Security News
A new analysis of website fingerprinting attacks aimed at the Tor web browser has revealed that it's possible for an adversary to glean a website frequented by a victim, but only in scenarios where the threat actor is interested in a specific subset of the websites visited by users. Tor browser offers "Unlinkable communication" to its users by routing internet traffic through an overlay network, consisting of more than six thousand relays, with the goal of anonymizing the originating location and usage from third parties conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis.
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.
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.
Researchers have discovered a new Python ransomware from an unnamed gang that's striking ESXi servers and virtual machines with what they called "Sniper-like" speed. While the choice of Python for the ransomware is fairly distinctive, going after ESXi servers is anything but.
The latest report from the WatchGuard shows an astonishing 91.5% of malware arriving over encrypted connections during Q2 2021. This is a dramatic increase over the previous quarter and means that any organization that isn't examining encrypted HTTPS traffic at the perimeter is missing 9/10 of all malware.
A full 91.5 percent of malware was delivered using HTTPS-encrypted connections in the second quarter, researchers said, making attacks more evasive. That's according to WatchGuard Technologies' latest report on findings within its telemetry, which also found that these detections come primarily from two malware families: AMSI.Disable.
Armorblox researchers have spotted an ongoing credential-phishing attack that spoofs an encrypted Zix email - one coming, weirdly enough, from what looks like a legitimate domain associated with the Baptist religion. God isn't sending encrypted Zix messages: If hapless users click on the spoofed email's link, it will try to download a presumably unholy HTML file onto their system.
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.
Facebook's WhatsApp on Friday said users will soon be able to store end-to-end encrypted backups of their chat history on Google Drive in Android or Apple iCloud in iOS, with an option to self-manage the encryption key. "We're adding another layer of privacy and security to WhatsApp: an end-to-end encryption option for the backups people choose to store in Google Drive or iCloud," said Facebook supremo Mark Zuckerberg in a missive on his platform.
The ProPublica report says that WhatsApp contractors "Sift through streams of private messages, images and videos that have been reported by WhatsApp users as improper and then screened by the company's artificial intelligence systems." WhatsApp in a statement emailed to The Register pushed back against ProPublica's claims.