exchange approaches are essentially incompatible with each other, prompting it to abandon KYBER. "The changes to the final version of ML-KEM make it incompatible with the previously deployed version of Kyber," the company said. "As a result, the codepoint in TLS for hybrid post-quantum key exchange is ch...

Google has rolled out security fixes to address a high-severity security flaw in its Chrome browser that it said has come under active exploitation in the wild. Tracked as CVE-2024-7971 , the vulnerability has been described as a type confusion bug in the V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine. "Type confusion in V8 in Google Chrome prior to 128.0.6613.84 allowed a remote attacker to exploit heap corruption via a crafted HTML page," according to a description of the bug in the NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD). The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) and Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) have been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw on August 19, 2024. No additional details about the nature of the attacks exploiting the flaw or the identity of the threat actors that may be weaponizing it have been released, primarily to ensure that a majority of the users are updated with a fix. The tech giant, however, acknowledged in a terse sta...

Google said it's adding new security warnings when downloading potentially suspicious and malicious files via its Chrome web browser. "We have replaced our previous warning messages with more detailed ones that convey more nuance about the nature of the danger and can help users make more informed decisions," Jasika Bawa, Lily Chen, and Daniel Rubery from the Chrome Security team said . To that end, the search giant is introducing a two-tier download warning taxonomy based on verdicts provided by Google Safe Browsing: Suspicious files and Dangerous files. Each category comes with its own iconography, color, and text to distinguish them from one another and help users make an informed choice. Google is also adding what's called automatic deep scans for users who have opted-in to the Enhanced Protection mode of Safe Browsing in Chrome so that they don't have to be prompted each time to send the files to Safe Browsing for deep scanning before opening them. In...

Google on Monday abandoned plans to phase out third-party tracking cookies in its Chrome web browser more than four years after it introduced the option as part of a larger set of a controversial proposal called the Privacy Sandbox. "Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they'd be able to adjust that choice at any time," Anthony Chavez, vice president of the initiative, said . "We're discussing this new path with regulators, and will engage with the industry as we roll this out." The significant policy reversal comes nearly three months following the company's announcement that it intends to eliminate third-party cookies starting early next year after repeated delays, underscoring the project's tumultuous history. While Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox no longer support third-party cookies as of early 2020, Go...

Google has once again  pushed its plans  to deprecate third-party tracking cookies in its Chrome web browser as it works to address outstanding competition concerns from U.K. regulators over its Privacy Sandbox initiative. The tech giant said it's working closely with the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and hopes to achieve an agreement by the end of the year. As part of the new timeline, it aims to start phasing out third-party cookies early next year, making it the third such extension since the tech giant  announced  the plans in 2020, postponing it from  early 2022 to late 2023 , and again to the  second half of 2024 . Privacy Sandbox refers to a  set of initiatives  that offers privacy-preserving alternatives to tracking cookies and cross-app identifiers in order to serve tailored ads to users. While Google has since  enabled  the features to a subset of Chrome browser users...

A new information stealer has been found leveraging Lua bytecode for added stealth and sophistication, findings from McAfee Labs reveal. The cybersecurity firm has assessed it to be a variant of a known malware called RedLine Stealer owing to the fact that the command-and-control (C2) server  IP address  has been previously identified as associated with the malware. RedLine Stealer,  first documented  in March 2020, is typically delivered via email and malvertising campaigns, either directly or via  exploit kits  and loader malware like  dotRunpeX  and  HijackLoader . The off-the-shelf malware is capable of harvesting information from cryptocurrency wallets, VPN software, and web browsers, such as saved credentials, autocomplete data, credit card information, and geolocations based on the victims' IP addresses. Over the years, RedLine Stealer has been co-opted by several threat actors into their attack chains, making it a prevalent strai...

Google on Tuesday said it's piloting a new feature in Chrome called Device Bound Session Credentials ( DBSC ) to help protect users against session cookie theft by malware. The prototype – currently tested against "some" Google Account users running Chrome Beta – is built with an aim to make it an open web standard, the tech giant's Chromium team said. "By binding authentication sessions to the device, DBSC aims to disrupt the cookie theft industry since exfiltrating these cookies will no longer have any value," the company  noted . "We think this will substantially reduce the success rate of cookie theft malware. Attackers would be forced to act locally on the device, which makes on-device detection and cleanup more effective, both for anti-virus software as well as for enterprise managed devices." The development comes on the back of reports that off-the-shelf information stealing malware are finding ways to steal cookies in a manner that al...

Google on Thursday announced that it will start testing a new feature called "Tracking Protection" beginning January 4, 2024, to 1% of Chrome users as part of its efforts to  deprecate third-party cookies  in the web browser. The setting is designed to limit "cross-site tracking by restricting website access to third-party cookies by default," Anthony Chavez, vice president of Privacy Sandbox at Google,  said . The tech giant noted that participants for Tracking Protection will be selected at random and that chosen users will be notified upon opening Chrome on either a desktop or an Android device. The goal is to restrict third-party cookies (also called "non-essential cookies") by default, preventing them from being used to track users as they move from one website to the other for serving personalized ads. While several major browsers like Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox have either already placed  restrictions  on third-party cookies via features ...

Google has rolled out security updates to fix seven security issues in its Chrome browser, including a zero-day that has come under active exploitation in the wild. Tracked as  CVE-2023-6345 , the high-severity vulnerability has been described as an integer overflow bug in Skia, an open source 2D graphics library. Benoît Sevens and Clément Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) have been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw on November 24, 2023. As is typically the case, the search giant  acknowledged  that "an exploit for CVE-2023-6345 exists in the wild," but stopped short of sharing additional information surrounding the nature of attacks and the threat actors that may be weaponizing it in real-world attacks. It's worth noting that Google released patches for a similar integer overflow flaw in the same component ( CVE-2023-2136 ) in April 2023 that had also come under active exploitation as a zero-day, raising the possibility that CVE-202...

