Security News
Security researchers Jesse D'Aguanno and Timo Teräs write that, with varying degrees of reverse-engineering and using some external hardware, they were able to fool the Goodix fingerprint sensor in a Dell Inspiron 15, the Synaptic sensor in a Lenovo ThinkPad T14, and the ELAN sensor in one of Microsoft's own Surface Pro Type Covers. These are just three laptop models from the wide universe of PCs, but one of these three companies usually does make the fingerprint sensor in every laptop we've reviewed in the last few years.
Hardware security hackers have detailed how it's possible to bypass Windows Hello's fingerprint authentication and login as someone else - if you can steal or be left alone with a vulnerable device. The research focuses on bypassing Windows Hello's fingerprint authentication on three laptops: a Dell Inspiron 15, a Lenovo ThinkPad T14, and a Microsoft Surface Pro 8/X, which were using fingerprint sensors from Goodix, Synaptics, and ELAN, respectively.
Security researchers bypassed Windows Hello fingerprint authentication on Dell Inspiron, Lenovo ThinkPad, and Microsoft Surface Pro X laptops in attacks exploiting security flaws found in the embedded fingerprint sensors. Blackwing Intelligence security researchers discovered vulnerabilities during research sponsored by Microsoft's Offensive Research and Security Engineering to assess the security of the top three embedded fingerprint sensors used for Windows Hello fingerprint authentication.
A group of academics has devised a "Deep learning-based acoustic side-channel attack" that can be used to classify laptop keystrokes that are recorded using a nearby phone with 95% accuracy. "When trained on keystrokes recorded using the video conferencing software Zoom, an accuracy of 93% was achieved, a new best for the medium," researchers Joshua Harrison, Ehsan Toreini, and Maryam Mehrnezhad said in a new study published last week.
Researchers from Ruhr University Bochum and the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security in Saarbrücken have assessed the security mechanisms of satellites currently orbiting the Earth from an IT perspective. They analyzed three current low-earth orbit satellites and found that, from a technical point of view, only some modern security concepts were implemented.
Microsoft is finally rolling out a driver update to address a known issue causing built-in cameras on ARM-based Windows devices to stop working. Before releasing the updated driver to fix the broken Surface laptop cameras, Microsoft also provided a temporary workaround that can still be used until the update rolls out to all impacted systems.
Microsoft has shared a temporary fix for a widespread issue triggered by a buggy driver that causes built-in cameras on some ARM-based Windows devices to stop working. The issues started last Tuesday, May 23, when many customers began reporting that their cameras had stopped working without warning.
When a Texas school district sold some old laptops at auction last year, it probably didn't expect to end up in a public legal fight with a local computer repair shop - but a debate over what to do with district data found on the liquidated machines has led to precisely that. The San Benito Consolidated Independent School District sold more than 3,500 devices at auction in July 2022, of which 700 were purchased by local computer repair and resale shop RDA Technologies.
DevOps platform CircleCI on Friday disclosed that unidentified threat actors compromised an employee's laptop and leveraged malware to steal their two-factor authentication-backed credentials to breach the company's systems and data last month. The CI/CD service CircleCI said the "Sophisticated attack" took place on December 16, 2022, and that the malware went undetected by its antivirus software.
Acer has released a firmware update to address a security vulnerability that could be potentially weaponized to turn off UEFI Secure Boot on affected machines. Tracked as CVE-2022-4020, the high-severity vulnerability affects five different models that consist of Aspire A315-22, A115-21, and A315-22G, and Extensa EX215-21 and EX215-21G. The PC maker described the vulnerability as an issue that "May allow changes to Secure Boot settings by creating NVRAM variables." Credited with discovering the flaw is ESET researcher Martin Smolár, who previously disclosed similar bugs in Lenovo computers.