Security News
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.
Recently I was fortunate enough to facilitate a fireside chat with Arkadiy Goykhberg, CISO of news media and business services giant DMGT. The challenge: Enterprise Drift due to Ongoing Threats. Change in security posture grows daily as threat actors, whether financially motivated or nation-state actors, evolve their tactics, tools and Procedures.
The Matrix.org Foundation, which oversees the Matrix decentralized communication protocol, said on Monday multiple Matrix clients and libraries contain a vulnerability that can potentially be abused to expose encrypted messages. The organization said a blunder in an implementation of the Matrix key sharing scheme - designed to allow a user's newly logged-in device to obtain the keys to decrypt old messages - led to the creation of client code that fails to adequately verify device identity.
WhatsApp on Friday announced it will roll out support for end-to-end encrypted chat backups on the cloud for Android and iOS users, paving the way for storing information such as chat messages and photos in Apple iCloud or Google Drive in a cryptographically secure manner. "With the introduction of end-to-end encrypted backups, WhatsApp has created an HSM based Backup Key Vault to securely store per-user encryption keys for user backups in tamper-resistant storage, thus ensuring stronger security of users' message history," the company said in a whitepaper.
With Windows 11, Microsoft is integrating the Microsoft Teams chatting feature into the Windows Taskbar. Microsoft Teams Chat feature is based on Microsoft Teams desktop client and Microsoft is basically extending Teams capability by bringing the dedicated button right to your taskbar.
Which brings me to last week's news that Australian and US law enforcement agencies seeded a backdoored encrypted chat app named AN0M into the criminal underworld, then intercepted word of a great many crimes and swooped to arrest those responsible. Late last week, FBI International Operations Division legal attaché for Australia Anthony Russo added another important piece of information: speaking to Australian newspapers he said one reason for discontinuing use of AN0M was that it produced too much intelligence.
In a huge sting operation, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and Australian Federal Police ran an "Encrypted chat" service called ANoM for almost 3 years to intercept 27 million messages between criminal gang members globally. "For almost three years, the AFP and the FBI have monitored criminals' encrypted communications over a Dedicated Encrypted Communications Platform," AFP said.