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The Search Engine giant is not going to spare the Pirated content providing sites . Google is ready to fulfill its commitment to downgrade the search rankings of ' notorious ' piracy sites globally that often rank above legal and commercial sites. Google and the Copyright holders are, to some extent, enemies for years, but in Google's ongoing anti-piracy efforts, the company will fight copyright infringement and assure rights holders that their contents will be appeared at the top of its search results and that the search made up only a small portion of pirate traffic. DOWNGRADE PIRATED SITES Google is preparing major tweaks to its search engine, which you'll be able to see this week, to ensure that the 'notorious' piracy sites that enable the downloading or streaming of pirated contents are out of search results when people search for music, movies and other copyrighted content. The announcement of the algorithm update came as Google updated " How Google Fights ...

If you have bet on Peppermint, Pancake or Pastry for "P" in the next version of Google's mobile operating system, sorry guys you lose because Android P stands for Android Pie . Yes, the next version of sugary snack-themed Android and the successor to Android Oreo will now be known as Android 9.0 Pie , and it has officially arrived, Google revealed on Monday. Android 9 Pie — 5 Best New Features Google says Android Pie comes with a "heaping helping of artificial intelligence baked in to make your phone smarter, simpler, and more tailored to you." 1.) AI-Powered Adaptive Battery Despite Google has made its efforts since it brought a power saving mode called Doze in  Android 6.0 Marshmallow , Battery life has always been a big concern for people. Android 9 Pie introduces a new feature called "Adaptive Battery," which uses machine learning to learn which apps you use most and prioritize battery for them accordingly. "Android 9 int...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a nascent Android remote access trojan (RAT) called PlayPraetor that has infected more than 11,000 devices, primarily across Portugal, Spain, France, Morocco, Peru, and Hong Kong. "The botnet's rapid growth, which now exceeds 2,000 new infections per week, is driven by aggressive campaigns focusing on Spanish and French speakers, indicating a strategic shift away from its previous common victim base," Cleafy researchers Simone Mattia, Alessandro Strino, and Federico Valentini said in an analysis of the malware. PlayPraetor, managed by a Chinese command-and-control (C2) panel, doesn't significantly deviate from other Android trojans in that it abuses accessibility services to gain remote control and can serve fake overlay login screens atop nearly 200 banking apps and cryptocurrency wallets in an attempt to hijack victim accounts. PlayPraetor was first documented by CTM360 in March 2025, detailing the operation's u...

Google has announced plans to add support for quantum-resistant encryption algorithms in its Chrome browser, starting with version 116. "Chrome will begin supporting  X25519Kyber768  for establishing symmetric secrets in  TLS , starting in Chrome 116, and available behind a flag in Chrome 115," Devon O'Brien  said  in a post published Thursday. Kyber was  chosen  by the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as the candidate for general encryption in a bid to tackle future cyber attacks posed by the advent of quantum computing.  Kyber-768  is roughly the security equivalent of  AES-192 . The encryption algorithm has already been adopted by  Cloudflare ,  Amazon Web Services , and IBM. X25519Kyber768 is a hybrid algorithm that combines the output of  X25519 , an elliptic curve algorithm widely used for key agreement in TLS, and Kyber-768 to create a strong session key to en...

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...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered an updated version of an Android malware called TgToxic (aka ToxicPanda), indicating that the threat actors behind it are continuously making changes in response to public reporting. "The modifications seen in the TgToxic payloads reflect the actors' ongoing surveillance of open source intelligence and demonstrate their commitment to enhancing the malware's capabilities to improve security measures and keep researchers at bay," Intel 471 said in a report published this week. TgToxic was first documented by Trend Micro in early 2023, describing it as a banking trojan capable of stealing credentials and funds from crypto wallets as well as bank and finance apps. It has been detected in the wild since at least July 2022, mainly focusing on mobile users in Taiwan, Thailand, and Indonesia. Then in November 2024, Italian online fraud prevention firm Cleafy detailed an updated variant with wide-ranging data-gathering featur...

Everything feels secure—until one small thing slips through. Even strong systems can break if a simple check is missed or a trusted tool is misused. Most threats don't start with alarms—they sneak in through the little things we overlook. A tiny bug, a reused password, a quiet connection—that's all it takes. Staying safe isn't just about reacting fast. It's about catching these early signs before they blow up into real problems. That's why this week's updates matter. From stealthy tactics to unexpected entry points, the stories ahead reveal how quickly risk can spread—and what smart teams are doing to stay ahead. Dive in. ⚡ Threat of the Week U.S. Disrupts N. Korea IT Worker Scheme — Prosecutors said they uncovered the North Korean IT staff working at over 100 U.S. companies using fictitious or stolen identities and not only drawing salaries, but also stealing secret data and plundering virtual currency more than $900,000 in one incident targeting an unnamed blockchain company in ...

A team of security researchers has discovered a new set of techniques that could allow hackers to bypass all kind of present mitigations put in place to prevent DMA-based Rowhammer attacks against Android devices. Dubbed RAMpage , the new technique (CVE-2018-9442) could re-enable an unprivileged Android app running on the victim's device to take advantage from the previously disclosed Drammer attack , a variant of DRAM Rowhammer  hardware vulnerability for Android devices, in an attempt to gain root privileges on the target device. You might have already read a few articles about RAMpage on the Internet or even the research paper, but if you are still unable to understand— what the heck is RAMpage —we have briefed the research in language everyone can understand. Before jumping directly on the details of RAMpage, it is important for you to understand what is RowHammer vulnerability, how it can be exploited using Drammer attack to hack Android devices and what mitigations G...

