Security News
A new variant of the Android banking trojan named Xenomorph has surfaced in the wild, the latest findings from ThreatFabric reveal. "This new version of the malware adds many new capabilities to an already feature-rich Android banker, most notably the introduction of a very extensive runtime engine powered by Accessibility services, which is used by actors to implement a complete ATS framework," the Dutch security firm said in a report shared with The Hacker News.
Google has released March 2023 security updates for Android, fixing a total of 60 flaws, and among them, two critical-severity remote code execution vulnerabilities impacting Android Systems running versions 11, 12, and 13. "The most severe of these issues is a critical security vulnerability in the System component that could lead to remote code execution with no additional execution privileges needed," reads the security bulletin.
An older version of Shein's Android application suffered from a bug that periodically captured and transmitted clipboard contents to a remote server. The Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team said it discovered the problem in version 7.9.2 of the app that was released on December 16, 2021.
An investigation into data safety labels for Android apps available on the Google Play Store has uncovered "Serious loopholes" that allow apps to provide misleading or outright false information. The study, conducted by the Mozilla Foundation as part of its *Privacy Not Included initiative, compared the privacy policies and labels of the 20 most popular paid apps and the 20 most popular free apps on the app marketplace.
Threat actors are exploiting the popularity of OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot to distribute malware for Windows and Android, or direct unsuspecting vitims to phishing pages. Security researcher Dominic Alvieri was among the first to notice one such example using the domain "Chat-gpt-pc.online" to infect visitors with the Redline info-stealing malware under the guise of a download for a ChatGPT Windows desktop client.
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.