Catégorie : Sécurité

Posted by Krish Vitaldevara, Director of Product Management Trust & Safety, Google PlayProviding safe experiences to billions of users and millions of Android developers has been one of the highest priorities for Google Play for many years. Last year we introduced new policies, improved our systems, and further optimized our processes to better protect our users, assist good developers and strengthen our guard against bad apps and developers. Additionally, in 2020, Google Play Protect scanned over 100B installed apps each day for malware across billions of devices. Users come to Google Play to find helpful, reliable apps on everything from COVID-19 vaccine information to new forms of entertainment, grocery delivery, communication and more. As such, we introduced a series of policies and new developer support to continue to elevate information…

What was the best news you heard so far this month? Mine was learning that KrebsOnSecurity is listed as a restricted competitor by Gartner Inc. [NYSE:IT] — a $4 billion technology goliath whose analyst reports can move markets and shape the IT industry. Earlier this month, a reader pointed my attention to the following notice from Gartner to clients who are seeking to promote Gartner reports about technology products and services: What that notice says is that KrebsOnSecurity is somehow on Gartner’s “non exhaustive list of competitors,” i.e., online venues where technology companies are not allowed to promote Gartner reports about their products and services. The bulk of Gartner’s revenue comes from subscription-based IT market research. As the largest organization dedicated to the analysis of software, Gartner’s network of analysts…

On Aug. 13, 2020, someone uploaded a suspected malicious file to VirusTotal, a service that scans submitted files against more than five dozen antivirus and security products. Last month, Microsoft and FireEye identified that file as a newly-discovered fourth malware backdoor used in the sprawling SolarWinds supply chain hack. An analysis of the malicious file and other submissions by the same VirusTotal user suggest the account that initially flagged the backdoor as suspicious belongs to IT personnel at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), a division of the U.S. Commerce Department that handles telecommunications and Internet policy. Both Microsoft and FireEye published blog posts on Mar. 4 concerning a new backdoor found on high-value targets that were compromised by the SolarWinds attackers. FireEye refers to the backdoor as “Sunshuttle,”…

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…