Fake Android apps uploaded to Play store by notorious Sandworm hackers

The Russian ‘Sandworm’ hacking group (not to be confused with the malware of the same name) has been caught repeatedly uploading fake and modified Android apps to Google’s Play store. They were detected by Google Threat Analysis Group (TAG), making the attacks public during a presentation at the recent CyberwarCon conference. In a blog on the topic this week, Google says the first attack connected to the group happened in South Korea in December 2017 when the group used bogus developer accounts to upload eight different apps to the Play Store. On the face of it, the campaign was unsuccessful, garnering fewer than 10 installs per app, but it’s likely that the targets were highly selective. That came after an attack in September 2017, when TAG detected that Sandworm hackers...

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iPhone holes and Android malware – how to keep your phone safe

Recent news stories about mobile phone security – or, more precisely, about mobile phone insecurity – have been more dramatic than usual. That’s because we’re in what you might call “the month after the week before” – last week being when the annual Black Hat USA conference took place in Las Vegas. A lot of detailed cybersecurity research gets presented for the first time at that event, so the security stories that emerge after the conference papers have been delivered often dig a lot deeper than usual. In particular, we heard from two mobile security researchers in Google’s Project Zero team: one looked at the Google Android ecosystem; the other at Apple’s iOS operating system. Natalie Silvanovich documented a number of zero-day security holes in iOS...

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Update your iPhone – remote control holes revealed by researchers

Google Project Zero researcher Natalie Silvanovich has just published a fascinating blog articleentitled The Fully Remote Attack Surface of the iPhone. This work, carried out by Silvanovich and research colleague Samuel Groß, was also the topic of a presentation she gave at this year’s Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. Silvanovich’s article is technical but not overly so, making it well worth a look even if you don’t have any formal coding experience. Notably, she reminds us all how easy it is to open up software to remote attacks, even if that software isn’t what you’d conventionally think of as server-side code, and even if it’s running on a device that you wouldn’t think of a server. By the way, despite the revelatory...

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mobile malware alert

NEWS Russian hackers create fake versions of popular apps for espionage, - media 112 International "Lookout has discovered a highly targeted mobile malware threat that uses a new and sophisticated set of custom Android surveillanceware tools ... Flag as irrelevant Agent Smith: The new virus to hit mobile devices Backend News Check Point researchers recently discovered a new variant of mobile malware that has quietly infected around 25 million devices, while the user ... Flag as irrelevant No environment is immune to cyber attacks-Check Point study reveals IT News Africa Check Point's “Cyber Attack Trends: 2019 Mid-Year Report” reveals banking malwarehas evolved to...

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