Google has assigned a new CVE identifier for a critical security flaw in the libwebp image library for rendering images in the  WebP format  that has come under active exploitation in the wild. Tracked as  CVE-2023-5129 , the issue has been given the maximum severity score of 10.0 on the CVSS rating system. It has been described as an issue rooted in the  Huffman coding algorithm  - With a specially crafted WebP lossless file, libwebp may write data out of bounds to the heap. The ReadHuffmanCodes() function allocates the HuffmanCode buffer with a size that comes from an array of precomputed sizes: kTableSize. The color_cache_bits value defines which size to use. The kTableSize array only takes into account sizes for 8-bit first-level table lookups but not second-level table lookups. libwebp allows codes that are up to 15-bit (MAX_ALLOWED_CODE_LENGTH). When BuildHuffmanTable() attempts to fill the second-level tables it may write data out-of-bounds. The OOB wr...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new version of an Android banking trojan called Octo that comes with improved capabilities to conduct device takeover ( DTO ) and perform fraudulent transactions. The new version has been codenamed Octo2 by the malware author, Dutch security firm ThreatFabric said in a report shared with The Hacker News, adding campaigns distributing the malware have been spotted in European countries like Italy, Poland, Moldova, and Hungary. "The malware developers took actions to increase the stability of the remote actions capabilities needed for Device Takeover attacks," the company said . Some of the malicious apps containing Octo2 are listed below - Europe Enterprise (com.xsusb_restore3) Google Chrome (com.havirtual06numberresources) NordVPN (com.handedfastee5) Octo was first flagged by the company in early 2022, describing it as the work of a threat actor who goes by the online aliases Architect and goodluck. It has been assessed...

Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Argentina, and Thailand have become the targets of a campaign that has infected Android TV devices with a botnet malware dubbed Vo1d . The improved variant of Vo1d has been found to encompass 800,000 daily active IP addresses, with the botnet scaling a peak of 1,590,299 on January 19, 2025, spanning 226 countries and regions. As of February 25, 2025, India has experienced a notable surge in infection rate, increasing from less than 1% (3,901) to 18.17% (217,771).  "Vo1d has evolved to enhance its stealth, resilience, and anti-detection capabilities," QiAnXin XLab said . "RSA encryption secures network communication, preventing [command-and-control] takeover even if [the Domain Generation Algorithm] domains are registered by researchers. Each payload uses a unique Downloader, with XXTEA encryption and RSA-protected keys, making analysis harder." The malware was first documented by Doctor Web in September 2024 as affecting Androi...

Cloudflare on Tuesday said it automatically mitigated a record-setting volumetric distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that peaked at 11.5 terabits per second (Tbps). "Over the past few weeks, we've autonomously blocked hundreds of hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks, with the largest reaching peaks of 5.1 Bpps and 11.5 Tbps," the web infrastructure and security company said in a post on X. "The 11.5 Tbps attack was a UDP flood that mainly came from Google Cloud." The entire attack lasted only about 35 seconds, with the company stating its "defenses have been working overtime." Volumetric DDoS attacks are designed to overwhelm a target with a tsunami of traffic, causing the server to slow down or even fail. These attacks typically result in network congestion, packet loss, and service disruptions. Such attacks are often conducted by sending the requests from botnets that are already under the control of the threat actors after having infected t...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new, sophisticated variant of a known Android malware referred to as Konfety that leverages the evil twin technique to enable ad fraud. The sneaky approach essentially involves a scenario wherein two variants of an application share the same package name: A benign "decoy" app that's hosted on the Google Play Store and its evil twin, which is distributed via third-party sources. It's worth pointing out that the decoy apps don't have to be necessarily published by threat actors themselves and could be legitimate. The only caveat is that the malicious apps share the exact same package names as their real counterparts already available on the Play Store.  "The threat actors behind Konfety are highly adaptable, consistently altering their targeted ad networks and updating their methods to evade detection," Zimperium zLabs researcher Fernando Ortega said . "This latest variant demonstrates their sophisticat...

The security landscape now moves at a pace no patch cycle can match. Attackers aren't waiting for quarterly updates or monthly fixes—they adapt within hours, blending fresh techniques with old, forgotten flaws to create new openings. A vulnerability closed yesterday can become the blueprint for tomorrow's breach. This week's recap explores the trends driving that constant churn: how threat actors reuse proven tactics in unexpected ways, how emerging technologies widen the attack surface, and what defenders can learn before the next pivot. Read on to see not just what happened, but what it means—so you can stay ahead instead of scrambling to catch up. ⚡ Threat of the Week Google Patches Actively Exploited Chrome 0-Day — Google released security updates for the Chrome web browser to address four vulnerabilities, including one that it said has been exploited in the wild. The zero-day vulnerability, CVE-2025-10585, has been described as a type confusion issue in the V8 JavaScript ...

The notorious Android banking trojan known as  SharkBot  has once again made an appearance on the Google Play Store by masquerading as antivirus and cleaner apps. "This new dropper doesn't rely on Accessibility permissions to automatically perform the installation of the dropper Sharkbot malware," NCC Group's Fox-IT  said  in a report. "Instead, this new version asks the victim to install the malware as a fake update for the antivirus to stay protected against threats." The apps in question, Mister Phone Cleaner and Kylhavy Mobile Security, have over 60,000 installations between them and are designed to target users in Spain, Australia, Poland, Germany, the U.S., and Austria - Mister Phone Cleaner (com.mbkristine8.cleanmaster, 50,000+ downloads) Kylhavy Mobile Security (com.kylhavy.antivirus, 10,000+ downloads) The  droppers  are designed to drop a new version of SharkBot,  dubbed V2  by Dutch security firm ThreatFabric, which features an...