Security News
A Pakistani fraudster was sentenced to 12 years in prison earlier this week after AT&T, the world's largest telecommunications company, lost over $200 million after he and his co-conspirators coordinated a seven-year scheme that led to the fraudulent unlocking of almost 2 million phones. Throughout this operation, Muhammad Fahd - the scheme leader - bribed multiple AT&T employees to do his bidding, including unlocking phones, giving him access to their credentials, and installing malware that gave him remote access to the mobile carrier's servers.
The ringleader of a seven-year phone-unlocking and malware scheme will head to the clink for 12 years, according to the Department of Justice, after effectively compromising AT&T's internal networks to install credential-thieving malware. "Unlocking a phone effectively removes it from AT&T's network, thereby allowing the account holder to avoid having to pay AT&T for service or to make any payments for purchase of the phone," it said.
A Glasgow-based company is facing a £150,000 penalty handed down by the UK's data watchdog for making more than half a million nuisance calls about bogus green energy deals. The Information Commissioner's Office fined DialADeal Scotland Ltd after an investigation found that it had targeted numbers registered with the Telephone Preference Service where people had expressly withdrawn their consent to receive marketing calls.
The problem with copyright infringement notices is that if they're genuine, they can't just be ignored, because social media sites are obliged to try to resolve meaningful copyright complaints when they're received. They've copied a trick that tech support scammers have been using for years, and that some ransomware scammers have recently adopted, namely giving you a toll-free phone number to call for "Help".
"We solve something that had previously been thought impossible - achieving location privacy in mobile networks," said Paul Schmitt, an associate research scholar at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, told The Register. In "Pretty Good Phone Privacy," [PDF] a paper scheduled to be presented on Thursday at the Usenix Security Symposium, Schmitt and Barath Raghavan, assistant professor of computer science at the University of Southern California, describe a way to re-engineer the mobile network software stack so that it doesn't betray the location of mobile network customers.
CIS Secure received approval from the National Telecommunications Security Working Group for its new Poly 8300 TSG conference phone. The Poly 8300 conference phone is designed to transform any small conference room hub into a TSG-protected secure collaboration space.
Regularly rebooting smartphones can make even the most sophisticated hackers work harder to maintain access and steal data from a phone. At a time of widespread digital insecurity it turns out that the oldest and simplest computer fix there is - turning a device off then back on again - can thwart hackers from stealing information from smartphones.
So the first vulnerability is based on the fact that the cell around network and the connectivity between cell networks around the world is built in such a way that whenever there is some, some sort of message call or any other message to be others to you. Connected to the, over the set alarm network, but eventually it is connected to the open internet and the like any device connected to the open internet.
An Israeli firm accused of supplying spyware to governments has been linked to a list of 50,000 smartphone numbers, including those of activists, journalists, business executives and politicians around the world, according to reports Sunday. The Post said 15,000 of the numbers on the list were in Mexico and included those of politicians, union representatives, journalists and government critics.
Motherboard got its hands on one of those Anom phones that were really FBI honeypots. The details are interesting.