An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Malicious apps from a campaign called "Agent Smith" have been downloaded to 25 million Android devices, according to new research by cyber-security firm Check Point. The apps, most of them games, were distributed through third-party app stores by a Chinese group with a legitimate business helping Chinese developers promote their apps on outside platforms. Check Point is not identifying the company, because they are working with local law enforcement. About 300,000 devices were infected in the U.S.

The malware was able to copy popular apps on the phone, including WhatsApp and the web browser Opera, inject its own malicious code and replace the original app with the weaponized version, using a vulnerability in the way Google apps are updated. The hijacked apps would still work just fine, which hid the malware from users. Armed with all the permissions users had granted to the real apps, "Agent Smith" was able to hijack other apps on the phone to display unwanted ads to users. That might not seem like a significant problem, but the same security flaws could be used to hijack banking, shopping and other sensitive apps, according to Aviran Hazum, head of Check Point's analysis and response team for mobile devices. There was also a "dormant" version of "Agent Smith" in 11 apps on the Play Store, which could have been triggered into action by a banner ad containing the keyword "infect." The apps have since been removed from the Play Store, but had over 10 million downloads.

Multiple German banks have announced plans to drop support for SMS-based one-time passcodes (OTP) as a login authentication and transaction verification method. From a report: Postbank plans to drop support in August, while Raiffeisen Bank and Volksbank plan to do so in the fall, Handelsblatt reports. Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank also plan to drop support for SMS OTP but have not announced a deadline, while Consorsbank plans to discontinue it by the end of the year. Other banks like DKB and N26 have never deployed the technology, while ING has not made any public statements on its plans. The reason why German banks are dropping support for SMS OTP is because of legislation that the EU passed in 2015, set to enter into effect on September 14, this year. In 2015, the EU revised the Payment Services Directive (PSD), a set of rules that govern online payments in the EU, and issued an updated version called the PSD2. This legislation also included a clause for strong customer authentication (SCA) mechanisms.

The US Conference of Mayors unanimously adopted a resolution this week to not pay any more ransom demands to hackers following ransomware infections. From a report: "Paying ransomware attackers encourages continued attacks on other government systems, as perpetrators financially benefit," the adopted resolution reads. "The United States Conference of Mayors has a vested interest in de-incentivizing these attacks to prevent further harm," it said. "NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the United States Conference of Mayors stands united against paying ransoms in the event of an IT security breach." The resolution adopted this week at the 87th annual meeting of the US Conference of Mayors doesn't have any legal binding, but can be used as an official position to justify administrative actions, for both federal authorities and taxpayers alike. The Conference of Mayors includes over 1,400 mayors from across the US, representing cities with a population of over 30,000. The organization said that "at least 170 county, city, or state government systems have experienced a ransomware attack since 2013," and "22 of those attacks have occurred in 2019 alone."

Apple has disabled the Apple Watch Walkie Talkie app due to an unspecified vulnerability that could allow a person to listen to another customer's iPhone without consent. From a report: Apple has apologized for the bug and for the inconvenience of being unable to use the feature while a fix is made. The Walkie Talkie app on Apple Watch allows two users who have accepted an invite from each other to receive audio chats via a 'push to talk' interface reminiscent of the PTT buttons on older cell phones.

Apple has released a silent update for Mac users removing a vulnerable component in Zoom, the popular video conferencing app, which allowed websites to automatically add a user to a video call without their permission. TechCrunch reports: The Cupertino, Calif.-based tech giant told TechCrunch that the update -- now released -- removes the hidden web server, which Zoom quietly installed on users' Macs when they installed the app. Apple said the update does not require any user interaction and is deployed automatically. Although Zoom released a fixed app version on Tuesday, Apple said its actions will protect users both past and present from the undocumented web server vulnerability without affecting or hindering the functionality of the Zoom app itself. The update will now prompt users if they want to open the app, whereas before it would open automatically.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: U.S. federal agencies have five weeks to rip out Chinese-made surveillance cameras in order to comply with a ban imposed by Congress last year in an effort to thwart the threat of spying from Beijing. But thousands of the devices are still in place and chances are most won't be removed before the Aug. 13 deadline. A complex web of supply chain logistics and licensing agreements make it almost impossible to know whether a security camera is actually made in China or contains components that would violate U.S. rules. The National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, which outlines the budget and spending for the Defense Department each year, included an amendment for fiscal 2019 that would ensure federal agencies do not purchase Chinese-made surveillance cameras. The amendment singles out Zhejiang Dahua Technology Co. and Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co., both of which have raised security concerns with the U.S. government and surveillance industry.

