Security News
A Forbes report last week outlined how some Xiaomi Android phones track their owners' web browsing and online activities. It was claimed the handsets' bundled Xiaomi browser collects things like browsing history, search queries, and news feed activity, and sends the data off to servers in China, even in private incognito mode.
Researchers are warning of a remote overlay malware attack that leverages a fake Chrome browser plugin to target the accounts of banking customers in Spain. Grandoreiro is a type of remote overlay banking trojan, designed to help attackers overtake devices and display a full-screen overlay image when victim accesses their online banking account.
Security solutions provider Avast this week announced the launch of an Android version of its Avast Secure Browser. Previously available for Windows and macOS, the browser aims to provide users with increased security and privacy while navigating the Internet, shopping, or accessing their bank accounts on their Android devices.
Avast has released an Android version of Avast Secure Browser to extend its platform support beyond Windows and Mac on desktop to mobile. Avast Secure Browser for Android was developed following Avast's 2019 acquisition of Tenta, a private browser backed by Blockchain pioneers ConsenSys, and has been built from the ground up by privacy and cybersecurity engineers focused on total encryption.
Mozilla has released security updates for its Firefox browser in conjunction with a US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency advisory warning that critical vulnerabilities in the browser are being actively exploited. To address these flaws, Firefox was updated to version 74.0.1 and Firefox Extended Support Release - a slower evolving version for enterprises - was updated to 68.6.1.
Mozilla just pushed out an update for its Firefox browser to patch a security hole that was already being exploited in the wild. Given that the bug needed patching in both the latest and the ESR versions, we can assume either that the vulnerability has been in the Firefox codebase at least since version 68 first appeared, which was back in July 2019, or that it was introduced as a side effect of a security fix that came out after version 68.0 showed up.0, so the ESR is popular with IT departments who want to avoid frequent feature updates that might require changes in company workflow, but don't want to lag behind on security patches.
The extension lets analysts process threat data directly from their web browser. Through a combination of automation and workflow tooling the browser extension reduces the time and effort for CTI analysts to process threat data found either on external websites or on the web-based front-ends of their internal security controls.
On Thursday, Google released security patches to stomp out high-severity vulnerabilities in its Chrome browser. Overall, eight security bugs were addressed in Chrome browser version 80.0.3987.162 for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
TLS 1.0 is over two decades old, and TLS 1.1 was only meant to address some limitations in the former and prevent specific attacks. In October 2018, major browser makers announced that support for the old and insecure TLS 1.0 and 1.1 protocol versions would be removed in March 2020, but such plans have been postponed due to the current COVID-19 pandemic.
In one of the strangest stories of the year, the COVID-19 virus has halted plans by major browsers to drop support for the ageing and insecure Transport Layer Security 1.0 and 1.1 protocols. While a temporary delay, it's still an unexpected retreat for an industry which had showed unity in collectively deciding to banish TLS 1.0 and the lesser used TLS 1.1 by early 2020.