Security News
The British government's PR campaign to destroy popular support for end-to-end encryption on messaging platforms has kicked off, under the handle "No Place To Hide", and it's as broad as any previous attack on the safety-guaranteeing technology. Judging by videos earnestly distributed by organisations supporting it, the No Place To Hide campaign is much wider than merely targeting Facebook Messenger as was previously thought.
The Swiss army has banned foreign instant-messaging apps such as Signal, Telegram, and WhatsApp and requires army members to use the locally-developed Threema messaging app instead. As Threema is a paid subscription communications service, the Swiss army promised to cover the annual subscription cost for all soldiers, which is roughly $4.40 per user. The Swiss army has also posted recommendations on Facebook, characterizing Threema as a secure ad-free communication tool that features end-to-end encryption and leaves no digital trace.
The Twitter account previously associated with the ANOM chat app is posting frivolous tweets this week. ANOM was a fake encrypted messaging platform created as part of a global sting operation led by the U.S. FBI, Australian Federal Police, and other law enforcement agencies to catch criminals.
A January 2021 FBI document outlines what types of data and metadata can be lawfully obtained by the FBI from messaging apps. Rolling Stone broke the story and it’s been written about elsewhere. I...
Australia's Federal Police force has revealed more about how it distributed a backdoored chat app to criminals. The app, named An0m, was revealed in June 2021 when Australia's Feds, the FBI and European authorities revealed they'd combined to convince crims the software allowed secure communications.
WhatsApp announced today that it had expanded the privacy control features with the addition of default disappearing messages for all newly initiated chats. Today, with the launch of default disappearing messages, the company also added two new durations that allow setting up messages to disappear after 24 hours or 90 days.
The GravityRAT remote access trojan is being distributed in the wild again, this time under the guise of an end-to-end encrypted chat application called SoSafe Chat. In 2020, the malware was targeting people via an Android app named 'Travel Mate Pro,' but since the pandemic has slowed down traveling, the actors moved to a new guise.
Britain's new Information Commissioner has called for video conferencing companies to enable end-to-end encryption on their products - even as police managers and politicians condemn the technology and demand its removal. This week the ICO urged tech companies to make end-to-end encryption "Available to all users" regardless if they're "Enterprise, consumer, paid or free" in a statement jointly backed by seven countries' data protection regulators - even including China.
WhatsApp is rolling out end-to-end encrypted chat backups on iOS and Android to prevent anyone from accessing your chats, regardless of where they are stored. Currently, WhatsApp allows you to create backups of all your chats and store them on online storage services.
FBI accused of withholding ransomware key as part of REvil probe. The FBI had obtained a key to undo a flood of ransomware infections but sat on it for a while in an attempt to strike at the malware operators, it's claimed.