Security News
Google has started working to harden the security of Android at the firmware level, a component of the software stack that interacts directly with the various processors of a system on a chip. The plan is to expand the security in Android devices beyond the operating system, which runs on a multi-core CPU, to the other processors on the SoC for dedicated tasks like cellular communication, media processing, or security modules.
Suspected North Korean nation-state actors targeted a journalist in South Korea with a malware-laced Android app as part of a social engineering campaign. The findings come from South Korea-based non-profit Interlab, which coined the new malware RambleOn.
Google this week reversed an overhaul of one of its security-related file formats after the transition broke Android apps. In November, 2021, Google announced changes to the format of its Chrome Certificate Transparency log list file and, in August, 2022, notified developers whose apps might be affected that it would stop publishing legacy log list files on October 17, 2022.
Google announced on Tuesday that it's officially rolling out Privacy Sandbox on Android in beta to eligible mobile devices running Android 13. "The Privacy Sandbox Beta provides new APIs that are designed with privacy at the core, and don't use identifiers that can track your activity across apps and websites," the search and advertising giant said.
Google on Tuesday began rolling out a beta test of its Privacy Sandbox software for a small portion of Android 13 devices to learn how its purportedly privacy-protecting ad tech actually performs. Google began working on its Privacy Sandbox in 2019 and its Android iteration surfaced a year ago.
A highlighted security feature in Android 14 is to block the installation of malicious apps that target older API levels, which allows easier abuse of sensitive permissions. Starting with the "Runtime receivers," which enable apps to receive intents broadcast by the system or other applications, all apps targeting Android 14 must declare if they need to receive information from other apps or if they should be limited to system "Broadcasts."
Money Lover is a finance app allowing users to manage their expenses and budgets that has been downloaded five million times on the Play Store, with the app also available for iOS and Windows. Money Lover allows users to create "Shared wallets" with specific users, like family members or coworkers, to log transactions to collaborate in expense logging and monitoring.
Dashlane announced it had made the source code for its Android and iOS apps available on GitHub under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 license. The popular subscription-based password manager and digital wallet have decided to release the code of its mobile apps to increase transparency in how they operate while also promoting a more collaborative and open development approach going forward.
A new Android banking trojan has set its eyes on Brazilian financial institutions to commit fraud by leveraging the PIX payments platform. "PixPirate belongs to the newest generation of Android banking trojan, as it can perform ATS, enabling attackers to automate the insertion of a malicious money transfer over the Instant Payment platform Pix, adopted by multiple Brazilian banks," researchers Francesco Iubatti and Alessandro Strino said.
A threat actor named InTheBox is promoting on Russian cybercrime forums an inventory of 1,894 web injects for stealing credentials and sensitive data from banking, cryptocurrency exchange, and e-commerce apps. Typically, mobile banking trojans check what apps are present on an infected device and pull from the command and control server the web injects corresponding to the apps of interest.