Security News
Tech companies could be fined $25 million - or ten percent of their global annual revenue - if they don't build suitable mechanisms to scan for child sex abuse material in end-to-end encrypted messages and an amended UK law is passed. The proposed update to the Online Safety bill [PDF], currently working its way through Parliament, states that British and foreign providers of a "Regulated user-to-user service" must report child sexual exploitation and abuse content to the country's National Crime Agency.
Chinese web giant Tencent has admitted to a significant account hijack attack on its QQ.com messaging and social media platform. In a post to rival social media platform Sina Weibo - a rough analog of Twitter - Tencent apologized for the incident.
Speek! is a new encrypted chat service that uses Tor to offer secure communication. Speek! isn't quite like the chat apps and services you are used to.
Zoom has fixed a security flaw in its video-conferencing software that a miscreant could exploit with chat messages to potentially execute malicious code on a victim's device. The upshot is that someone who can send you chat messages could cause your vulnerable Zoom client app to install malicious code, such as malware and spyware, from an arbitrary server.
An analysis of four months of chat logs spanning more than 40 conversations between the operators of Conti and Hive ransomware and their victims has offered an insight into the groups' inner workings and their negotiation techniques. Conti and Hive are among the most prevalent ransomware strains in the threat landscape, cumulatively accounting for 29.1% of attacks detected during the three-month-period between October and December 2021.
Days after the Conti ransomware group broadcasted a pro-Russian message pledging its allegiance to Vladimir Putin's ongoing invasion of Ukraine, a disgruntled member of the cartel has leaked the syndicate's internal chats. The file dump, published by malware research group VX-Underground, is said to contain 13 months of chat logs between affiliates and administrators of the Russia-affiliated ransomware group from January 2021 to February 2022, in a move that's expected to offer unprecedented insight into the gang's workings.
An angry member of the Conti ransomware operation has leaked over 60,000 private messages after the gang sided with Russia over the invasion of Ukraine. AdvIntel CEO Vitali Kremez, who has been tracking the Conti/TrickBot operation over the last couple of years, also confirmed to BleepingComputer that the leaked messages are valid and were taken from a log server for the Jabber communication system used by the ransomware gang.
Security researchers warn that some attackers are compromising Microsoft Teams accounts to slip into chats and spread malicious executables to participants in the conversation. More than 270 million users are relying on Microsoft Teams every month, many of them trusting the platform implicitly, despite the absence of protections against malicious files.
Discord is suffering a 'massive outage' preventing users from logging in to the service or using voice chats. The outage started at 2:49 PM EST and was originally caused by a widespread API outage.
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.