Security News

Apple announced additional security and privacy updates for its newest mobile operating system. In this Help Net Security video, you’ll learn more about the latest privacy and security features in...

Researchers have identified 1,859 apps across Android and iOS containing hard-coded Amazon Web Services credentials, posing a major security risk. "Over three-quarters of the apps contained valid AWS access tokens allowing access to private AWS cloud services," Symantec's Threat Hunter team, a part of Broadcom Software, said in a report shared with The Hacker News.

Researchers at Symantec's Threat Hunting team, part of Broadcom Software, found 1,859 applications containing hard-coded AWS credentials, most of them being iOS apps and just 37 for Android. The threat analysts highlight three notable cases in their report where the exposed AWS tokens could have had catastrophic consequences for both authors and users of the vulnerable apps.

Apple on Wednesday backported security updates to older iPhones, iPads, and iPod touch devices to address a critical security flaw that has been actively exploited in the wild. An anonymous researcher has been credited for reporting the vulnerability.

Apple has released new security updates to backport patches released earlier this month to older iPhones and iPads addressing a remotely exploitable WebKit zero-day that allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on unpatched devices. In a security advisory published today, Apple once again said that they're aware of reports that this security issue "May have been actively exploited."

Apple has left a VPN bypass vulnerability in iOS unfixed for at least two years, leaving identifying IP traffic data exposed, and there's no sign of a fix. Earlier this year, Michael Horowitz, a veteran software developer and consultant, revisited the situation and found that VPNs on iOS are still vulnerable and leaking data.

Users of Apple's Instagram and Facebook iOS apps are being warned that both use an in-app browser that allows parent company Meta to track 'every single tap' users make with external websites accessed via the software. iOS users' concerns over tracking were addressed by Apple's 2021 release of iOS 14.5 and a feature called App Tracking Transparency.

Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, the US, and the U.K. the Roaming Mantis operation moved to targeting Android and iOS users in France, likely compromising tens of thousands of devices. Roaming Mantis is believed to be a financially-motivated threat actor that started targeting European users in February.

"An attacker could take advantage of this sandbox escape vulnerability to gain elevated privileges on the affected device or execute malicious commands like installing additional payloads," Jonathan Bar Or of the Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team said in a write-up. While Apple's App Sandbox is designed to tightly regulate a third-party app's access to system resources and user data, the vulnerability makes it possible to bypass these restrictions and compromise the machine.

Microsoft has introduced a new Microsoft Defender for Endpoint feature in public preview to help organizations detect weaknesses affecting Android and iOS devices in their enterprise networks.After enabling the new Mobile Network Protection feature on Android and iOS devices you want to monitor, the enterprise endpoint security platform will provide protection and notifications when it detects rogue Wi-Fi-related threats and rogue certificates.