‘AVPass’ Sneaks Malware Past Android Antivirus Apps
Researchers at Black Hat USA will release a toolset that studies and then cheats specific Android AV apps. A team of researchers from Georgia Tech built an Android hacking tool that snuck past nearly all of 58 Android AV antivirus programs in tests conducted via VirusTotal. Their AVPass toolkit includes a query function that vets…
Apple iOS Malware Growth Outpaces that of Android
Number of iOS devices running malicious apps more than tripled in three consecutive quarters, while infected Android devices remained largely flat, report shows. iPhones and other devices running Apple’s iOS have seen a jump in malicious apps attacking them while Android malware infections have remained largely stable, according to a report released today by mobile…
Elon Musk’s top cybersecurity concern: Preventing a fleet-wide hack of Teslas
“AI is a fundamental, existential risk for human civilization,” Tesla and Space X CEO Elon Musk said at the National Governors Association summer meeting. He doesn’t think people “fully appreciate that.” AI and a possible robot apocalypse is just one topic covered by Musk, and we’ll get back to that; but since a Tesla is…
PoS Malware Hits Avanti Payment Kiosks
Micro markets solutions provider Avanti Markets has informed customers that their personal, payment card and biometric data may have been stolen by cybercriminals who managed to infect some of its kiosks with malware. According to the company, which serves 1.6 million customers across 46 U.S. states, the malware was designed to harvest information such as…
Google Patches Critical Vulnerabilities in Android
Google on Wednesday announced that a total of 138 vulnerabilities were addressed in the Android platform with the release of this month’s set of security patches. The July 2017 Android Security Bulletin was split in two partial security patch level strings: the 2017-07-01 security patch level that addresses issues in the platform itself, and the 2017-07-05 security patch…
Social media is a cybersecurity risk for business
By itself, social media might not constitute a cyberthreat but once again, employees who ignore best practices around security are making it easy for scammers. It’s even been described as the perfect hunting ground for illegal activity. Social media has also turned into a dandy reconnaissance tool that cybercriminals use to socially engineer their victims. When someone neglects their privacy settings or publicly posts personal notes and photos, they can leave cybercriminals free to use their information…
The Law of Unintended Outbreak – Who Is at Risk from Petya?
Hot on the heels of the global WannaCry outbreak in May, yesterday saw a wave of what looked like copycat malware sweeping the globe again. However, on closer inspection there may more to this than meets the eye, more than a simple new variant of an already established ransomware borrowing propagation techniques from WannaCry. The…
Video Game Firms Targeted With “Paranoid” PlugX Malware
Companies in the video game industry and possibly other sectors have been targeted in attacks involving improved variants of the notorious PlugX remote access trojan (RAT). Palo Alto Networks has spotted several interesting PlugX samples believed to have been used by the same threat actor. While the company has not provided any details on the…
Petya Weren’t Expecting This: Ransomware Takes Systems Hostage Across the Globe
Early on Tuesday, June 27, reports began to circulate that organizations in the Ukraine and elsewhere in Europe were suffering ransomware attacks. It quickly became clear that this Petya attack could equal or surpass the May WannaCry attack. WannaCry’s spread was so successful because it was powered by a flaw in Windows, and although Microsoft…
With ransomware, pay up if you want to keep paying
A hospital CEO is contacted in the middle of the night with a dire warning. Hackers have taken control of computer systems used for patient care, CT scans, and lab work. The hacker wants money. Rather than pay the ransom, the hospital CEO enlists several experts to try to break back into the system. It…