Security News
The National Institute of Standards and Technology announced that ASCON is the winning bid for the "Lightweight cryptography" program to find the best algorithm to protect small IoT devices with limited hardware resources. The weak chips inside these devices call for an algorithm that can deliver robust encryption at very little computational power.
The first-ever Linux variant of the Clop ransomware has been detected in the wild, but with a faulty encryption algorithm that has made it possible to reverse engineer the process. "The ELF executable contains a flawed encryption algorithm making it possible to decrypt locked files without paying the ransom," SentinelOne researcher Antonis Terefos said in a report shared with The Hacker News.
Remote access outfit GoTo has admitted that a threat actor exfiltrated an encryption key that allowed access to "a portion" of encrypted backup files. A third-party cloud storage service GoTo uses for its own products and affiliate company LastPass was attacked in August 2022.
Research conducted by Fujitsu suggests there is no need to panic about quantum computers being able to decode encrypted data - this is unlikely to happen in the near future, it claims. Fujitsu said it ran trials using its 39-qubit quantum simulator hardware to assess how difficult it would be for quantum computers to crack data encrypted with the RSA cipher, using a Shor's algorithm approach.
GoTo is warning customers that threat actors who breached its development environment in November 2022 stole encrypted backups containing customer information and an encryption key for a portion of that data. "Our investigation to date has determined that a threat actor exfiltrated encrypted backups related to Central and Pro from a third-party cloud storage facility," reads the notice to customers.
Ultimately, Threema dismissed the importance of ETH Zurich's research, saying that the disclosed issues are no longer relevant to the protocol used by the software and never had any considerable real-world impact. Cloning via Threema ID export - An attacker can clone other people's accounts on their device during windows of opportunity like the victim leaving their device unlocked and unattended.
The paper, titled "Factoring integers with sublinear resources on a superconducting quantum processor," suggests that the application of Claus Peter Schnorr's recent factoring algorithm, in conjunction with a quantum approximate optimization algorithm, can break asymmetric RSA-2048 encryption using a non-fault tolerant quantum computer with only 372 physical quantum bits or qubits. The speculation has been that orders of magnitude more qubits, in conjunction with robust error correction at scale, may allow future quantum computers to run Peter Schor's algorithm - not to be confused with the similarly named Schnorr - quickly, on very large numbers, thereby breaking RSA encryption.
To address these challenges, Google, Microsoft and Proton, whose Proton Mail service was a first-mover in secure email, both moved to expand end-to-end encryption offerings. Google's announcement followed that of Proton, an encrypted cloud storage platform launched in 2013 in Geneva, Switzerland by CEO Andy Yen.
The Vice Society ransomware actors have switched to yet another custom ransomware payload in their recent attacks aimed at a variety of sectors. "This ransomware variant, dubbed 'PolyVice,' implements a robust encryption scheme, using NTRUEncrypt and ChaCha20-Poly1305 algorithms," SentinelOne researcher Antonio Cocomazzi said in an analysis.
Google is trying to help enterprise and educational users of Gmail better secure their messages. Adding to the encryption already used by Google Drive, Google Meet, Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides, the new Gmail encryption is designed to keep data private and confidential while at the same time meeting regulatory and compliance requirements for security.