Despite the looming deadline to satisfy the NDAA, at least 1,700 Hikvision and Dahua cameras are still operating in places where they've been banned, according to San Jose, California-based Forescout Technologies, which has been hired by some federal agencies to determine what systems are running on their networks. The actual number is likely much higher, said Katherine Gronberg, vice president of government affairs at Forescout, because only a small percentage of government offices actually know what cameras they're operating. The agencies that use software to track devices connected to their networks should be able to comply with the law and remove the cameras in time, Gronberg said. "The real issue is for organizations that don't have the tools in place to detect the banned devices," she added. Also, since many of Dahua and Hikvision's cameras are sent to equipment manufacturers and sold under those brands, those cameras have completely different labels and packaging. This means it would be nearly impossible to tell if the thousands of video cameras installed across the country are actually re-labelled Chinese devices.

Samba says version 4.11.0 will switch off previously on-by-default support for the aging and easily subverted SMB1 protocol. Slashdot reader Jeremy Allison - Sam shares a report from The Register detailing the new changes: The open-source SMB toolkit's developers say the Samba 4.11 build, currently in preview, will by default set SMB2_02 as the earliest supported version of the Windows file-sharing protocol. Admins will still have the option to allow SMB1 on their servers if they so choose, but support will be turned off by default. The move by Samba to drop SMB1 can be seen as long overdue, given that Microsoft has been moving to get rid of the file-server protocol version from its operating systems for several years now, even before it was revealed to be one of the NSA's favorite weak points to exploit. You can read the 4.11 release notes here.

State-sponsored hackers have breached ICS-Forth, the organization that manages Greece's top-level domain country codes of .gr and .el. From a report: ICS-Forth, which stands for the Institute of Computer Science of the Foundation for Research and Technology, publicly admitted to the security incident in emails it sent to domain owners on April 19. The hackers behind the breach are the same group detailed in a Cisco Talos report from April, which the company named Sea Turtle. The group uses a relatively novel approach to hacking targets. Instead of targeting victims directly, they breach or gain access to accounts at domain registrars and managed DNS providers where they make modifications to a company's DNS settings. By modifying DNS records for internal servers, they redirect traffic meant for a company's legitimate apps or webmail services to clone servers where they carry out man-in-the-middle attacks and intercept login credentials.

The Caps Lock, Num Lock, and Scroll Lock LEDs on a keyboard can be used to exfiltrate data from a secure air-gapped system, academics from an Israeli university have proved. From a report: The attack, which they named CTRL-ALT-LED, is nothing that regular users should worry about but is a danger for highly secure environments such as government networks that store top-secret documents or enterprise networks dedicated to storing non-public proprietary information. he attack requires some pre-requisites, such as the malicious actor finding a way to infect an air-gapped system with malware beforehand. CTRL-ALT-LED is only an exfiltration method. But once these prerequisites are met, the malware running on a system can make the LEDs of an USB-connected keyboard blink at rapid speeds, using a custom transmission protocol and modulation scheme to encode the transmitted data. A nearby attacker can record these tiny light flickers, which they can decode at a later point, using the same modulation scheme used to encode it.

Mozilla today launched Firefox 68 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. Firefox 68 includes a darker reader view, recommended extensions, IT Pro customizations, and more. From a report: As part of this release, Mozilla has curated a list of recommended extensions "that have been thoroughly reviewed for security, usability, and usefulness." You can find the list on the Get Add-ons page in the Firefox Add-ons Manager (about:addons). While Firefox has had dark mode for months, the Reader View's dark contrast only covered the text area. Now, when you change the contrast to dark, all sections of the site (including sidebars and toolbars) will be immersed in dark mode.

With Firefox 60, Mozilla introduced an enterprise version of the browser that employers can customize. This let IT professionals configure Firefox for their organization, either using Group Policy on Windows or a JSON file that works across Windows, Mac, and Linux. With Firefox 68, Mozilla has added more enterprise policies -- to configure or remove the new tab page, turn off search suggestions, and so on.

A security researcher has publicly disclosed new vulnerabilities in the USB dongles (receivers) used by Logitech wireless keyboards, mice, and presentation clickers. New submitter raikoseagle shares a report: The vulnerabilities allow attackers to sniff on keyboard traffic, but also inject keystrokes (even into dongles not connected to a wireless keyboard) and take over the computer to which a dongle has been connected. When encryption is used to protect the connection between the dongle and its paired device, the vulnerabilities also allow attackers to recover the encryption key. Furthermore, if the USB dongle uses a "key blacklist" to prevent the paired device from injecting keystrokes, the vulnerabilities allow the bypassing of this security protection system. Marcus Mengs, the researcher who discovered these vulnerabilities, said he notified Logitech about his findings, and the vendor plans to patch some of the reported issues, but not all.

