Security News
An SMS-based phishing campaign is targeting customers of Indian banks with information-stealing malware that masquerades as a rewards application. The Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team said that the messages contain links that redirect users to a sketchy website that triggers the download of the fake banking rewards app for ICICI Bank.
Data-stealing spyware disguised as a banking rewards app is targeting Android users, Microsoft's security team has warned. The Microsoft threat hunters' investigation began after receiving a text message claiming to be from India's ICICI bank's rewards program.
A new Iranian state-sponsored hacking group known as APT42 has been discovered using a custom Android malware to spy on targets of interest. The cybersecurity firm has collected enough evidence to determine that APT42 is a state-sponsored threat actor who engages in cyberespionage against individuals and organizations of particular interest to the Iranian government.
A previously undocumented strain of Android spyware with extensive information gathering capabilities has been found disguised as a book likely designed to target the Uyghur community in China. The malware comes under the guise of a book titled "The China Freedom Trap," a biography written by the exiled Uyghur leader Dolkun Isa.
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.
Researchers have identified 1,859 apps across Android and iOS containing hard-coded Amazon Web Services credentials, posing a major security risk. "Over three-quarters of the apps contained valid AWS access tokens allowing access to private AWS cloud services," Symantec's Threat Hunter team, a part of Broadcom Software, said in a report shared with The Hacker News.
"Attackers could have leveraged the vulnerability to hijack an account without users' awareness if a targeted user simply clicked a specially crafted link," Dimitrios Valsamaras of the Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team said in a write-up. Successful exploitation of the flaw could have permitted malicious actors to access and modify users' TikTok profiles and sensitive information, leading to the unauthorized exposure of private videos.
Microsoft found and reported a high severity flaw in the TikTok Android app in February that allowed attackers to "Quickly and quietly" take over accounts with one click by tricking targets into clicking a specially crafted malicious link."Attackers could have leveraged the vulnerability to hijack an account without users' awareness if a targeted user simply clicked a specially crafted link," Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team's Dimitrios Valsamaras said.
Google in November will prohibit Android VPN apps in its Play store from interfering with or blocking advertising, a change that may pose problems for some privacy applications. The T&Cs spell out that developers must declare the use of VPNservice in their apps' Google Play listing, must encrypt data from the device to the VPN endpoint, and must comply with Developer Program Policies, particularly those related to ad fraud, permissions, and malware.
A new batch of thirty-five malware Android apps that display unwanted advertisements was found on the Google Play Store, with the apps installed over 2 million times on victims' mobile devices. The apps were found by security researchers at Bitdefender, who employed a real-time behavior-based analysis method to discover the potentially malicious applications.