Security

Huawei’s Chief Financial Officer, Meng Wanzhou, has been granted bail at a hearing in a court in Canada on Tuesday (December 11). The executive’s bail has been set at CA$10 million (~US$7.5 million) and she has had to give up her Chinese and Hong Kong passports. In a possible act of retaliation, Chinese officials have detained a Canadian citizen.

It has been reported that the new Sony PlayStation Classic has already been hacked, even though the console has only just been released. Apparently, hackers have been able to run software on the device using a USB flash drive, after discovering that the PlayStation Classic’s security key is on the system itself. The console has been met with a generally lukewarm response so far.

Supermicro has published a letter to its customers to explicitly state that no evidence of tampering was discovered in its hardware during a recent thorough internal review. An article from Bloomberg claimed that Supermicro products had been compromised by Chinese spy chips, which had then affected servers used by companies like Amazon and Apple.

Ever since Google's Chrome browser launched, a large part of internet users have used the browser over competitors such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Explorer, and Edge. With the death of Edge and Microsoft's move to a Chromium based browser, Mozilla is warning the world of an impending Google monopoly.

Huawei’s Chief Financial Officer, Meng Wanzhou, has appeared in court in Canada today. The high-level executive was at the Supreme Court of British Columbia for her bail hearing where she listened to the reasons behind her recent arrest. American officials want Meng to be extradited to the US to face charges of offenses relating to fraud.

A spokesperson for the Canadian Department of Justice has confirmed the arrest of Meng Wanzhou, the current Chief Financial Officer and Deputy Chairwoman of Huawei Technologies. It’s believed Meng was detained by Canadian authorities for possible extradition to the US. Meng Wanzhou, also known as Sabrina Meng, is the daughter of Huawei’s founder and president, Ren Zhengfei.

Since the research team who discovered the SplitSpectre attack used SpiderMonkey 52.7.4 — the JavaScript engine in Firefox — to target both Intel and AMD chips nobody seems to be safe anymore. The attack has been successfully carried out against Intel Haswell, Intel Skylake, and AMD Ryzen processors.

Bitcoin has closed at a price of US$3,964.89 today, keeping the well-known digital currency under the US$4,000 mark. Its value actually dropped to a low of US$3,505 on November 25 but has managed to gain a little over the last few days. However, a market analyst for IG Group has stated that the virtual currency is coming close to a crucial “capitulation moment.”

Dell has published a press release that will be of some concern to customers that use its network. The company suffered from a recent cyber attack, and although the attempted hack was apparently “detected and disrupted” it is possible that some information was stolen. The attack targeted names, emails, and hashed passwords; credit card details were not extracted.

Nine people and two companies in South Korea have been charged with selling Samsung technology to a Chinese rival. It is believed bendable OLED technology, which is expected to be incorporated in the South Korean company’s upcoming foldable smartphone, was included in the criminal exchange. The Chinese company that received the information has not been named.

Launching for users in North America only for now, the Eurocom service promises to update your laptop software, BIOS, anti-virus, operating system, and more for a small fee. A "deep cleaning" of the fans, hinges, and motherboard is also an option even for difficult-to-service laptops.

DriveSavers, one of the world's leading data recovery companies, now offers a service for unlocking smartphones and tablets that have a locked passcode, including iPhones and iPads. DriveSavers claims to be the only company that offers this level of device unlocking and data recovery outside of law enforcement, but the service costs a staggering US$3900.

A group known for Nintendo Switch piracy has obtained and distributed a full file dump of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, set to release in two weeks on December 7th. While early game leaks are not uncommon, a leak this far in advance is quite unusual, especially a leak of a game as hotly anticipated as Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

The UK Parliament has seized important internal Facebook documents from an executive of the software start-up Six4Three. The unprecedented move is believed to be partly in response for Mark Zuckerberg’s failure to stand before British politicians and answer questions in regard to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook is also facing accusations that employees knew about privacy policy loopholes and assisted in exploiting them.

In a report published by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC), it was revealed that LinkedIn has been using 18 million non-user emails to generate targeted ads on Facebook. It was also shown that LinkedIn has been using the personal data of its users to automatically build professional networks.

According to malware researcher Lukas Stefanko, Google Play users have installed a number of driving game apps that are actually malware. The 13 affected apps, which all come from the same developer, had been downloaded and installed over half a million times before Google pulled them from its store. Two of the apps had actually been trending, offering greater visibility to users.

Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and other leading cryptocurrencies have been experiencing sharp falls in their prices in the market recently. Bitcoin in particular has suffered a terrible week that will have owners feeling nervous about their digital currency holding. The well-known cryptocurrency has seen its price drop by over US$2,000 in less than seven days.

Tumblr's disappearance from Apple's App Store finally has an official reason: what was first simply described as "an issue" was, in fact, child pornography that slipped through the filters — enough of it to make the app vanish. This is not the first time Tumblr has run into pornography-related problems — most likely not the last time, either.

Apple’s stock price seems to have stabilized and even briefly bounced back after days of steep decline. The NASDAQ community has offered a “bullish” rating for the stock, implying there is still plenty of optimism in the company’s recovery. However, it’s unlikely Mark Zuckerberg is going to be investing in the Cupertino-based firm any time soon.

In a paper presented at a biometric securities conference, a research team from NYU showed off a new algorithm for cracking fingerprint readers. The system, named "DeepMasterPrints," operates in similar fashion to a dictionary attack for passwords. DeepMasterPrints uses a library of fingerprint images and permutes them until it finds a match.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has formally re-named HTTP-over-QUIC as HTTP/3. This means that it is the next generation in internet-traffic-enabling protocols. HTTP/3 essentially allows QUIC to supplant TCP, and may hasten the adoption of TLS 1.3.

Apple has confirmed to The Verge that its T2 chip will limit the ability to repair new Macs as it feels that the chip is crucial to enabling modern security features on Mac computers. However, critics are concerned that Apple's move will greatly impact enthusiasts and third-party repair shops thereby preventing them from offering aftermarket services to Mac owners.

CloudFlare has released a new app that will route your Android device's internet traffic through its local services, effectively changing your phone's DNS. While this may be a boon for privacy advocates that bemoan the lack of DNS server choice in Android 8.1 (and below), there are a few caveats. The biggest is that the app acts as a VPN, preventing users from accessing any other VPN at the same time.

Valimail, a US authority in online authentication, has released the results of a study conducted on the ability to spot false election campaign material sent via email. It has found that only 20% of a group identifying as Republicans identified a fake sent by their candidate, compared to just under 40% of Democrats.

The BBC has reported that the private messages associated with a minimum of 81,000 Facebook accounts have been stolen. This data was hacked using a browser extension, then offered for sale online. The security company Digital Shadows has reportedly confirmed this theft.

A new CVE may enable yet another side-channel exploit in Intel processors. This vulnerability, known as CVE-2018-5407 (or "PortSmash"), targets Hyper-Threading (or simultaneous multi-threading (SMT)). It is confirmed as effective in Skylake and Kaby Lake chips, and could affect others.

Google's latest iteration of the reCAPTCHA system, reCAPTCHA v3, is now available to website administrators and webmasters. reCAPTCHA v3 runs in the background, tracking user behavior and assigning a risk score based on that behavior. Administrators can use this score to assign thresholds requiring further authentication if needed, allowing the bot-battling system to run unobtrusively for most users.

The Moto G5 and Moto G5 Plus are now receiving an update to Android 8.1 Oreo. While receiving a year old update is bad enough, the phones are also receiving the June 2018 Android security patch, putting the devices' security four months behind the curve.

Gab, a social media alternative to the likes of Facebook and Twitter, has come under fire yet again for posts from its users. This time, anti-Semitic posts from the Pittsburgh shooter, who shot and killed 11 people in a synagogue yesterday, prompted PayPal to ban Gab from its payment services and platform.

Most people who own connected devices appear not to need them in their everyday lives. This is one of the findings of a new study into IoT use in the home and similar settings. 29% of these users were unsure of how their data was used across all their devices.

Web service provider Yahoo has agreed to pay out US$50 million in damages in response to the huge data breaches the company suffered from in 2013 and 2014. Once the settlement has been legally approved, Yahoo accountholders affected by the breaches will be able to make financial claims against the company and gain free access to a credit-monitoring service.

Google and Apple can celebrate because the Huawei Mate 20 Pro and its non-Pro sibling will not give them a hard time in the US. Unfortunately for Huawei's US fans, the Chinese company has just confirmed that these two devices will not be available locally. However, European and Asian variants might be imported.