Security researcher Jonathan Leitschuh has publicly disclosed a serious zero-day vulnerability for the Zoom video conference app on Macs that could allow websites to turn on user cameras without permission. The Verge reports: He has demonstrated that any website can open up a video-enabled call on a Mac with the Zoom app installed. That's possible in part because the Zoom app apparently installs a web server on Macs that accepts requests regular browsers wouldn't. In fact, if you uninstall Zoom, that web server persists and can reinstall Zoom without your intervention. Leitschuh details how he responsibly disclosed the vulnerability to Zoom back in late March, giving the company 90 days to solve the problem. According to Leitschuh's account, Zoom doesn't appear to have done enough to resolve the issue. The vulnerability was also disclosed to both the Chromium and Mozilla teams, but since it's not an issue with their browsers, there's not much those developers can do. The report notes that you can "patch" the vulnerability by making sure the Mac app is up to date and also disabling the setting that allows Zoom to turn your camera on when joining a meeting. "Again, simply uninstalling Zoom won't fix this problem, as that web server persists on your Mac," reports The Verge. "Turning off the web server requires running some terminal commands, which can be found at the bottom of the Medium post."

Microsoft has released a public preview of a new service aimed at helping businesses assess their app-compatibility levels ahead of deploying new Windows 10 feature updates. From a report: It allows for the quick and easy creation of app inventories to make compatibility checks simpler. Brad Anderson, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365, says that the tool makes use of machine learning and the cloud to make it easier to deploy and update Windows 10. The aim with Desktop Analytics is to avoid the compatibility problems that stand in the way of keeping machines up to date.

The Microsoft security team has issued a warning today about ongoing malware campaigns that are distributing the Astaroth malware using fileless and living-off-the-land techniques that make it harder for traditional antivirus solutions to spot the ongoing attacks. From a report: The attacks were detected by the team behind Windows Defender ATP, the commercial version of the company's Windows Defender free antivirus. Andrea Lelli, a member of the Windows Defender ATP team said alarms bells sounded at Microsoft's offices when they detected a huge and sudden spike in usage of the Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line (WMIC) tool. This is a legitimate tool that ships with all modern versions of Windows, but the sudden spike in usage suggested a pattern specific to malware campaigns. When Microsoft looked closer, it discovered a malware campaign that consisted of a massive spam operation that was sending out emails with a link to a website hosting a .LNK shortcut file.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has proposed another set of robocall rules, this time to ban malicious calls that spoof caller IDs in text messages and international calls. From a report: The anti-spoofing rules will be voted on by the FCC Aug. 1, and they already have the support of more than 40 state attorneys general, Pai said Monday. These new rules would close the loopholes in targeting international callers, including one-way interconnected VoIP calls, and scammers using text messaging. They are part of the FCC's "multi-pronged approach to battle the noxious intrusion of illegal robocalls, as well as malicious caller ID spoofing," Pai said. Last month, the FCC voted unanimously on a proposal to give mobile phone companies greater power to "aggressively block" unwanted robocalls.

AmiMoJo writes: British Airways is facing a record fine of 183m Pound ($230m) for last year's breach of its security systems. The Information Commissioner's Office said the incident took place after users of British Airways' website were diverted to a fraudulent site. Through this false site, details of around 500,000 customers were harvested by the attackers. The BA penalty amounts to 1.5% of its worldwide turnover in 2017, less than the possible maximum of 4%. The fine amounts to around 10% of BA's profits for that year.

An excerpt from a post on Trail of Bits: From major open source projects to exciting new proprietary software, we've seen it all. But one common denominator in all of these systems is that for some inexplicable reason people still seem to think RSA is a good cryptosystem to use. Let me save you a bit of time and money and just say outright -- if you come to us with a codebase that uses RSA, you will be paying for the hour of time required for us to explain why you should stop using it. RSA is an intrinsically fragile cryptosystem containing countless foot-guns which the average software engineer cannot be expected to avoid. Weak parameters can be difficult, if not impossible, to check, and its poor performance compels developers to take risky shortcuts. Even worse, padding oracle attacks remain rampant 20 years after they were discovered. While it may be theoretically possible to implement RSA correctly, decades of devastating attacks have proven that such a feat may be unachievable in practice.

Remember when the small town of Lake City, Florida paid $460,000 for a ransomware's decryption key?

As they slowly recover 100 years of encrypted municipal records, the New York Times looks at the lessons learned, arguing that cyberattackers have simply found a juicy target: small governments with weak computer protections -- and strong insurance policies. The city had backup files for all its data, but they were on the same network -- and also inaccessible... The city's insurer, the Florida League of Cities, hired a consultant to handle the negotiations with the hackers via the email addresses that had been posted on the city server. The initial demands were refused outright, and city technicians raced to find a workaround. "We tried a lot of different solutions," said Joseph Helfenberger, the city manager. None of them worked. "We were at the end of the day faced with either re-creating the data from scratch, or paying the ransom," he said.

