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Apple has just updated the rules of its bug bounty program by announcing a few major changes during a briefing at the annual Black Hat security conference yesterday. One of the most attractive updates is… Apple has enormously increased the maximum reward for its bug bounty program from $200,000 to $1 million—that's by far the biggest bug bounty offered by any major tech company for reporting vulnerabilities in its products. The $1 million payouts will be rewarded for a severe deadly exploit—a zero-click kernel code execution vulnerability that enables complete, persistent control of a device's kernel. Less severe exploits will qualify for smaller payouts. What's more? From now onwards, Apple's bug bounty program is not just applicable for finding security vulnerabilities in the iOS mobile operating system, but also covers all of its operating systems, including macOS , watchOS, tvOS, iPadOS, and iCloud. Since its inception around three years ago, Apple

Facebook has filed a lawsuit against two shady Android app developers accused of making illegal money by hijacking users' smartphones to fraudulently click on Facebook ads. According to Facebook, Hong Kong-based 'LionMobi' and Singapore-based 'JediMobi' app developers were distributing malicious Android apps via the official Google Play Store that exploit a technique known as "click injection fraud." Click injection is a type of attribution fraud where fraudsters manipulate the attributions to steal the credit from the actual source of app installation in an advertising process that involves Cost Per Installation model. In simple words, a malicious app installed on a device automatically generates a fake click to the advertisement network with its own tracking codes when it finds that the user is installing a new app from any other source to claim itself as the source of the installation. Therefore, Advertisers end up paying commission to the wro

Imagine a world where the software that powers your favorite apps, secures your online transactions, and keeps your digital life could be outsmarted and taken over by a cleverly disguised piece of code. This isn't a plot from the latest cyber-thriller; it's actually been a reality for years now. How this will change – in a positive or negative direction – as artificial intelligence (AI) takes on a larger role in software development is one of the big uncertainties related to this brave new world. In an era where AI promises to revolutionize how we live and work, the conversation about its security implications cannot be sidelined. As we increasingly rely on AI for tasks ranging from mundane to mission-critical, the question is no longer just, "Can AI  boost cybersecurity ?" (sure!), but also "Can AI  be hacked? " (yes!), "Can one use AI  to hack? " (of course!), and "Will AI  produce secure software ?" (well…). This thought leadership article is about the latter. Cydrill  (a

Remember the Reverse RDP Attack ? Earlier this year, researchers disclosed clipboard hijacking and path-traversal issues in Microsoft's Windows built-in RDP client that could allow a malicious RDP server to compromise a client computer, reversely. (You can find details and a video demonstration for this security vulnerability, along with dozens of critical flaws in other third-party RDP clients, in a previous article written by Swati Khandelwal for The Hacker News.) At the time when researchers responsibly reported this path-traversal issue to Microsoft, in October 2018, the company acknowledged the issue, also known as " Poisoned RDP vulnerability ," but decided not to address it. Now, it turns out that Microsoft silently patched this vulnerability  (CVE-2019-0887) just last month as part of its July Patch Tuesday updates after Eyal Itkin, security researcher at CheckPoint, found the same issue affecting Microsoft's Hyper-V technology as well. Microsoft

Malta-based cryptocurrency exchange Binance has become a victim of a ransom demand from a scammer who claimed to have hacked the KYC (Know Your Customer) data of thousands of its customers. The unknown attacker threatened the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume to release KYC information of 10,000 users if the company did not pay 300 Bitcoins—that's equivalent to almost $3.5 million at today's exchange value. Although the authenticity of the hack is not confirmed yet, several photos of individuals holding their identity cards, such as passports and voter IDs, have been circulating across different online channels. In response to the incident, Binance just released an official statement today confirming that "an unidentified individual has threatened and harassed us, demanding 300 BTC in exchange for withholding 10,000 photos that bear similarity to Binance KYC data." Binance said the company is still investigating the legitimacy of those