Supermicro has sent out a letter to its customers to reassure them that the tech company will be carrying out a thorough internal review of its hardware in regard to allegations made by a Bloomberg article. The news item argued that products from Supermicro had been compromised by tiny spy chips, supposedly planted by Chinese intelligence officers.

Intel may be implementing in-silicon solutions against Spectre and meltdown attacks, but not all threat variants can be identified this way. MIT's DAWG solution can detect all variants plus similar speculative attacks, and it can easily be integrated in operating systems without serious performance hits.

Google has detailed what is so special about the new Titan M custom silicon it has baked into the Pixel 3 to help secure the device. In its latest blog post since the official launch of the device, Google has identified four key areas where the new chip will protect users from attacks.

Google has admitted that its social media app, Google+, has been hacked. This data theft has affected approximately half a million profiles. The users in question may have had many points of important user data extracted from their Google accounts.

There are some phones to be released later this year - as well as some that already have been - with in- or under-display fingerprint (FP) scanners. This technology is based on optical (or light) sensors that act to construct a 2D FP model in order to learn, store and authenticate different prints. However, it seems that next year's versions will improve on this method.

DuckDuckGo is quickly becoming a popular alternative to Google's increasingly invasive search engine. The privacy-focused search tool just announced hitting 30 million searches a day. While this is a far cry from the 3.5+ billion searches Google enjoys, it marks a 50% growth for DuckDuckGo, positioning the search engine for rapid growth without relying on tracking users.

The Google Pixel 3 and 3 XL have been released. Their appearance will surprise nobody, as both phones look exactly as described in all their leaks. The Pixel 3 XL has a notch, but may also have a lot of interesting new Google features behind it.

The US Department of Homeland Security has issued a statement that seems to refute Bloomberg’s claim that a significant number of US companies had been compromised due to clandestine microchips reporting sensitive data back to China. Amazon Web Services and Apple have also rebuked the article’s content.

An internal service document recently leaked from within Apple states that no-one but company staff and Authorized Apple Service Providers (AASPs) can repair or replace most MacBook 2018 and iMac Pro components without the devices becoming inoperable. However, iFixit has claimed to have done so with a MacBook Pro - and nothing happened.

Pete Lau, the CEO of the smartphone maker OnePlus, has been talking about the company's upcoming release in a new interview with CNET. Lau admitted that this phone, the 6T, is going to retail for more than its predecessor. According to him, Screen Unlock is a driving factor in this decision.

OnePlus has posted a teaser video for its upcoming 6T flagship update on Twitter. This clip, which is the first of its kind, may hint at the in-display fingerprint sensor confirmed to feature in the phone. The video also invites us to "Unlock the Future" with the 6T.

A Facebook breach has compromised almost 50 million accounts. After discovering the breach on September 25, the company reset the access tokens of the 50 million affected accounts and 40 million others as a precautionary step. The attackers accessed the accounts via a vulnerability involving Facebook's access tokens which keep users logged in.

Huawei is now rumored to be integrating a new form of device security, Voice Unlock, into its upcoming flagship, the Mate 20 Pro. This device may also have a 6.9-inch screen, as much as 6GB in RAM and an extra-large battery. However, this leak reinforces the lack of a 3.5mm jack in this device.

The Austrian national tourist office (ANTO) is embracing blockchain in order to protect its upcoming advertisement investment. It is a digital campaign that ANTO will roll out in partnership with Adbank, an Ethereum-linked platform. The aim of this collaboration is to combat the effects of ad fraud on the new project.

Move over Galaxy S, Galaxy P is here. At least, this is what an increasing number of leaks say. The series is purported to kick off with the release of the Galaxy P30 and P30+. It is also possible that one of them will come with in-display fingerprint reading, and will follow the trend of color-gradients for back panels.

The latest version of Google's Chrome browser will now automatically log users in if they log into any Google service. This, in turn, opens the door for the user's browsing data to be accessed by Google. While this isn't the case now (Chrome's sync features aren't turned on by default), it raises several red flags as to the future of the privacy of user's browsing data.

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, which is the basis for many cloud and enterprise services, is coming up on its end of life this April. Canonical will begin offering an Extended Security Maintenance service in April that will continue rolling out security patches. However, the service is designed primarily for enterprise customers.

Smart home technology has definitely caught on by now, with many people automating or controlling their living spaces with new products designed to be integrated into them. A new market research report suggests that the market built up around this trend is worth billions now and will be worth even more in the future.