Security News
A televised phone-in with Russian President Vladimir Putin Wednesday was targeted by "Powerful" cyberattacks, the state-run Rossiya 24 network which broadcast the event said. Shown on Kremlin-friendly media, the annual session with Putin sees the president field in real time queries submitted by Russians throughout the country.
The number of spam calls, the number of people losing money to them and the total amount of money lost In the past year are all record setting. A study of U.S. residents has found that one in three say they've fallen victim to a phone scam in the past year, and 19% say they've been duped more than once.
Google is force-installing a Massachusetts COVID-19 tracking app on residents' Android devices without an easy way to uninstall it. For the past few days, users have reported that Google silently installed the Massachusetts 'MassNotify' app on their devices without the ability to open it or find it in the Google Play Store.
Google is force-installing a Massachusetts COVID-19 tracking app on residents' Android devices without an easy way to uninstall it. For the past few days, users have reported that Google silently installed the Massachusetts 'MassNotify' app on their devices without the ability to open it or find it in the Google Play Store.
The GEA/1 encryption algorithm used by GPRS phones in the 1990s was seemingly designed to be weaker than it appears to allow eavesdropping, according to European researchers. A paper just out by academics at Germany's Ruhr-Universität Bochum, with help from Norwegian and French experts, has found [PDF] that GEA/1 only really offered 40-bit encryption, by design, and the way encryption keys were subdivided made the system relatively easy to break if you knew how at the time.
For three years, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Australian Federal Police owned and operated a commercial encrypted phone app, called AN0M, that was used by organized crime around the world. This week, the world's police organizations announced 800 arrests based on text messages sent over the app.
China's crackdown on cryptocurrencies has reached a new crescendo, with the nation's Ministry of Public Security on Wednesday proclaiming it has arrested over 1000 people and shut down 170 gangs that provided crypto-linked money-laundering services. Others are what China calls "Two cards" scammers, who funnel their ill-gotten gains to acquire phone cards that are shipped outside China, then use call credit stored in the cards to make scam calls back into the Middle Kingdom.
Their messages were some of 27 million that the FBI and law enforcement partners in Australia and elsewhere scooped up and decrypted, exposing global criminal networks to an unparallelled extent. FBI Special Agent Suzanne Turner said they were stunned at how openly traffickers exchanged information on the ANOM devices.
Police arrested more than 800 people worldwide in a huge global sting involving encrypted phones that were secretly planted by the FBI, law enforcement agencies said Tuesday. Australian police said the supposedly hardened encrypted devices were handed out to operatives within the mafia, Asian crime syndicates, drug cartels and outlaw motorcycle gangs as part of the elaborate FBI-led plot.
The Princeton team has a number of recommendations for T-Mobile and Verizon, noting that both carriers allow unlimited inquiries on their prepaid customer platforms online - meaning there is nothing to stop attackers from automating this type of number reconnaissance. The carriers could offer their own "Number parking" service for customers who know they will not require phone service for an extended period of time, or for those who just aren't sure what they want to do with a number.