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Only a single character can crash your iPhone and block access to the Messaging app in iOS as well as popular apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Outlook for iOS, and Gmail. First spotted by Italian Blog Mobile World, a potentially new severe bug affects not only iPhones but also a wide range of Apple devices, including iPads, Macs and even Watch OS devices running the latest versions of their operating software. Like previous 'text bomb' bug, the new flaw can easily be exploited by anyone, requiring users to send only a single character from Telugu—a native Indian language spoken by about 70 million people in the country. Once the recipient receives a simple message containing the symbol or typed that symbol into the text editor, the character immediately instigates crashes on iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apple Watches and Apple TVs running Apple's iOS Springboard. Apps that receive the text bomb tries to load the character, but fails and refuses to function prope...

Bitmessage developers have warned of a critical 'remotely executable' zero-day vulnerability in the PyBitmessage application that was being exploited in the wild. Bitmessage is a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) communications protocol used to send encrypted messages to users. Since it is decentralized and trustless communications, one need-not inherently trust any entities like root certificate authorities. Those who unaware, PyBitmessage is the official client for Bitmessage messaging service. According to Bitmessage developers, a critical zero-day remote code execution vulnerability, described as a message encoding flaw, affects PyBitmessage version 0.6.2 for Linux, Mac, and Windows and has been exploited against some of their users. "The exploit is triggered by a malicious message if you are the recipient (including joined chans). The attacker ran an automated script but also opened, or tried to open, a remote reverse shell," Bitmessage core developer Peter Šurda ex...

A serious vulnerability has been discovered in Microsoft-owned most popular free web messaging and voice calling service Skype that could potentially allow attackers to gain full control of the host machine by granting system-level privileges to a local, unprivileged user. The worst part is that this vulnerability will not be patched by Microsoft anytime soon. It's not because the flaw is unpatchable, but because fixing the vulnerability requires a significant software rewrite, which indicates that the company will need to issue an all-new version of Skype rather than just a patch. The vulnerability has been discovered and reported to Microsoft by security researcher Stefan Kanthak and resides in Skype's update installer, which is susceptible to Dynamic Link Libraries (DLL) hijacking. According to the researcher, a potential attacker could exploit the "functionality of the Windows DLL loader where the process loading the DLL searches for the DLL to be loaded fi...

Microsoft's Patch Tuesday for this month falls the day before the most romantic day of the year. Yes, it's Valentine's, and the tech giant has released its monthly security update for February 2018, addressing a total of 50 CVE-listed vulnerabilities in its Windows operating system, Microsoft Office, web browsers and other products. Fourteen of the security updates are listed as critical, 34 are rated as important, and 2 of them are rated as moderate in severity. The critical update patches serious security flaws in Edge browser and Outlook client, an RCE in Windows' StructuredQuery component, and several memory corruption bugs in the scripting engines used by Edge and Internet Explorer. Critical Microsoft Outlook Vulnerability One of the most severe bugs includes a memory corruption vulnerability ( CVE-2018-0852 ) in Microsoft Outlook, which can be exploited to achieve remote code execution on the targeted machines. In order to trigger the vulnerability...

A zero-day vulnerability has been discovered in the desktop version for end-to-end encrypted Telegram messaging app that was being exploited in the wild in order to spread malware that mines cryptocurrencies such as Monero and ZCash. The Telegram vulnerability was uncovered by security researcher Alexey Firsh from Kaspersky Lab last October and affects only the Windows client of Telegram messaging software. The flaw has actively been exploited in the wild since at least March 2017 by attackers who tricked victims into downloading malicious software onto their PCs that used their CPU power to mine cryptocurrencies or serve as a backdoor for attackers to remotely control the affected machine, according to a blogpost on Securelist. Here's How Telegram Vulnerability Works The vulnerability resides in the way Telegram Windows client handles the RLO (right-to-left override) Unicode character (U+202E), which is used for coding languages that are written from right to left, li...

The Pyeongchang Winter Olympics taking place in South Korea was disrupted over the weekend following a malware attack before and during the opening ceremony on Friday. The cyber attack coincided with 12 hours of downtime on the official website for the Winter Games, the collapse of Wi-Fi in the Pyeongchang Olympic stadium and the failure of televisions and internet at the main press center, leaving attendees unable to print their tickets for events or get venue information. The Pyeongchang Winter Olympics organizing committee confirmed Sunday that a cyber attack hit its network helping run the event during the opening ceremony, which was fully restored on 8 am local time on Saturday—that's full 12 hours after the attack began. Multiple cybersecurity firms published reports on Monday, suggesting that the cause of the disruption was "destructive" wiper malware that had been spread throughout the Winter Games' official network using stolen credentials. Dubbed...