Tech News

Microsofts smart assistant Cortana will helpfully let hackers change a password on locked computers, access data on the device and execute malicious code, a security researcher at cybersecurity company McAfee has revealed. The vulnerability, patched Tuesday by Microsoft, is the result of default settings that enable the Hey Cortana voice activation from the lock screen. As senior principle engineer at McAfee, Cedric Cochin puts it: This led to some interesting behavior and ultimately vulnerabilities allowing arbitrary code execution. The vulnerability was submitted to Microsoft as part of the McAfee Labs Advanced Threat Research teams responsible disclosure policy, on April 23.

The VPNFilter router malware, a giant-sized IoT botnet revealed two weeks ago, just went from bad to somewhat worse. Originally thought to affect 15-20 mostly home/Soho routers and NAS devices made by Linksys, MikroTik, Netgear, TP-Link, and QNAP, this has now been expanded to include at least another 56 from Asus, D-Link, Huawei, Ubiquiti, UPVEL, and ZTE. Talos gets this information by trying to determine the models on which VPNFilter has been detected but given the size of that job (affected devices number at least 500,000, probably more) the list is unlikely to be complete. The updated alert confirms that VPNFilter has the ability to carry out man-in-the-middle interception of HTTP/S web traffic (something that SophosLabs own investigation of the malware concluded was highly likely), which means that it is not only able to monitor traffic and capture credentials but potentially deliver exploits to network devices too. Home routers have become a big target but malware able to infect so many of them is relatively rare. The last home router scare of this multi-vendor magnitude was probably DNSChanger which took years for anyone to notice, having first emerged in 2007.

The UK Governments Security Minister, Ben Wallace, has called for a new system of Digital IDs in order to end mob rule on the internet by preventing people from being able to hide behind anonymity online. You know, like Russia, Syria and China have tried repeatedly to do. Should we be more like them? People are flawed. Sometimes it can seem like for every polite, law abiding and well-mannered person there is another individual who seems intent upon highlighting the very worst of humanity. In our personal off-line lives we can often avoid such people, but in the online world you are bound to cross a few of them eventually or see their impact upon others and much of the time they do this anonymously.  But you can still avoid most of them, if you so choose. Equally we can all have our off-moments, when we let down our guard and say something that we probably should not have. In keeping with that, some topics are more likely to divide and ignite argument than they are to unite and those tend to be the biggest sparks. This is one area where Politicians are perhaps more of a target than most due to the impact they can have upon our everyday lives (e.g. Brexit). Anger quickly turns into abuse. In this context it is easier to understand Ben Wallaces otherwise odd claim of mob rule, since you would only see that if you were deliberately exposing yourself to it and that is something which politicians open the floodgates to (some of them thrive on the divisions they create). Sadly for them the easy option of simply avoiding social media altogether does not work, especially when so many of the electorate use it. Admittedly Wallace does make a fair point about the level of trolling and abuse online, although attempting to solve that via compulsory Digital IDs and then applying it only in the UK (while excluding other countries) could be rather challenging and may even be impossible, without turning the entire internet into a walled garden. Totalitarian states also happen to love walled gardens that only they and the thought police control. The logical progression of such an approach may also result in the banning of Virtual Private Networks (VPN), which are often legitimately used as a privacy or security tool and also for remote working or avoiding unfair geographic restrictions. Equally civil rights campaigners in non-democratic countries have been able to use such tools to campaign for freedom etc.

A data breach has exposed 92 million accounts on DNA testing and genealogy website MyHeritage, the company said on Tuesday. The breach was discovered by a security researcher who notified MyHeritage on Tuesday that a trove of email addresses and hashed passwords were sitting on a private server somewhere outside of the company. Because the passwords were hashed, the actual passwords were not exposed - hackers only got access to a scrambled string of text compiled by crytogaphic algorithms.

Google removed five fake ad blockers from the Chrome Store after they were flagged by a researcher, but they had already been downloaded more than 20 million times. The malicious ad blockers were discovered by Andrey Meshkov, co-founder of Adguard, who detailed his findings in a blog post. While he noted that hackers have long created cloned versions of popular ad blockers, they have grown more sophisticated. These criminals still use simple rip-offs of popular products, with a few lines of code added by the new authors.  But instead of using similar names like Adguard Hardline or Adblock Plus Premium, they spam keywords into the extensions description, trying to move it to the top search results and increase the likelihood of getting a victim to download it.

A new malware family recently infiltrated Google Play by presenting itself as a bunch of handy utilities. This malware is now detected as Andr/HiddnAd-AJ, and the name gives you an inkling of what the rogue apps do: blast you with ads, but only after lying low for a while to lull you into a fals sense of security. The offending apps have now been pulled from the Play Store, but not before some of them attracted more than 500,000 downloads. The subterfuge used by the developers to keep the Google Play Protect app-vetting process sweet seems surprisingly simple. First, the apps were, at least on the surface, what they claimed: six were QR code reading apps; and one was a so-called smart compass. In other words, if you were just trying out apps for fun, or for a one-off purpose, you would be inclined to judge them by their own descriptions.