Bitcoin wallets created between 2011 and 2015 are susceptible to a new kind of exploit called  Randstorm  that makes it possible to recover passwords and gain unauthorized access to a multitude of wallets spanning several blockchain platforms. "Randstorm() is a term we coined to describe a collection of bugs, design decisions, and API changes that, when brought in contact with each other, combine to dramatically reduce the quality of random numbers produced by web browsers of a certain era (2011-2015)," Unciphered  disclosed  in a report published last week. It's estimated that approximately 1.4 million bitcoins are parked in wallets that were generated with potentially weak cryptographic keys. Customers can check whether their wallets are vulnerable at www.keybleed[.]com. The cryptocurrency recovery company said it re-discovered the problem in January 2022 while it was  working for an unnamed customer  who had been locked out of its Blockchain.co...

The developers behind the Brave open-source web browser have revealed a new privacy-preserving data querying and retrieval system called  FrodoPIR . The idea, the company  said , is to use the technology to build out a wide range of use cases such as safe browsing, scanning passwords against breached databases, certificate revocation checks, and streaming, among others. The scheme is called  FrodoPIR  because "the client can perform hidden queries to the server, just as Frodo remained hidden from Sauron," a reference to the characters from J. R. R. Tolkien's  The Lord of the Rings . PIR, short for  private information retrieval , is a cryptographic protocol that enables users (aka clients) to retrieve a piece of information from a database server without revealing to its owner which element was selected. In other words, the goal is to be able to query a platform for information (say, cooking videos) without letting the service provider infer from...

As many as 207 websites have been infected with malicious code designed to launch a cryptocurrency miner by leveraging WebAssembly (Wasm) on the browser. Web security company Sucuri, which published details of the campaign, said it launched an investigation after one of its clients had their computer slowed down significantly every time upon navigating to their own WordPress portal. This uncovered a compromise of a theme file to inject malicious JavaScript code from a remote server -- hxxps://wm.bmwebm[.]org/auto.js -- that's loaded whenever the website's page is accessed. "Once decoded, the contents of auto.js immediately reveal the functionality of a cryptominer which starts mining when a visitor lands on the compromised site," Sucuri malware researcher Cesar Anjos  said . What's more, the deobfuscated auto.js code makes use of WebAssembly to run low-level binary code directly on the browser. WebAssembly , which is supported by all major browsers, is a  b...

Google has rolled out fixes for five security vulnerabilities in its Chrome web browser, including one which it says is being exploited in the wild, making it the  17th such weakness  to be disclosed since the start of the year. Tracked as  CVE-2021-4102 , the flaw relates to a  use-after-free bug  in the V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine, which could have severe consequences ranging from corruption of valid data to the execution of arbitrary code. An anonymous researcher has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw. As it stands, it's not known how the weakness is being abused in real-world attacks, but the internet giant issued a terse statement that said, "it's aware of reports that an exploit for CVE-2021-4102 exists in the wild." This is done so in an attempt to ensure that a majority of users are updated with a fix and prevent further exploitation by other threat actors. CVE-2021-4102 is the second use-after-free vulnerability in V8 th...

Google on Friday rolled out an emergency security patch to its Chrome web browser to address a security flaw that's known to have an exploit in the wild. Tracked as  CVE-2021-37973 , the vulnerability has been described as  use after free  in  Portals API , a web page navigation system that enables a page to show another page as an inset and "perform a seamless transition to a new state, where the formerly-inset page becomes the top-level document." Clément Lecigne of Google Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has been credited with reporting the flaw. Additional specifics pertaining to the weakness have not been disclosed in light of active exploitation and to allow a majority of the users to apply the patch, but the internet giant said it's "aware that an exploit for CVE-2021-37973 exists in the wild." The update arrives a day after Apple moved to close an actively exploited security hole in older versions of iOS and macOS ( CVE-2021-30869 ), which the TAG no...

If you own a Xiaomi smartphone or have installed the Mi browser app on any of your other brand Android device, you should enable a newly introduced privacy setting immediately to prevent the company from spying on your online activities. The smartphone maker has begun rolling out an update to its Mi Browser/Mi Browser Pro (v12.1.4) and Mint Browser (v3.4.3) after concerns were raised over its practice of transmitting web browsing histories and device metadata to the company servers. The new privacy setting now allows Mi Browser users to disable aggregated data collection feature while in Incognito Mode, but it bears noting that it's not enabled by default. The option can be accessed by tapping the settings icon in the browser > Incognito mode settings > and then disable 'Enhanced incognito mode,' as shown in an attached screenshot below. Mint Browser and Mi Browser Pro have been downloaded more than 15 million times from Google Play to date. The devel...

If you use the Firefox web browser, here's an important update that you need to be aware of. Starting today, Mozilla is activating the DNS-over-HTTPS security feature by default for all Firefox users in the U.S. by automatically changing their DNS server configuration in the settings. That means, from now onwards, Firefox will send all your DNS queries to the Cloudflare DNS servers instead of the default DNS servers set by your operating system, router, or network provider. As you may know, DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) protocol performs DNS lookups — i.e., finding the server I.P. address of a certain domain name — over an encrypted connection to a DNS server rather than sending queries in the plaintext. This privacy-focused technology makes it harder for man-in-the-middle attackers, including your ISPs, to manipulate DNS queries, eavesdrop on your Internet connection, or learning what sites you visit. "This helps hide your browsing history from attackers on the network, ...