If you are running a KDE desktop environment on your Linux operating system, you need to be extra careful and avoid downloading any ".desktop" or ".directory" file for a while. A cybersecurity researcher has disclosed an unpatched zero-day vulnerability in the KDE software framework that could allow maliciously crafted .desktop and .directory files to silently run arbitrary code on a user's computer—without even requiring the victim to actually open it. KDE Plasma is one of the most popular open-source widget-based desktop environment for Linux users and comes as a default desktop environment on many Linux distributions, such as Manjaro, openSUSE, Kubuntu, and PCLinuxOS. Security researcher Dominik Penner who discovered the vulnerability contacted The Hacker News, informing that there's a command injection vulnerability in KDE 4/5 Plasma desktop due to the way KDE handles .desktop and .directory files. "When a .desktop or .directory file is

A new variant of the Spectre (Variant 1)  side-channel vulnerability has been discovered that affects all  modern Intel CPUs , and probably some AMD processors as well, which leverage speculative execution for high performance, Microsoft and Red Hat warned. Identified as CVE-2019-1125, the vulnerability could allow unprivileged local attackers to access sensitive information stored in the operating system privileged kernel memory, including passwords, tokens, and encryption keys, that would otherwise be inaccessible. Speculative execution is a core component of modern microprocessor design that speculatively executes instructions based on assumptions that are considered likely to be true. If the assumptions come out to be valid, the execution continues, otherwise discarded. Such speculative executions also have side effects that are not restored when the CPU state is unwound, leading to information disclosure, which can then be accessed using side-channel attacks . Microsof

United States federal government has charged a Pakistani national for bribing employees at AT&T telecommunication company over a period of five years to help unlock more than 2 million phones and plant malware on the company's network. Muhammad Fahd, a 34-year-old man from Pakistan, was arrested in Hong Kong last year in February at the request of the U.S. government and just extradited to the U.S. on Friday, August 2, 2019. According to an indictment unsealed Monday, Fahd recruited and paid AT&T insiders working at a call center in Bothell, Washington, more than $1 million in bribes between 2012 and 2017 to help them unlock cell phones associated with specified IMEI numbers that otherwise were not eligible to be removed from AT&T's network. Some telecommunication companies, including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint, sell flagship phones at discounted prices, but it comes with locked SIMs that prevent users from switching their network service for any

A series of critical vulnerabilities have been discovered in Qualcomm chipsets that could allow hackers to compromise Android devices remotely just by sending malicious packets over-the-air with no user interaction. Discovered by security researchers from Tencent's Blade team, the vulnerabilities, collectively known as QualPwn , reside in the WLAN and modem firmware of Qualcomm chipsets that powers hundreds of millions of Android smartphones and tablets. According to researchers, there are primarily two critical vulnerabilities in Qualcomm chipsets and one in the Qualcomm's Linux kernel driver for Android which if chained together could allow attackers to take complete control over targeted Android devices within their Wi-Fi range. "One of the vulnerabilities allows attackers to compromise the WLAN and Modem over-the-air. The other allows attackers to compromise the Android Kernel from the WLAN chip. The full exploit chain allows attackers to compromise the Andr

The same team of cybersecurity researchers who discovered several severe vulnerabilities, collectively dubbed as Dragonblood , in the newly launched WPA3 WiFi security standard few months ago has now uncovered two more flaws that could allow attackers to hack WiFi passwords . WPA, or WiFi Protected Access, is a WiFi security standard that has been designed to authenticate wireless devices using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) protocol and intended to prevent hackers from eavesdropping on your wireless data. The WiFi Protected Access III (WPA3) protocol was launched a year ago in an attempt to address technical shortcomings of the WPA2 protocol from the ground, which has long been considered to be insecure and found vulnerable to more severe KRACK attacks . WPA3 relies on a more secure handshake, called SAE (Simultaneous Authentication of Equals), which is also known as Dragonfly, that aims to protect WiFi networks against offline dictionary attacks. However, in less