Security News

Security analysts have found security issues in the payment system present on Xiaomi smartphones that rely on MediaTek chips providing the trusted execution environment that is responsible for signing transactions. Considering how common mobile payments and Xiaomi phones are, especially in Asian markets, the money pool hackers could tap into is estimated to be in the billions of U.S. dollars.

A now-former T-Mobile US store stole at least 50 employees' work credentials to run a phone unlocking and unblocking service that prosecutors said netted $25 million. Argishti Khudaverdyan, 44, of Burbank, California, was found guilty of 14 criminal charges [PDF] by a US federal jury on Friday.

A former owner of a T-Mobile retail store in California has been found guilty of a $25 million scheme where he illegally accessed T-Mobile's internal systems to unlock and unblock cell phones. "From August 2014 to June 2019, Khudaverdyan fraudulently unlocked and unblocked cellphones on T-Mobile's network, as well as the networks of Sprint, AT&T and other carriers," details the announcement of the U.S. Department of Justice.

VoIP phones using Digium's software have been targeted to drop a web shell on their servers as part of an attack campaign designed to exfiltrate data by downloading and executing additional payloads. "The malware installs multilayer obfuscated PHP backdoors to the web server's file system, downloads new payloads for execution, and schedules recurring tasks to re-infect the host system," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said in a Friday report.

INKY researchers disclosed the latest variant of the tried-and-true phone scam, a low-tech phone scam where attackers extract personal information by sending out spoofed emails from what appears to be a legitimate source, with no suspicious links or malware attachments, just a pitch and a phone number. In this Help Net Security video, Roger Kay, VP of Security Strategy, INKY, talks about how this time around, attackers impersonated reputable retail brands such as Amazon, Apple, and Paypal, to send out legitimate notifications from QuickBooks, an accounting software package used primarily by small business and midmarket customers who lack in-house expertise in finance and accounting.

You'll also need the Authy app installed on your new phone. After enabling multi-device support on Authy, open the app on the new phone, where you'll be prompted for your Country Code and Phone Number.

Sick of the unending stream of email and phone calls you receive from scammers claiming to represent your bank? Amazon? Microsoft? The tax office? The police? Despite the not-very-threatening outcome when Rober later releases the insects inside a scam call centre where he has access to footage from the CCTV feed, the video gives a good visual indication of just how industriously and unrelentingly these scammers operate.

We've always known that phones-and the people carrying them-can be uniquely identified from their Bluetooth signatures, and that we need security techniques to prevent that. Computer scientists at the University of California San Diego proved in a study published May 24 that minute imperfections in phones caused during manufacturing create a unique Bluetooth beacon, one that establishes a digital signature or fingerprint distinct from any other device.

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of two medium-security flaws in Mitel 6800/6900 desk phones that, if successfully exploited, could allow an attacker to gain root privileges on the devices. Tracked as CVE-2022-29854 and CVE-2022-29855, the access control issues were discovered by German penetration testing firm SySS, following which patches were shipped in May 2022.

Check Point found attackers could transmit a specially designed radio packet to a nearby device to crash the firmware, ending that equipment's cellular connectivity, at least, presumably until it's rebooted. UNISOC is a 21-year-old chip designer based in China that spent the first 17 years of life known as Spreadtrum Communications, and that by 2011 was supplying chips for more than half of the mobile phones in the country.