Showing only posts in Ars Technica. Show all posts.

Provider of covert surveillance app spills passwords for 62,000 users

Source

The maker of a phone app that is advertised as providing a stealthy means for monitoring all activities on an Android device spilled email addresses, plain-text passwords, and other sensitive data belonging to 62,000 users, a researcher discovered recently. A security flaw in the app, branded Catwatchful, allowed …

AT&T rolls out Wireless Account Lock protection to curb the SIM-swap scourge

Source

AT&T is rolling out a protection that prevents unauthorized changes to mobile accounts as the carrier attempts to fight a costly form of account hijacking that occurs when a scammer swaps out the SIM card belonging to the account holder. The technique, known as SIM swapping or port-out …

Drug cartel hacked FBI official’s phone to track and kill informants, report says

Source

The Sinaloa drug cartel in Mexico hacked the phone of an FBI official investigating kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán as part of a surveillance campaign “to intimidate and/or kill potential sources or cooperating witnesses,” according to a recently published report by the Justice Department. The report, which cited …

Actively exploited vulnerability gives extraordinary control over server fleets

Source

Hackers are exploiting a maximum-severity vulnerability that has the potential to give them complete control over thousands of servers, many of which handle mission-critical tasks inside data centers, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is warning. The vulnerability, carrying a severity rating of 10 out of a possible …

Canadian telecom hacked by suspected China state group

Source

Hackers suspected of working on behalf of the Chinese government exploited a maximum-severity vulnerability, which had received a patch 16 months earlier, to compromise a telecommunications provider in Canada, officials from that country and the US said Monday. “The Cyber Centre is aware of malicious cyber activities currently targeting …

Record DDoS pummels site with once-unimaginable 7.3Tbps of junk traffic

Source

Large-scale attacks designed to bring down Internet services by sending them more traffic than they can process keep getting bigger, with the largest one yet, measured at 7.3 terabits per second, being reported Friday by Internet security and performance provider Cloudflare. The 7.3Tbps attack amounted to 37 …

Israel-tied Predatory Sparrow hackers are waging cyberwar on Iran’s financial system

Source

The Israel-linked hacker group known as Predatory Sparrow has carried out some of the most disruptive and destructive cyberattacks in history, twice disabling thousands of gas station payment systems across Iran and once even setting a steel mill in the country on fire. Now, in the midst of a …

Address bar shows hp.com. Browser displays scammers’ malicious text anyway.

Source

Tech support scammers have devised a method to inject their fake phone numbers into webpages when a target's web browser visits official sites for Apple, PayPal, Netflix, and other companies. The ruse, outlined in a post on Wednesday from security firm Malwarebytes, threatens to trick users into calling the …

Cybersecurity takes a big hit in new Trump executive order

Source

Cybersecurity practitioners are voicing concerns over a recent executive order issued by the White House that guts requirements for: securing software the government uses, punishing people who compromise sensitive networks, preparing new encryption schemes that will withstand attacks from quantum computers, and other existing controls. The executive order (EO …

Vandals cut fiber-optic lines, causing outage for Spectrum Internet subscribers

Source

Subscribers in Southern California of Spectrum’s Internet service experienced outages over the weekend following what company officials said was an attempted theft of copper lines located in Van Nuys, a suburb located 20 miles from downtown Los Angeles. The people behind the incident thought they were targeting copper …

Coming to Apple OSes: A seamless, secure way to import and export passkeys

Source

Apple this week provided a glimpse into a feature that solves one of the biggest drawbacks of passkeys, the industry-wide standard for website and app authentication that isn't susceptible to credential phishing and other attacks targeting passwords. The import/export feature, which Apple demonstrated at this week’s Worldwide …

Found in the wild: 2 Secure Boot exploits. Microsoft is patching only 1 of them.

