Trump’s Still Using His Old Android Phone. That’s Very, Very Risky:
AS PART OF a broader look at President Donald Trump’s acclimation to the White House, the New York Times noted on Wednesday that Trump still uses his personal, consumer-grade Android smartphone in the White House. That’s worrying.
Even if you’re not a security expert, some potential dangers of keeping an insecure device in the White House probably come to mind right away. There’s a reason President Obama had to make do with a heavily modified BlackBerry for most of his time in office, and why security officials reportedly issued Trump a locked-down device when he took office. One that he apparently doesn’t always use. If Trump does use his old Android smartphone in his spare time—which recent@realDonaldTrump tweets sent from Android seems to support—he’s leaving himself exposed to all manner of unsavory outcomes.
Source: Wired
Over the past half-decade, a growing number of ordinary people have come to regard virtual private networking software as an essential protection against all-too-easy attacks that intercept sensitive data or inject malicious code into incoming traffic. Now, a comprehensive study of almost 300 VPN apps downloaded by millions of Android users from Google’s official Play Market finds that the vast majority of them can’t be fully trusted. Some of them don’t work at all.
Source: Ars Technica
Android 7 boasts new encryption features as the Crypto War soldiers on:
Not too long ago, the idea of smartphone encryption set off a global debate.
Now, with the release of Android 7.0, the rise of secure messaging apps, and a public awakening on cyberspying, encrypting your chats and data is easier than ever—encryption is a now marketable selling point for the world’s tech giants—even as the political controversy heats up once more.
Source: dailydot.com
Vulnerability Exposes 900M Android Devices—and Fixing Them Won’t Be Easy:
THE LATEST ANDROID vulnerability to fret about isn’t limited to any particular device, or any specific firmware version. That’s because it doesn’t start with Android at all, but with Qualcomm, the company that provides internal components for hardware manufacturers. Lots of them. In this case, 900 million Android smartphones with Qualcomm inside are at risk, and fixing them will be no easy task.
As security research firm Check Point detailed this week, the vulnerability in question is actually a set of four issues, collectively called QuadRooter, and affects Qualcomm chipsets from manufacturers ranging from HTC to LG to OnePlus to Google, which contracts with other makers for its own Nexus devices. It’s serious; compromised devices would give bad actors root access, meaning they could collect any data stored on the phone, control the camera and microphone, and track its GPS location. It’s like giving someone the keys to your house, then holding the door open for them while they make off with the jewels.
Source: Wired
Cybercriminals targeting eager Pokémon Go users with malware:
Pokémon Go is notoriously successful at sucking its players in so deeply that they can’t pay attention to the outside world or, say, oncoming cars.
Hackers are now using that eagerness to become a Pokémon master to spread a dangerous RAT (remote access tool) that allows attackers full access to a victim’s Android device, handing over complete control to the criminal, according to the security firm Proofpoint.
Source: dailydot.com
Android’s full-disk encryption just got much weaker—here’s why
Unlike Apple’s iOS, Android is vulnerable to several key-extraction techniques.
The Great iOS-Android Emoji Divide Narrows Ever So Slightly:
YOU PROBABLY KNOW already that the emoji that you see on your iOS device are different, sometimes by a wild degree, from those that your Android friends do, and vice versa. This makes for some fun confusion—is that a grimace or a grin?—but also frustration, particularly on the Android side, because many core Android emoji are objectively worse. But not for long!
Google has announced several updates as part of its latest Android N preview, but we can skip past the new 3D rendering API and launcher shortcuts and head straight to the real news, which is that Android will finally deploy emoji that look like actual people.
In the age of the internet of things, where all kinds of old-fashioned devices and technologies are now connecting to the net, everything can be hacked, including cars, cities, parking garages, and wind turbines. Now, a security researcher has proven this adage once more, finding a way to turn off the lights on tens of thousands of billboards by taking advantage of some flaws in an Android app designed to control the billboards’ lighting system.
Over the summer, Randy Westergren, an independent security researcher, found that the Android app for SmartLink, a system to remotely control billboards’ night lighting,had a series of bugs in its API. These bugs allowed any malicious hacker to easily shut off the lights on any billboard in the SmartLink system, which is provided by a company called OutdoorLink, as Westergren explained in a blog post published on Sunday.
Earlier this year, someone hacked a video billboard to display one of the internet’s most shocking and disgusting memes. But the flaws revealed by Westergren show that even old-fashioned analog billboards can be hacked, although indirectly.
Source: Vice Magazine