Blog

Posted by Brooke Davis and Eugene Liderman, Android Security and Privacy TeamWith all of the challenges from this past year, users have become increasingly dependent on their mobile devices to create fitness routines, stay connected with loved ones, work remotely, and order things like groceries with ease. According to eMarketer, in 2020 users spent over three and a half hours per day using mobile apps. With so much time spent on mobile devices, ensuring the safety of mobile apps is more important than ever. Despite the importance of digital security, there isn’t a consistent industry standard for assessing mobile apps. Existing guidelines tend to be either too lightweight or too onerous for the average developer, and lack a compliance arm. That’s why we're excited to share ioXt’s announcement of a…

Posted by Wedson Almeida Filho, Android Team In our previous post, we announced that Android now supports the Rust programming language for developing the OS itself. Related to this, we are also participating in the effort to evaluate the use of Rust as a supported language for developing the Linux kernel. In this post, we discuss some technical aspects of this work using a few simple examples. C has been the language of choice for writing kernels for almost half a century because it offers the level of control and predictable performance required by such a critical component. Density of memory safety bugs in the Linux kernel is generally quite low due to high code quality, high standards of code review, and carefully implemented safeguards. However, memory safety bugs do…

Microsoft today released updates to plug at least 110 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other products. The patches include four security fixes for Microsoft Exchange Server — the same systems that have been besieged by attacks on four separate (and zero-day) bugs in the email software over the past month. Redmond also patched a Windows flaw that is actively being exploited in the wild. Nineteen of the vulnerabilities fixed this month earned Microsoft’s most-dire “Critical” label, meaning they could be used by malware or malcontents to seize remote control over vulnerable Windows systems without any help from users. Microsoft released updates to fix four more flaws in Exchange Server versions 2013-2019 (CVE-2021-28480, CVE-2021-28481, CVE-2021-28482, CVE-2021-28483). Interestingly, all four were reported by the U.S. National Security Agency, although…

Someone is selling account information for 21 million customers of ParkMobile, a mobile parking app that’s popular in North America. The stolen data includes customer email addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, license plate numbers, hashed passwords and mailing addresses. KrebsOnSecurity first heard about the breach from Gemini Advisory, a New York City based threat intelligence firm that keeps a close eye on the cybercrime forums. Gemini shared a new sales thread on a Russian-language crime forum that included my ParkMobile account information in the accompanying screenshot of the stolen data. Included in the data were my email address and phone number, as well as license plate numbers for four different vehicles we have used over the past decade. Asked about the sales thread, Atlanta-based ParkMobile said the company published…

Posted by Jeff Vander Stoep and Stephen Hines, Android Team Correctness of code in the Android platform is a top priority for the security, stability, and quality of each Android release. Memory safety bugs in C and C++ continue to be the most-difficult-to-address source of incorrectness. We invest a great deal of effort and resources into detecting, fixing, and mitigating this class of bugs, and these efforts are effective in preventing a large number of bugs from making it into Android releases. Yet in spite of these efforts, memory safety bugs continue to be a top contributor of stability issues, and consistently represent ~70% of Android’s high severity security vulnerabilities. In addition to ongoing and upcoming efforts to improve detection of memory bugs, we are ramping up efforts to prevent…

Ne’er-do-wells leaked personal data — including phone numbers — for some 553 million Facebook users this week. Facebook says the data was collected before 2020 when it changed things to prevent such information from being scraped from profiles. To my mind, this just reinforces the need to remove mobile phone numbers from all of your online accounts wherever feasible. Meanwhile, if you’re a Facebook product user and want to learn if your data was leaked, there are easy ways to find out. The HaveIBeenPwned project, which collects and analyzes hundreds of database dumps containing information about billions of leaked accounts, has incorporated the data into his service. Facebook users can enter the mobile number (in international format) associated with their account and see if those digits were exposed in the…

Some of the top ransomware gangs are deploying a new pressure tactic to push more victim organizations into paying an extortion demand: Emailing the victim’s customers and partners directly, warning that their data will be leaked to the dark web unless they can convince the victim firm to pay up. This letter is from the Clop ransomware gang, putting pressure on a recent victim named on Clop’s dark web shaming site. “Good day! If you received this letter, you are a customer, buyer, partner or employee of [victim],” the missive reads. “The company has been hacked, data has been stolen and will soon be released as the company refuses to protect its peoples’ data.” “We inform you that information about you will be published on the darknet [link to dark…

For four days this past week, Internet-of-Things giant Ubiquiti did not respond to requests for comment on a whistleblower’s allegations the company had massively downplayed a “catastrophic” two-month breach ending in January to save its stock price, and that Ubiquiti’s insinuation that a third-party was to blame was a fabrication. I was happy to add their eventual public response to the top of Tuesday’s story on the whistleblower’s claims, but their statement deserves a post of its own because it actually confirms and reinforces those claims. Ubiquiti’s IoT gear includes things like WiFi routers, security cameras, and network video recorders. Their products have long been popular with security nerds and DIY types because they make it easy for users to build their own internal IoT networks without spending many thousands…

Dear Readers, this has been long overdue, but at last I give you a more responsive, mobile-friendly version of KrebsOnSecurity. We tried to keep the visual changes to a minimum and focus on a simple theme that presents information in a straightforward, easy-to-read format. Please bear with us over the next few days as we hunt down the gremlins in the gears. We were shooting for responsive (fast) and uncluttered. Hopefully, we achieved that and this new design will render well in whatever device you use to view it. If something looks amiss, please don’t hesitate to drop a note in the comments below. NB: KrebsOnSecurity has not changed any of its advertising practices: The handful of ads we run are still image-only creatives that are vetted by me and…

On Jan. 11, Ubiquiti Inc. [NYSE:UI] — a major vendor of cloud-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as routers, network video recorders and security cameras — disclosed that a breach involving a third-party cloud provider had exposed customer account credentials. Now a source who participated in the response to that breach alleges Ubiquiti massively downplayed a “catastrophic” incident to minimize the hit to its stock price, and that the third-party cloud provider claim was a fabrication. A security professional at Ubiquiti who helped the company respond to the two-month breach beginning in December 2020 contacted KrebsOnSecurity after raising his concerns with both Ubiquiti’s whistleblower hotline and with European data protection authorities. The source — we’ll call him Adam — spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution by…