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Mobile carriers in the United States will finally offer a universal cross-carrier communication standard for the next-generation RCS messaging service that is meant to replace SMS and has the potential to change the way consumers interact with brands for years to come. All major United States mobile phone carriers, including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint, have joined forces to launch a new initiative that will replace SMS with RCS mobile messaging standard . What's more? The initiative is also working with its carrier ownership group and other companies to develop and deploy the new RCS standard in a new text messaging app for Android phones that is expected to be launched in 2020. The goal of this joint venture , dubbed the Cross Carrier Messaging Initiative (CCMI) , is to deliver the GSMA's Rich Communications Service (RCS) industry standard to consumers and businesses on each of the four carriers, both in the United States and globally. "Efforts like...

First of all, if you have any of the below-listed apps installed on your Android device, you are advised to uninstall it immediately. Cybersecurity researchers have identified 42 apps on the Google Play Store with a total of more than 8 million downloads, which were initially distributed as legitimate applications but later updated to maliciously display full-screen advertisements to their users. Discovered by ESET security researcher Lukas Stefanko, these adware Android applications were developed by a Vietnamese university student, who easily got tracked likely because he never bothered to hide his identity. The publicly available registration details of a domain associated with the adware apps helped find the identity of the rogue developer, including his real name, address, and phone number, which eventually led the researcher to his personal accounts on Facebook, GitHub, and YouTube. "Seeing that the developer did not take any measures to protect his identity, it ...

What's the price of unprotected IT infrastructure? Cybercrime Magazine says that global damages will surpass $6 billion as soon as 2021 . Here we'll go through some of the most frequent and emerging causes of data breaches in 2019 and see how to address them in a timely manner. Misconfigured Cloud Storage It's hard to find a day without a security incident involving unprotected AWS S3 storage, Elasticsearch, or MongoDB. A global study from Thales and the Ponemon Institute states that only 32% of organizations believe protecting their data in a cloud is their own responsibility. Worse, according to the same report, 51% of the organizations still do not use encryption or tokenization to protect sensitive data in the cloud. McAfee confirms, claiming that 99% of cloud and IaaS misconfigurations fall into the realm of end users' control and remain unnoticed. Marco Rottigni, Chief Technical Security Officer EMEA at Qualys , explains the problem: "Some of th...

A team of German cybersecurity researchers has discovered a new cache poisoning attack against web caching systems that could be used by an attacker to force a targeted website into delivering error pages to most of its visitors instead of legitimate content or resources. The issue could affect sites running behind reverse proxy cache systems like Varnish and some widely-used Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) services, including Amazon CloudFront, Cloudflare, Fastly, Akamai, and CDN77. In brief, a Content Distribution Network (CDN) is a geographically distributed group of servers that sit between the origin server of a website and its visitors to optimize the performance of the website. A CDN service simply stores/caches static files—including HTML pages, JavaScript files, stylesheets, images, and videos—from the origin server and delivers them to visitors more quickly without going back to the originating server again and again. Each of the geographically distributed CDN se...

Protection from cyberattacks begins way before attackers launch their weapons on an organization. Continuously monitoring the environment for security weaknesses and addressing such, if found, is a proven way to provide organizations with immunity to a large portion of attacks. Among the common weaknesses that expose organizations to cyberattacks, the most prominent are software vulnerabilities in systems and applications that attackers relentlessly take advantage of. To assist in the discovery of such vulnerabilities, Cynet now offers organizations a 14 days free access to its Cynet 360 platform in which they can leverage its built-in vulnerability assessment tools. A vulnerability is a bug in the software that enables a threat actor to manipulate it for malicious purposes. For example, a vulnerability in Word enables attackers to craft a Word document in such a manner that when a user double clicks to open it, it transparently opens a connection between the user computer an...