Source

Researchers have unearthed two publicly available exploits that completely evade protections offered by Secure Boot, the industry-wide mechanism for ensuring devices load only secure operating system images during the boot-up process. Microsoft is taking action to block one exploit and allowing the other one to remain a viable threat …

Millions of low-cost Android devices turn home networks into crime platforms

Source

Millions of low-cost devices for media streaming, in-vehicle entertainment, and video projection are infected with malware that turns consumer networks into platforms for distributing malware, concealing nefarious communications, and performing other illicit activities, the FBI has warned. The malware infecting these devices, known as BadBox, is based on Triada …

Two certificate authorities booted from the good graces of Chrome

Source

Google says its Chrome browser will stop trusting certificates from two certificate authorities after “patterns of concerning behavior observed over the past year” diminished trust in their reliability. The two organizations, Taiwan-based Chunghwa Telecom and Budapest-based Netlock, are among the dozens of certificate authorities trusted by Chrome and most …

Meta and Yandex are de-anonymizing Android users’ web browsing identifiers

Source

Tracking code that Meta and Russia-based Yandex embed into millions of websites is de-anonymizing visitors by abusing legitimate Internet protocols, causing Chrome and other browsers to surreptitiously send unique identifiers to native apps installed on a device, researchers have discovered. Google says it's investigating the abuse, which allows Meta …

Ransomware kingpin “Stern” apparently IDed by German law enforcement

Source

For years, members of the Russian cybercrime cartel Trickbot unleashed a relentless hacking spree on the world. The group attacked thousands of victims, including businesses, schools, and hospitals. “Fuck clinics in the usa this week,” one member wrote in internal Trickbot messages in 2020 about a list of 428 …

Thousands of Asus routers are being hit with stealthy, persistent backdoors

Source

Thousands of home and small office routers manufactured by Asus are being infected with a stealthy backdoor that can survive reboots and firmware updates in an attack by a nation-state or another well-resourced threat actor, researchers said. The unknown attackers gain access to the devices by exploiting now-patched vulnerabilities …

Feds charge 16 Russians allegedly tied to botnets used in cyberattacks and spying

Source

The hacker ecosystem in Russia, more than perhaps anywhere else in the world, has long blurred the lines between cybercrime, state-sponsored cyberwarfare, and espionage. Now an indictment of a group of Russian nationals and the takedown of their sprawling botnet offers the clearest example in years of how a …

Researchers cause GitLab AI developer assistant to turn safe code malicious

Source

Marketers promote AI-assisted developer tools as workhorses that are essential for today’s software engineer. Developer platform GitLab, for instance, claims its Duo chatbot can “instantly generate a to-do list” that eliminates the burden of “wading through weeks of commits.” What these companies don’t say is that these …

Destructive malware available in NPM repo went unnoticed for 2 years

Source

Researchers have found malicious software that received more than 6,000 downloads from the NPM repository over a two-year span, in yet another discovery showing the hidden threats users of such open source archives face. Eight packages using names that closely mimicked those of widely used legitimate packages contained …

Authorities carry out global takedown of infostealer used by cybercriminals

Source

A consortium of global law enforcement agencies and tech companies announced on Wednesday that they have disrupted the infostealer malware known as Lumma. One of the most popular infostealers worldwide, Lumma has been used by hundreds of what Microsoft calls “cyber threat actors” to steal passwords, credit card and …

“Microsoft has simply given us no other option,” Signal says as it blocks Windows Recall

Source

Signal Messenger is warning the users of its Windows Desktop version that the privacy of their messages is under threat by Recall, the AI tool rolling out in Windows 11 that will screenshot, index, and store almost everything a user does every three seconds. Effective immediately, Signal for Windows …

Windows 11’s most important new feature is post-quantum cryptography. Here’s why.

Source

Microsoft is updating Windows 11 with a set of new encryption algorithms that can withstand future attacks from quantum computers in a move aimed at jump-starting what’s likely to be the most formidable and important technology transition in modern history. Computers that are based on the physics of …

Spies hack high-value mail servers using an exploit from yesteryear

Source

Threat actors, likely supported by the Russian government, hacked multiple high-value mail servers around the world by exploiting XSS vulnerabilities, a class of bug that was among the most commonly exploited in decades past. XSS is short for cross-site scripting. Vulnerabilities result from programming errors found in webserver software …

« newer articles | page 5 | older articles »