mobile devices Archives

mobile devices

Missing in Action At BlackHat: The PC

June 3, 2013 Paul Roberts

Once the target of choice for hackers of all stripes, personal computers (PC) will be -at most- a side attraction at this year’s annual Black Hat Briefings show in Las Vegas, where presentations on ways to attack mobile devices and other networked “stuff” will take center stage. Just over ten percent of the scheduled talks and turbo talks at The Black Hat Briefings in early August (5 of 47) will be devoted to attacks against what might be considered “traditional” endpoints, like end user systems and servers running Microsoft’s Windows, Apple’s Mac OSX and Linux. By contrast, more than 30% will discuss security flaws and attacks against mobile phones or other “smart” devices including wireless surveillance cameras, home automation systems and smart meters. The dearth of PC-focused talks isn’t a new trend in and of itself. As far back as 2006, talks that explicitly discussed security issues with components of Microsoft’s […]

Monoculture 2.0: Will Android’s Rise Be A Security Nightmare?

May 31, 2013 Paul Roberts

There have been a bunch of interesting articles in recent weeks that highlight the rapid expansion of Google’s Android operating system from phones and tablets to all kinds of intelligent devices. They beg the question: is Android becoming the Microsoft Windows of the fast-emerging “Internet of Things.” And, if so, we might ask: ‘What are the security implications of that?’ First the skinny on Android’s growing dominance of the intelligent device sector. Ashlee Vance over at Businessweek.com delved into that with an article “Behind the Internet of Things is Android – and its everywhere.” Vance makes the point that Android is not only the choice for 75% of the handset makers these days – it’s also become the OS of choice for anyone making anything with a processor and a networking stack. The effect of that is akin to what Microsoft encountered when Windows went from being just another PC […]

Podcast: The Big Truth – Responding To Sophisticated Attacks

May 25, 2013 Paul Roberts

If you work at a rank and file corporation in the U.S. or Europe, stories like those about the breach at the defense contractor Qinetiq are terrifying. Here’s a company that’s on the bleeding edge of technology, making autonomous vehicles and other high-tech gadgetry for the U.S. Military. Despite that, it finds itself the hapless victim of a devastating cyber breach that lasts – by all accounts – for months, or years. In the end, the attackers (likely linked to China’s People’s Liberation Army) make off with the company’s intellectual property (likely all of it) and, soon, defense contractors in Mainland China start turning out devices that look eerily similar to the ones Qinetiq makes. Ouch! If a company like Qinetiq can’t stop an attack by advanced persistent threats (APT) – or whatever name you want to use – what hope do overworked IT admins at rank and file enterprises […]

New Banking Trojan Hacks The FAQ To Fool Users

May 1, 2013 Paul Roberts

Cyber criminals are notoriously crafty and persistent, especially when it comes to defeating security measures created to thwart them. But a group behind a recent version of the Ramnit banking malware has raised their game to a new level: hacking the customer FAQ (frequently asked questions) document to make their malicious activity look like it was business-as-usual. A report on Tuesday by the security firm Trusteer finds that new variants of Ramnit targeting a UK bank have added features to game a one-time-password (OTP) feature at the bank. Among other tricks, the Ramnit variant uses an HTML injection attack to alter the wording of the bank’s customer FAQ, making it seem as if prompts created by the malware were standard security features at the bank. The report, published on the Trusteer blog, described a complex ruse in which Ramnit lies dormant on infected machines, then springs to action once a […]

BadNews: Mobile Attackers Pivot To Malicious Ads

April 22, 2013 Paul Roberts

The identification over the weekend of a large-scale outbreak of mobile malware dubbed “BadNews” is bad news, indeed for millions of Android device users, who downloaded applications from the official Google Play application store that connected their devices to a malicious advertising network, dubbed “BadNews.” The discovery of the malware-infected apps, which were downloaded between two- and nine million times, suggests a new wrinkle in the mobile malware space, with attackers turning to honest-seeming mobile ad networks to push out malicious links and collect information on compromised devices. “This is one of the first times that we’ve seen a malicious distribution network clearly posing as an ad network,” wrote Lookout’s Marc Rogers on the company blog. He speculated that the new tactic may reflect improved security on the Google Play app store following the introduction of the Bouncer malware scanner. Lookout said that the company notified Google, which removed the […]