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Posted by Will Harris, Chrome Security Team Cybercriminals using cookie theft infostealer malware continue to pose a risk to the safety and security of our users. We already have a number of initiatives in this area including Chrome’s download protection using Safe Browsing, Device Bound Session Credentials, and Google’s account-based threat detection to flag the use of stolen cookies. Today, we’re announcing another layer of protection to make Windows users safer from this type of malware. Like other software that needs to store secrets, Chrome currently secures sensitive data like cookies and passwords using the strongest techniques the OS makes available to us - on macOS this is the Keychain services, and on Linux we use a system provided wallet such as kwallet or gnome-libsecret. On Windows, Chrome uses the…

Posted by Nataliya Stanetsky and Roger Piqueras Jover, Android Security & Privacy Team Cell-site simulators, also known as False Base Stations (FBS) or Stingrays, are radio devices that mimic real cell sites in order to lure mobile devices to connect to them. These devices are commonly used for security and privacy attacks, such as surveillance and interception of communications. In recent years, carriers have started reporting new types of abuse perpetrated with FBSs for the purposes of financial fraud. In particular, there is increasingly more evidence of the exploitation of weaknesses in cellular communication standards leveraging cell-site simulators to inject SMS phishing messages directly into smartphones. This method to inject messages entirely bypasses the carrier network, thus bypassing all the sophisticated network-based anti-spam and anti-fraud filters. Instances of this new…