Security News
KoolSpan and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency announced the availability of TrustCall, a secure mobile communications application, to all DoD and IC users for iOS and Android, via the GEOINT App Store. The threats are posed by systemic vulnerabilities in the global telecommunications infrastructure that readily enable interception and monitoring of mobile communications, both voice and data.
The Wall Street Journal has an article about a company called Anomaly Six LLC that has an SDK that's used by "More than 500 mobile applications." Through that SDK, the company collects location data from users, which it then sells. Anomaly Six is a federal contractor that provides global-location-data products to branches of the U.S. government and private-sector clients.
A series of vulnerabilities affecting Samsung's Find My Mobile could have been chained to perform various types of activities on a compromised smartphone, a researcher from Portugal-based cybersecurity services provider Char49 revealed at the DEF CON conference on Friday. Find My Mobile is designed to help users find lost Samsung phones.
The United States National Security Agency has issued new advice on securing mobile devices that says location services create a security risk for staff who work in defence or national security. The new guide [PDF], titled "Limiting Location Data Exposure", notes that smartphones, tablets and fitness trackers "Store and share device geolocation data by design."
A report released Monday by network monitoring provider Gigamon looks at the use of mobile devices on business networks and the risks posed by mobile malware and inadequate security. The report also offers several pieces of advice on protecting your organization from mobile threats.
A mobile spearphishing attack targeting "a small number of employees" is what led to the unprecedented, major attack earlier in the month on high-profile Twitter accounts to push out a Bitcoin scam. On the day of the attack, Twitter revealed that the accounts fell victim to a compromise of the company's internal systems by a group of unidentified hackers that managed to access Twitter company tools and secure employee privileges.
India has banned 47 more Chinese apps just weeks after blocking the highly popular video-sharing platform TikTok and 58 others over national security and privacy concerns, an information ministry official and media reports said Monday. "We have banned 47 mobile apps from China in this ongoing exercise which highlights the government's seriousness about data privacy and security," the official, who asked to remain anonymous, told AFP. "The order was issued on Friday. Most of these 47 apps are banned for the same reasons as the earlier 59, and many were lite versions or variants of the earlier banned applications."
Hebeisen walks listeners through what these new tools are and how they were used in a seven-year long surveillanceware campaign against the Uyghur ethnic minority group. The campaign really started to take shape in our view of all of this in late 2019, when we were looking into the SilkBean family in particular, when we started looking deep into the infrastructure involved in SilkBean, we found many connections to the other malware families involved in this and this whole web of interconnections started to unravel.
If you needed another reason not to use a charger made available at a coffeeshop or airport or by an acquaintance, here it is: maliciously modified fast chargers may damage your phone, tablet or laptop and set it on fire. Fast chargers and power banks are not a rarity anymore, and most digital devices now support fast charging.
Amazon Web Services, an Amazon.com company, announced the general availability of Amazon Interactive Video Service, a new fully managed service that makes it easy to set up live, interactive video streams for a web or mobile application in just a few minutes. Customers can then combine the Amazon IVS SDK and APIs to attach structured text data to video streams, and create interactive content, including polls, surveys, and leaderboards, all of which are automatically synchronized to the live video.