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Posted by Harshvardhan Sharma, Information Security Engineer, Google We first announced the GCP VRP Prize in 2019 to encourage security researchers to focus on the security of Google Cloud Platform (GCP), in turn helping us make GCP more secure for our users, customers, and the internet at large. In the first iteration of the prize, we awarded $100,000 to the winning write-up about a security vulnerability in GCP. We also announced that we would reward the top 6 submissions in 2020 and increased the total prize money to $313,337.2020 turned out to be an amazing year for the Google Vulnerability Reward Program. We received many high-quality vulnerability reports from our talented and prolific vulnerability researchers. Vulnerability reports received year-over-yearThis trend was reflected in the submissions we received for the GCP VRP…

If you sell Web-based software for a living and ship code that references an unregistered domain name, you are asking for trouble. But when the same mistake is made by a Fortune 500 company, the results can range from costly to disastrous. Here’s the story of one such goof committed by Fiserv [NASDAQ:FISV], a $6 billion firm that provides online banking software and other technology solutions to thousands of financial institutions. In November 2020, KrebsOnSecurity heard from security researcher Abraham Vegh, who noticed something odd while inspecting an email from his financial institution. Vegh could see the message from his bank referenced a curious domain: defaultinstitution.com. A quick search of WHOIS registration records showed the domain was unregistered. Wondering whether he might receive email communications to that address if he…

SMS text messages were already the weakest link securing just about anything online, mainly because there are tens of thousands of people (many of them low-paid mobile store employees) who can be tricked or bribed into swapping control over a mobile phone number to someone else. Now we’re learning about an entire ecosystem of companies that anyone could use to silently intercept text messages intended for other mobile users. Security researcher “Lucky225” worked with Vice.com’s Joseph Cox to intercept Cox’s incoming text messages with his permission. Lucky225 showed how anyone could do the same after creating an account at a service called Sakari, a company that helps celebrities and businesses do SMS marketing and mass messaging. The “how they did it” was sickeningly simple. It cost just $16, and there…

Posted by Ryan Hurst, Product Management, Google Trust ServicesEncryption is a fundamental building block when you’re on a mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible with strong security and privacy. This is why a little over four years ago we created Google Trust Services—our publicly trusted Certificate Authority (CA).The road to becoming a publicly trusted certificate authority is a long one - especially if the certificates you issue will be used by some of the most visited sites on the internet. When we started on this journey, our goal was that within five years our root certificates would be embedded in enough devices that we could do a single transition to our long-term root certificates. There are still a large number of active used devices that…

A little over a year ago, the FBI and law enforcement partners overseas seized WeLeakInfo[.]com, a wildly popular service that sold access to more than 12 billion usernames and passwords stolen from thousands of hacked websites. In an ironic turn of events, a lapsed domain registration tied to WeLeakInfo let someone plunder and publish account data on 24,000 customers who paid to access the service with a credit card. For several years, WeLeakInfo was the largest of several services selling access to hacked passwords. Prosecutors said it had indexed, searchable information from more than 10,000 data breaches containing over 12 billion indexed records — including names, email addresses, usernames, phone numbers, and passwords for online accounts. For a small fee, you could enter an email address and see every password…

Posted by Stephen Röttger and Artur Janc, Information Security EngineersThree years ago, Spectre changed the way we think about security boundaries on the web. It quickly became clear that flaws in modern processors undermined the guarantees that web browsers could make about preventing data leaks between applications. As a result, web browser vendors have been continuously collaborating on approaches intended to harden the platform at scale. Nevertheless, this class of attacks still remains a concern and requires web developers to deploy application-level mitigations.In this post, we will share the results of Google Security Team's research on the exploitability of Spectre against web users, and present a fast, versatile proof-of-concept (PoC) written in JavaScript which can leak information from the browser's memory. We've confirmed that this proof-of-concept, or its variants, function…

Posted by Parisa Tabriz, Head of Chrome Product, Engineering and UX In an effort to showcase the breadth and depth of Black+ contributions to security and privacy fields, we’ve launched a profile series that aims to elevate and celebrate the Black+ voices in security and privacy we have here at Google.Brooke Pearson manages the Privacy Sandbox program at Google, and her team's mission is to, “Create a thriving web ecosystem that is respectful of users and private by default.” Brooke lives this mission and it is what makes her an invaluable asset to the Chrome team and Google. In addition to her work advancing the fields of security and privacy, she is a fierce advocate for women in the workplace and for elevating the voices of her fellow Black+ practitioners in security…

Posted by Eugene Liderman, Android Security and Privacy TeamEvaluating the security of mobile devices is difficult, and a trusted way to validate a company’s claims is through independent, industry certifications. When it comes to smartphones one of the most rigorous end-to-end certifications is the Common Criteria (CC) Mobile Device Fundamentals (MDF) Protection Profile. Common Criteria is the driving force for establishing widespread mutual recognition of secure IT products across 31 countries . Over the past few years only three smartphone manufacturers have continually been certified on every OS version: Google, Samsung, and Apple. At the beginning of February, we successfully completed this certification for all currently supported Pixel smartphones running Android 11. Google is the first manufacturer to be certified on the latest OS version. This specific certification is designed…

Posted by Jonathan Metzman, Google Open Source Security TeamOSS-Fuzz, Google’s open source fuzzing service, now supports fuzzing applications written in Java and other Java Virtual Machine (JVM) based languages (e.g. Kotlin, Scala, etc.). Open source projects written in JVM based languages can add their project to OSS-Fuzz by following our documentation.The Google Open Source Security team partnered with Code Intelligence to integrate their Jazzer fuzzer with OSS-Fuzz. Thanks to their integration, open source projects written in JVM-based languages can now use OSS-Fuzz for continuous fuzzing.OSS-Fuzz has found more than 25,000 bugs in open source projects using fuzzing. We look forward to seeing how this technique can help secure and improve code written in JVM-based languages.What can Jazzer do?Jazzer allows users to fuzz code written in JVM-based languages with libFuzzer, as…

On the off chance you were looking for more security to-dos from Microsoft today…the company released software updates to plug more than 82 security flaws in Windows and other supported software. Ten of these earned Microsoft’s “critical” rating, meaning they can be exploited by malware or miscreants with little or no help from users. Top of the heap this month (apart from the ongoing, global Exchange Server mass-compromise) is a patch for an Internet Explorer bug that is seeing active exploitation. The IE weakness — CVE-2021-26411 — affects both IE11 and newer EdgeHTML-based versions, and it allows attackers to run a file of their choice by getting you to view a hacked or malicious website in IE. The IE flaw is tied to a vulnerability that was publicly disclosed in…