Catégorie : Actualités

Tavis Ormandy, Software Engineer and Daniel Moghimi, Senior Research Scientist Finding and mitigating security vulnerabilities is critical to keeping Internet users safe.  However, the more complex a system becomes, the harder it is to secure—and that is also the case with computing hardware and processors, which have developed highly advanced capabilities over the years. This post will detail this trend by exploring Downfall and Zenbleed, two new security vulnerabilities (one of which was disclosed today) that prior to mitigation had the potential to affect billions of personal and cloud computers, signifying the importance of vulnerability research and cross-industry collaboration. Had these vulnerabilities not been discovered by Google researchers, and instead by adversaries, they would have enabled attackers to compromise Internet users. For both vulnerabilities, Google worked closely with our partners…

Posted by Roger Piqueras Jover, Yomna Nasser, and Sudhi Herle Android is the first mobile operating system to introduce advanced cellular security mitigations for both consumers and enterprises. Android 14 introduces support for IT administrators to disable 2G support in their managed device fleet. Android 14 also introduces a feature that disables support for null-ciphered cellular connectivity. Hardening network security on Android The Android Security Model assumes that all networks are hostile to keep users safe from network packet injection, tampering, or eavesdropping on user traffic. Android does not rely on link-layer encryption to address this threat model. Instead, Android establishes that all network traffic should be end-to-end encrypted (E2EE). When a user connects to cellular networks for their communications (data, voice, or SMS), due to the distinctive nature of…

WormGPT, a private new chatbot service advertised as a way to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to write malicious software without all the pesky prohibitions on such activity enforced by the likes of ChatGPT and Google Bard, has started adding restrictions of its own on how the service can be used. Faced with customers trying to use WormGPT to create ransomware and phishing scams, the 23-year-old Portuguese programmer who created the project now says his service is slowly morphing into “a more controlled environment.” Image: SlashNext.com. The large language models (LLMs) made by ChatGPT parent OpenAI or Google or Microsoft all have various safety measures designed to prevent people from abusing them for nefarious purposes — such as creating malware or hate speech. In contrast, WormGPT has promoted itself as a…

Jay Hou, Software Engineer, TrustFabric (transparency.dev)  Pixel Binary Transparency With Android powering billions of devices, we’ve long put security first. There’s the more visible security features you might interact with regularly, like spam and phishing protection, as well as less obvious integrated security features, like daily scans for malware. For example, Android Verified Boot strives to ensure all executed code comes from a trusted source, rather than from an attacker or corruption. And with attacks on software and mobile devices constantly evolving, we’re continually strengthening these features and adding transparency into how Google protects users. This blog post peeks under the hood of Pixel Binary Transparency, a recent addition to Pixel security that puts you in control of checking if your Pixel is running a trusted installation of its operating…

One frustrating aspect of email phishing is the frequency with which scammers fall back on tried-and-true methods that really have no business working these days. Like attaching a phishing email to a traditional, clean email message, or leveraging link redirects on LinkedIn, or abusing an encoding method that makes it easy to disguise booby-trapped Microsoft Windows files as relatively harmless documents. KrebsOnSecurity recently heard from a reader who was puzzled over an email he’d just received saying he needed to review and complete a supplied W-9 tax form. The missive was made to appear as if it were part of a mailbox delivery report from Microsoft 365 about messages that had failed to deliver. The reader, who asked to remain anonymous, said the phishing message contained an attachment that appeared…

Researchers say mobile malware purveyors have been abusing a bug in the Google Android platform that lets them sneak malicious code into benign mobile apps and evade security scanning tools. Google says it has updated its app malware detection mechanisms in response to the new research. At issue is a mobile malware obfuscation method identified by researchers at ThreatFabric, a security firm based in Amsterdam. Aleksandr Eremin, a senior malware analyst at the company, told KrebsOnSecurity they recently encountered a number of mobile banking trojans abusing a bug present in all Android OS versions that involves corrupting components of an app so that its new evil bits will be ignored as invalid by popular mobile security scanning tools, while the app as a whole gets accepted as valid by Android…

Maddie Stone, Security Researcher, Threat Analysis Group (TAG) This is Google’s fourth annual year-in-review of 0-days exploited in-the-wild [2021, 2020, 2019] and builds off of the mid-year 2022 review. The goal of this report is not to detail each individual exploit, but instead to analyze the exploits from the year as a whole, looking for trends, gaps, lessons learned, and successes.  Executive Summary 41 in-the-wild 0-days were detected and disclosed in 2022, the second-most ever recorded since we began tracking in mid-2014, but down from the 69 detected in 2021.  Although a 40% drop might seem like a clear-cut win for improving security, the reality is more complicated. Some of our key takeaways from 2022 include: N-days function like 0-days on Android due to long patching times. Across the Android…

The Russian government today handed down a treason conviction and 14-year prison sentence on Iyla Sachkov, the former founder and CEO of one of Russia’s largest cybersecurity firms. Sachkov, 37, has been detained for nearly two years under charges that the Kremlin has kept classified and hidden from public view, and he joins a growing roster of former Russian cybercrime fighters who are now serving hard time for farcical treason convictions. Ilya Sachkov. Image: Group-IB.com. In 2003, Sachkov founded Group-IB, a cybersecurity and digital forensics company that quickly earned a reputation for exposing and disrupting large-scale cybercrime operations, including quite a few that were based in Russia and stealing from Russian companies and citizens. In September 2021, the Kremlin issued treason charges against Sachkov, although it has refused to disclose…

Researchers this month uncovered a two-year-old Linux-based remote access trojan dubbed AVrecon that enslaves Internet routers into botnet that bilks online advertisers and performs password-spraying attacks. Now new findings reveal that AVrecon is the malware engine behind a 12-year-old service called SocksEscort, which rents hacked residential and small business devices to cybercriminals looking to hide their true location online. Image: Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs. In a report released July 12, researchers at Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs called the AVrecon botnet “one of the largest botnets targeting small-office/home-office (SOHO) routers seen in recent history,” and a crime machine that has largely evaded public attention since first being spotted in mid-2021. “The malware has been used to create residential proxy services to shroud malicious activity such as password spraying, web-traffic proxying and…

Many things have changed since 2018, such as the names of the companies in the Fortune 100 list. But one aspect of that vaunted list that hasn’t shifted much since is that very few of these companies list any security professionals within their top executive ranks. The next time you receive a breach notification letter that invariably says a company you trusted places a top priority on customer security and privacy, consider this: Only four of the Fortune 100 companies currently list a security professional in the executive leadership pages of their websites. This is actually down from five of the Fortune 100 in 2018, the last time KrebsOnSecurity performed this analysis. A review of the executives pages published by the 2022 list of Fortune 100 companies found only four…