Facebook Announces Messenger Security Features that Don't Compromise Privacy

Note that this is "announced," so we don't know when it's actually going to be implemented. Facebook today announced new features for Messenger that will alert you when messages appear to come from financial scammers or potential child abusers, displaying warnings in the Messenger app that provid...

Guardedbox - Online Client-Side Manager For Secure Storage And Secrets Sharing

GuardedBox is an open-source online client-side manager for secure storage and secrets sharing. It allows users to upload secrets to a centralized server and retrieve them at anytime and from anywhere. It also allows users to share their secrets with other users, individually or via groups. Secre...

Securing Internet Videoconferencing Apps: Zoom and Others

The NSA just published a survey of video conferencing apps. So did Mozilla. Zoom is on the good list, with some caveats. The company has done a lot of work addressing previous security concerns. It still has a bit to go on end-to-end encryption. Matthew Green looked at this. Zoom does offer...

Zoom Taps Ex-Facebook CISO Amid Security Snafus, Lawsuit

As it faces a major lawsuit, Zoom is taking a significant step to bolster security and privacy efforts by recruiting an industry heavy-hitter – former Facebook CISO Alex Stamos – to provide special counsel. It has also named third-party expert security advisory teams. The popular videoconferencin...

FBI Releases Guidance on Defending Against VTC Hijacking and Zoom-bombing

The Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI has released an article on defending against video-teleconferencing VTC hijacking referred to as “Zoom-bombing” when attacks are to the Zoom VTC platform. Many organizations and individuals are increasingly dependent on VTC platforms, such as Zoom and...

Facebook Says Encrypting Messenger by Default Will Take Years

Mark Zuckerberg promised default end-to-end encryption throughout Facebook's platforms. Nearly a year later, Messenger's not even close...

Landry's Restaurant Chain Suffers Payment Card Theft Via PoS Malware

Landry's, a popular restaurant chain in the United States, has announced a malware attack on its point of sale POS systems that allowed cybercriminals to steal customers' payment card information. Landry's owns and operates more than 600 bars, restaurants, hotels, casinos, food and beverage outle...

Security Vulnerabilities in the RCS Texting Protocol

Interesting research: SRLabs founder Karsten Nohl, a researcher with a track record of exposing security flaws in telephony systems, argues that RCS is in many ways no better than SS7, the decades-old phone system carriers still used for calling and texting, which has long been known to be...

New WhatsApp Bug Could Have Let Hackers Secretly Install Spyware On Your Devices

The recent controversies surrounding the WhatsApp hacking haven't yet settled, and the world's most popular messaging platform could be in the choppy waters once again. The Hacker News has learned that last month WhatsApp quietly patched yet another critical vulnerability in its app that could ha...

AG Barr, Officials to Facebook: Don't Encrypt Messaging

U.S. Attorney General William Barr is among government officials asking Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to halt or at least delay a plan to add end-to-end encryption to its messaging services in an effort to bolster consumer privacy. The move, unveiled Thursday, once again sparked the privacy debate...

Google Uncovers How Just Visiting Some Sites Were Secretly Hacking iPhones For Years

Beware Apple users! Your iPhone can be hacked just by visiting an innocent-looking website, confirms a terrifying report Google researchers released earlier today. The story goes back to a widespread iPhone hacking campaign that cybersecurity researchers from Google's Project Zero discovered...

Implant Teardown

Posted by Ian Beer, Project Zero In the earlier posts we examined how the attackers gained unsandboxed code execution as root on iPhones. At the end of each chain we saw the attackers calling posixspawn, passing the path to their implant binary which they dropped in /tmp. This starts the implant...

Apple Suspends Siri Program After Privacy Backlash

Apple is suspending a program that lets contractors listen in on Siri voice recordings after facing a rain of backlash regarding the privacy implications of the program. The suspension comes after a report in The Guardian last week outlining how contractors regularly listen to intimate voice...

How to securely send your personal information

This story originally ran on The Parallax and was updated on July 3, 2019. A few months ago, my parents asked a great security question: How could they securely send their passport numbers to a travel agent? They knew email wasn’t safe on its own. Standard email indeed isn’t safe for sending...

Germany Talking about Banning End-to-End Encryption

Der Spiegel is reporting that the German Ministry for Internal Affairs is planning to require all Internet message services to provide plaintext messages on demand, basically outlawing strong end-to-end encryption. Anyone not complying will be blocked, although the article doesn't say how. Cory...

WhatsApp Zero-Day Exploited in Targeted Spyware Attacks

UPDATE WhatsApp is urging users to update as soon as possible, after a zero-day vulnerability found in its messaging platform was exploited by attackers who were able to inject spyware onto victims’ phones in targeted campaigns. First reported by the Financial Times, the popular messaging app...

Hacker Breaks Into French Government's New Secure Messaging App

A white-hat hacker found a way to get into the French government's newly launched, secure encrypted messaging app that otherwise can only be accessed by officials and politicians with email accounts associated with the government identities. Dubbed "Tchap," the end-to-end encrypted, open source...

Telegram Gained 3 Million New Users During WhatsApp, Facebook Outage

WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram faced a widespread outage yesterday with users from around the world reporting issues with sending messages on WhatsApp and Messenger, posting feeds on Facebook and accessing other features on the three Facebook-owned platforms. While the outage was quite troubli...

Firefox Send — Free Encrypted File Transfer Service Now Available For All

Mozilla has made it easy for you to share large files securely and privately with whomever you want, eliminating the need to depend upon less secure free third-party services or file upload tools that burn a hole in your pocket. Mozilla has finally launched its free, end-to-end encrypted...

Securely and Anonymously Send and Receive Files: OnionShare

OnionShare is an open source tool for securely and anonymously sending and receiving files using Tor onion services. It works by starting a web server directly on your computer and making it accessible as an unguessable Tor web address that others can load in Tor Browser to download files from yo...