Security News

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered yet another piece of wormable Android malware-but this time downloadable directly from the official Google Play Store-that's capable of propagating via WhatsApp messages. Disguised as a rogue Netflix app under the name of "FlixOnline," the malware comes with features that allow it to automatically reply to a victim's incoming WhatsApp messages with a payload received from a command-and-control server.

Apps on Android have been able to infer the presence of specific apps, or even collect the full list of installed apps on the device. A study undertaken by a group of Swiss researchers in 2019 found that "Free apps are more likely to query for such information and that third-party libraries are the main requesters of the list of installed apps."

The same North Korean threat actors that targeted security researchers in January appear to be readying a new campaign using a fake company that aim to lure security professionals into another cyber-espionage trap. While researchers have seen no evidence yet of nefarious activity from attackers that leverage these web assets, it appears that attackers are gearing up to target security researchers again by the nature of the activity, according to Google TAG. Like previous websites that Google TAG has observed Zinc establish, the SecuriElite website has a link to the group's PGP public key at the bottom of the page, researchers noted.

Mobile device-tracking by Apple and Google take center stage in a report revealing that, despite both allowing users to opt out of sharing telemetry data - they do anyway. The research, entitled Mobile Handset Privacy: Measuring The Data iOS and Android Send to Apple And Google, also found that Google collects up to 20 times more data from its Android Pixel users compared to the amount of data that Apple collects from iOS users.

Google's Threat Analysis Group says that North Korean government-sponsored hackers are once again targeting security researchers using fake Twitter and LinkedIn social media accounts. The hackers also created a website for a fake company named SecuriElite and supposedly offering offensive security services as the Google security team focused on hunting down state-backed hackers discovered on March 17.

Google offers a password checking service that will check all of your Chrome-saved passwords for weaknesses and against known breaches. With a tool called Password Checkup, the Google AI will comb through your vast array of authentication credentials to let you know if you have a password associated with a breach.

Google Chrome developers have announced plans to roll out DNS-over-HTTPS support to Chrome web browser for Linux. Yesterday, the open-source Chromium project which powers the Google Chrome web browser announced plans to release a Chrome for Linux version with DNS-over-HTTPS support.

Google Chrome will switch to choosing HTTPS as the default protocol for all URLs typed in the address bar, starting with the web browser's next stable version. This move is part of a larger effort to defend users from attackers attempting to intercept their unencrypted web traffic and speed up the loading of websites served over HTTPS. "Chrome will now default to HTTPS for most typed navigations that don't specify a protocol," Chrome team's Shweta Panditrao and Mustafa Emre Acer said.

Google has mysteriously removed the popular browser extension ClearURLs from the Chrome Web Store. ClearURLs is a web browser add-on available for both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox tasked with removing tracking bits from the URLs.

Digital Realty announced it has expanded secure, private access to Google Cloud's global network in five key metros. Direct, low-latency interconnections to Google Cloud are available from 12 locations on Digital Realty's global platform - in Atlanta, Los Angeles and New York in North America, and in Düsseldorf, Madrid, Marseille, Paris, Stockholm, Vienna, and Zürich as well as two distinct locations in Frankfurt within EMEA. In addition, the Digital Realty Internet Exchange supports Google's Direct Peering capabilities and dedicated access to multiple third-party Internet Exchanges on PlatformDIGITAL, providing a direct path from on-premise networks to Google Cloud services.