Security News

I previously wrote about hacking voice assistants with lasers. Voice assistants - the demo targeted Siri, Google Assistant, and Bixby - are designed to respond when they detect the owner's voice after noticing a trigger phrase such as 'Ok, Google'.

A California man has been sentenced to more than seven years in prison for hacking an Atlanta-based company and trying to extort money in exchange for the return of the company's intellectual property. Kight accessed computer networks and servers of multiple companies and organizations in Georgia without authorization, prosecutors said.

Cross-border investigations, Europol announced on Friday that it's arrested more than two dozen people suspected of draining bank accounts by hijacking victims' phone numbers via SIM-swap fraud. As we've explained, SIM swaps work because phone numbers are actually tied to the phone's SIM card - in fact, SIM is short for subscriber identity module, a special system-on-a-chip card that securely stores the cryptographic secret that identifies your phone number to the network.

Hackers are getting hacked via trojanized hacking toolsSomeone has been trojanizing a wide variety of hacking tools to compromise the machines of hackers who want to use the tools for free, Cybereason researcher Amit Serper has revealed. SECURE Magazine: RSAC 2020 special issue releasedRSA Conference, the world's leading information security conference and exposition, concluded its 29th annual event in San Francisco.

Criminals targeting other criminals is nothing new, but researchers have now uncovered a years-long campaign that trojanizes hacking tools in order to infect other hackers with njRAT. Just as trojanized mobile apps can be downloaded from app stores and installed by trusting users, so trojanized hacking tools are downloaded and installed by trusting hackers. The njRAT infection route in the campaign appears to be via cracked and trojanized hacking tools.

Someone has been trojanizing a wide variety of hacking tools to compromise the machines of hackers who want to use the tools for free, Cybereason researcher Amit Serper has revealed. "So far, we have found samples that are either pretending to be various hacking tools or pretending to be installers of the Chrome Internet browser," they noted.

A former CIA software engineer accused of stealing a massive trove of the agency's hacking tools and handing it over to WikiLeaks was convicted of only minor charges Monday, after a jury deadlocked on the more serious espionage charges against him. Joshua Schulte, who worked as a coder at the agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, was convicted by a jury of contempt of court and making false statements after a four-week trial in Manhattan federal court that offered an unusual window into the CIA's digital sleuthing and the team that designs computer code to spy on foreign adversaries.

A federal judge in New York on Monday declared a mistrial in the case of a former CIA software engineer who was accused of stealing a massive trove of the agency's classified hacking and tools and leaking it to WikiLeaks whistleblower website. Schulte, who designed hacking tools and malware for both the CIA and NSA to break into adversaries computers, was arrested in August 2017 and initially charged with possession and transportation of child pornography.

A federal judge in New York on Monday declared a mistrial in the case of a former CIA software engineer who was accused of stealing a massive trove of the agency's classified hacking and tools and leaking it to WikiLeaks whistleblower website. Schulte, who designed hacking tools and malware for both the CIA and NSA to break into adversaries computers, was arrested in August 2017 and initially charged with possession and transportation of child pornography.

The Social Network chalked up an easy win this week when a US court issued a default notice in its favor against Israeli spyware builder NSO group. Facebook filed suit back in 2019, alleging NSO developed code for exploits in acquired crypto chat app WhatsApp.