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Chinese authorities are secretly installing surveillance apps on smartphones of foreigners at border crossings in the Xinjiang region who are entering from neighboring Kyrgyzstan, an international investigation revealed. Xinjiang (XUAR) is an autonomous territory and home to many Muslim ethnic minority groups where China is known to be conducting massive surveillance operations, especially on the activities of Uighurs, a Muslim Turkic minority group of about 8 million people. The Chinese government has blamed the Muslim Turkic minority group for Islamic extremism and deadly attacks on Chinese targets. According to a joint investigation by New York Times , the Guardian, Süddeutsche Zeitung and more, the surveillance app has been designed to instantly extract emails, texts, calendar entries, call records, contacts and insecurely uploads them to a local server set-up at the check-point only. This suggests that the spyware app has not been designed to continuously and remote...

Data loss and theft continues to rise, and hardly a day goes by without significant data breaches hit the headlines. In January 2019 alone, 1.76 billion records were leaked, and according to IBM's Data Breach study, the average cost of each lost or stolen record has reached about $148. Most of these data leaks are because of malicious attacks, where exploitation of web application vulnerabilities is one of the most common cyber attack vectors. An application security breach is a problem facing one and all, and no matter what's the size of your company, your web applications are prone to cyber attacks. Hackers breach sites for a variety of reasons—some do it for fame, some to get competitive information, whereas some do it just for financial gains. No matter what the reason is, the cost of a security breach is always higher than the cost of protection, leading to loss of data, substantial financial losses, and most importantly, loss of customers' trust. If you a...

Google has started rolling out this month's security updates for its mobile operating system platform to address a total of 33 new security vulnerabilities affecting Android devices, 9 of which have been rated critical in severity. The vulnerabilities affect various Android components, including the Android operating system, framework, library, media framework, as well as Qualcomm components, including closed-source components. Three of the critical vulnerabilities patched this month reside in Android's Media framework, the most severe of which could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on a targeted device, within the context of a privileged process, by convincing users into opening a specially crafted malicious file. "The severity assessment is based on the effect that exploiting the vulnerability would possibly have on an affected device, assuming the platform and service mitigations are turned off for development purposes or if successfully bypas...

SaaS Adoption is Skyrocketing, Resilience Hasn't Kept Pace SaaS platforms have revolutionized how businesses operate. They simplify collaboration, accelerate deployment, and reduce the overhead of managing infrastructure. But with their rise comes a subtle, dangerous assumption: that the convenience of SaaS extends to resilience. It doesn't. These platforms weren't built with full-scale data protection in mind . Most follow a shared responsibility model — wherein the provider ensures uptime and application security, but the data inside is your responsibility. In a world of hybrid architectures, global teams, and relentless cyber threats, that responsibility is harder than ever to manage. Modern organizations are being stretched across: Hybrid and multi-cloud environments with decentralized data sprawl Complex integration layers between IaaS, SaaS, and legacy systems Expanding regulatory pressure with steeper penalties for noncompliance Escalating ransomware threats and inside...

Mozilla has finally introduced a mechanism to let Firefox browser automatically fix certain TLS errors, often triggered when antivirus software installed on a system tries to intercept secure HTTPS connections. Most Antivirus software offers web security feature that intercepts encrypted HTTPS connections to monitor the content for malicious web pages before it reaches the web browser. To achieve this, security software replaces websites' TLS certificates with their own digital certificates issued by any trusted Certificate Authorities (CAs). Since Mozilla only trusts those CAs that are listed in its own root store, the antivirus products relying on other trusted CAs provided by the operating system (OS) are not allowed to intercept HTTPS connections on Firefox. In recent months, this limitation continually crashed HTTPS pages for many Firefox users showing them SEC_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ISSUER, MOZILLA_PKIX_ERROR_MITM_DETECTED or ERROR_SELF_SIGNED_CERT error codes when their an...

The German police yesterday raided the house of the developer of OmniRAT and seized his laptop, computer and mobile phones probably as part of an investigation into a recent cyber attack, a source told The Hacker News. OmniRAT made headlines in November 2015 when its developer launched it as a legitimate remote administration tool for IT experts and companies to manage their devices with explicit permissions. Available between $25 and $100, OmniRAT quickly became one of the most popular remote administration tools, allowing users to monitor Android, Windows, Linux, and Mac devices remotely and access every available information on them. However, just like any other remote administration tool like DroidJack, DarkComet, AndroRAT, and njRAT, some customers of OmniRAT also used the tool for illicit purposes, especially because it was available at a far cheaper price than other RATs in the market. In one such event earlier this year, a group of hackers attempted to target severa...

In the last two weeks, Florida has paid more than $1.1 million in bitcoin to cybercriminals to recover encrypted files from two separate ransomware attacks—one against Riviera Beach and the other against Lake City . Lake City, a city in northern Florida, agreed on Monday to pay hackers 42 Bitcoin (equivalent to $573,300 at the current value) to unlock phone and email systems following a ransomware attack that crippled its computer systems for two weeks. The ransomware attack, dubbed "Triple Threat" since it combines three different methods of attack to target network systems, infected Lake City systems on June 10 after an employee in city hall opened a malicious email. Though the IT staff disconnected computers within just 10 minutes of the cyber attack starting, it was too late. The attack locked down the city workers' email accounts and servers. Since the police and fire departments operate on a different server, they were the only ones not impacted by the a...

A popular gaming platform used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide has been found vulnerable to multiple security flaws that could have allowed remote hackers to takeover players' accounts and steal sensitive data. The vulnerabilities in question reside in the "Origin" digital distribution platform developed by Electronic Arts (EA)—the world's second-largest gaming company with over 300 million users—that allows users to purchase and play some of the most popular video games including Battlefield, Apex Legends, Madden NFL, and FIFA. The Origin platform also manages users EA Games account authentication and allows them to find friends, join games, and manage their profiles. Discovered by researchers at Check Point and CyberInt, the vulnerabilities when chained together could have allowed attackers to hijack gamer's EA account just by convincing them into opening an official webpage from the EA Games website. To perform this attack, as shown in th...