Displaying items by tag: Android

The Google Play Store is and has always been something of a playground for mobile malware groups. Over the past few years hundreds of malicious apps have been uncovered with tens of thousands of downloads. Everything from banking malware to information stealers and worse has been identified in the store. Google, to their credit, has tried to find a solution to this. The problem is that the mobile device theater is about as secure as the PC industry was in the late 90s given the shovel ware from mobile device makers, and then carriers.

TrendMicro made a shocking revelation at Black Hat Asia 2023 where they disclosed an operation that has been running since 2018 targeting Android devices. The scheme was uncovered in 2021 while researchers at TrendMicro were looking into SMS PVA (Phone Verified Accounts) mobile bot net. They identified that the botnet had been helped along by a supply chain attack targeting the image used by OEM to rapidly deploy the OS onto the devices.

in the wild. The patch for this bug is one of 37 that are part of the monthly security release which covers multiple components in the popular mobile OS. This comes at a time when mobile banking malware is on the rise and there are also concerns around threat groups targeting phones to compromise them for use in MFA request responses.

It looks like there has been another round of malware identified on the Google Play sore and, you guessed it, the majority is focused on banks and other financial institutions. The combination of apps found totals around 515,000 downloads. 500,000 of these downloads are being attributed to a new trojan dubbed Octo and appears to be distributed via fake apps uploaded to the Google Play store.

Google has a bit of an issue with malware present in their Play Store as there are reports of another banking trojan targeting users of European banks. Currently, the malware called Xenomorph may have infected as many as 50,000 devices across 56 Banks, all though a malicious app located in the Google Play Store.

The rise of the smart device meant that more and more people were going to be using these for more than just communication. Mobile banking, mobile home automation, mobile car monitoring, you name it, there is probably an app for it. With this new and powerful accessibility there comes risk. Attackers know that mobile security is not exactly where it should be, and that people are more trusting on their phones than they might be on their laptops and desktops (maybe). We also have the issue with how mobile apps access the information they have permissions to and display it to the user. To call mobile device security a mess would be a gross understatement.

When Red Digital Cinema first announced they were looking to build a phone many people were very interested. The idea that the company who turned the world of cinema cameras on its head taking on the stagnant world of smartphones with mediocre cameras was a big one. Sadly, after the announcement there were significant delays for the new device. Happily, for the rest of the smartphone world, newer generations of cameras and camera software began to up their game on what we can do with our smartphone cameras. Still, this is Red we are talking about here, so despite these advances they were sure to have a significant product. If you read most of the “reviews” out there you would not think that was the case. Personally, I was not deterred by the reviews as most of them came off as incomplete. I decided to take it for a spin, but not a quick 15 minutes, but a 30-day plus test run including taking it around to get reactions from other people. So, with that in mind, let’s see what we found.

All good things must come to an end. In April of 2013 we published an article that Apple and their iOS based devices would begin to slide in 2016. It was in response to a survey/analysis claiming that Apple would reclaim the crown from Google by 2016 and dominate through 2018. For some reason the technical and financial press were jumping at the announcement for Windows phone 8.x. The fact that Windows phone held a single digit market share at the time did not seem to matter to them.

Remember when we told you that BitTorrent was coming out with their very own chat app called Bleep? No well they are and from the information we have so far it is looking like a pretty cool application. The concept is to take basic chat and run it, encrypted, through Torrent swarms. This move, in theory, should prevent the big guys from being able to store or grab your communications in transit.

There is a perception that to enjoy brilliant tablet gaming you have to pay big bucks – but that is not the case. There are tablets at every price that can give you this; you just need to find the right specs at the right price for you.