The insurer's negotiator settled on a payment of 42 Bitcoins, or about $460,000, Helfenberger said, of which the city would pay a $10,000 deductible. After the payment, the hackers provided a decryption key, and recovery efforts began in earnest.

As it turned out, recovery would not be simple. Even with the decryption key, each terabyte has taken about 12 hours to recover. Much of the city's data, nearly a month after the onset of the attack, has still not been unlocked... In Lake City, the information technology director, blamed for both failing to secure the network and taking too long to recover the data, wound up losing his job.
Mark A. Orlando, the chief technology officer for Raytheon Intelligence Information and Services, tells the Times it's unrealistic to expect cities to never pay the ransom. "Anyone who said that has never been in charge of a municipality that has half their services down and no choice."

But does that create an ever-widening problem? The FBI knows of at least 1,500 reported ransomware incidents last year, according to the article, although the Illinois computer programmer offering free decryption help at ID Ransomware says he's receiving 1,500 requests for assistance every day.

"Windows 10 continues to be a danger zone," writes Forbes senior contributor Gordon Kelly: Not only have problems been piling up in recent weeks, Microsoft has also been worryingly deceptive about the operation of key services. And now the company has warned millions about another problem. Spotted by the always excellent Windows Latest, Microsoft has told tens of millions of Windows 10 users that the latest KB4501375 update may break the platform's Remote Access Connection Manager (RASMAN). And this can have serious repercussions.

The big one is VPNs. RASMAN handles how Windows 10 connects to the internet and it is a core background task for VPN services to function normally. Given the astonishing growth in VPN usage for everything from online privacy and important work tasks to unlocking Netflix and YouTube libraries, this has the potential to impact heavily on how you use your computer. Interestingly, in detailing the issue Microsoft states that it only affects Windows 10 1903 - the latest version of the platform.

The problem is Windows 10 1903 accounts for a conservative total of at least 50M users.
Microsoft estimates they'll have a solution available "in late July," adding that the issue only occurs "when a VPN profile is configured as an Always On VPN (AOVPN) connection with or without device tunnel. This does not affect manual only VPN profiles or connections." That support page also offers a work-around which involves configuring the default telemetry settings in either the group policy settings or with a registry value.

UPDATE (7/7/2019): ZDNet is strongly criticizing Forbes' article, arguing that the issue affects only a small number of Windows users, "when the diagnostic data level setting is manually configured to the non-default setting of 0." For those who don't understand how unusual that configuration is, note that it applies only to Windows 10 Enterprise and that it can be set only using Group Policy on corporate networks or by manually editing the registry. You can't accidentally enable this setting. And you can't deliberately set it on a system running Windows 10 Home or Pro, because it is for Enterprise edition only.

Trailrunner7 quotes Duo.com's Decipher blog: There's an interesting and troubling attack happening to some people involved in the OpenPGP community that makes their certificates unusable and can essentially break the OpenPGP implementation of anyone who tries to import one of the certificates.

The attack is quite simple and doesn't exploit any technical vulnerabilities in the OpenPGP software, but instead takes advantage of one of the inherent properties of the keyserver network that's used to distribute certificates. Keyservers are designed to allow people to discover the public certificates of other people with whom they want to communicate over a secure channel. One of the properties of the network is that anyone who has looked at a certificate and verified that it belongs to another specific person can add a signature, or attestation, to the certificate. That signature basically serves as the public stamp of approval from one user to another...

Last week, two people involved in the OpenPGP community discovered that their public certificates had been spammed with tens of thousands of signatures -- one has nearly 150,000 -- in an apparent effort to render them useless. The attack targeted [OpenPGP project developers] Robert J. Hansen and Daniel Kahn Gillmor, but the root problem may end up affecting many other people, too...

Matthew Green, a cryptographer and associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, said that the attack points out some of the weaknesses in the entire OpenPGP infrastructure.

"PGP is old and kind of falling apart. There's not enough people maintaining it and it's full of legacy code. There are some people doing the lord's work in keeping it up, but it's not enough," Green said. "Think about like an old hospital that's crumbling and all of the doctors have left but there's still some people keeping the emergency room open and helping patients. At some point you have to ask whether it's better just to let it close and let something better come along.

"I think PGP is preventing the development of better stuff and the person who did this is clearly demonstrating this problem."

On Thursday ZDNet quoted a disturbing blog post from OpenPGP project developer Robert "rjh Hansen, who warned that "given the ease of the attack and the highly publicized success of the attack, it is prudent to believe other certificates will soon be poisoned."