Tag: security

  • Facebook stored hundreds of millions of user passwords in plain text for years

    Krebs on Security reported that Facebook stored hundreds of millions of user passwords in plain text for years. The Facebook source said the investigation so far indicates between 200 million and 600 million Facebook users may have had their account passwords stored in plain text and searchable by more than 20,000 Facebook employees. The source…

  • Two-thirds of all Android antivirus apps are frauds

    Catalin Cimpanu reported ZDNet that two-thirds of all Android antivirus apps are frauds. That means that 170 of the 250 Android antivirus apps had failed the organization’s most basic detection tests, and were, for all intent and purposes, a sham. “Most of the above apps, as well as the risky apps already mentioned, appear to…

  • Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus unlocks with the video of the owner’s face

    Dan Seifert reported for The Verge about the unlocking features of Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus. But it’s not as fast or reliable as the traditional, capacitive fingerprint scanner on the back of the S9. The target area for the reader is rather small (though the lockscreen will show you a diagram of where to place…

  • Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus Review: A $1,000 Smartphone With Compromises

    Brian Chen wrote for The New York Times about Samsung Galaxy S10,a $1,000 Smartphone With Compromises. My bumpy experience with the print sensor firmed up one conclusion: Face recognition is a more convenient method for unlocking phones, and Samsung is behind Apple in this area. There are some cons to using FaceID but the pros…

  • Android phones unlocked with a 3D-printed head

    Forbes reported that they broke into a bunch of Android phones with a 3D-printed head. We tested four of the hottest handsets running Google’s operating systems and Apple’s iPhone to see how easy it’d be to break into them. We did it with a 3D-printed head. All of the Androids opened with the fake. Apple’s…

  • A bug in Samsung’s default texting app is sending random pics to other people

    Gizmodo reported that a bug in Samsung’s default texting app is sending random pics to other people. According to user reports, the problem stems from Samsung Messages, the default texting app on Galaxy devices, which (for reasons that haven’t been determined), is erroneously sending pictures stored on the devices to random contacts via SMS. One…

  • Samsung decides not to patch kernel vulnerabilities in non-Lollipop S4 devices

    Softpedia reported on Samsung not patching kernel vulnerabilities in non-Lollipop S4 phones. According to Jonathan Salwan, one of QuarksLAB’s junior security researchers, Samsung took 3 months to acknowledge the bugs (November 2014), and only responded to QuarksLAB’s emails after the company went public with their research on September 21, 2015. “They just acknowledged the issues,…

  • How to hack an Android phone

    Business Insider reported on hacking an Android phone by typing in a really long password. The vulnerability, discovered by John Gordon, is easy to exploit: simply open the phone’s “Emergency Call” feature, type a few characters and the repeatedly copy-and-paste them. The pasted text becomes longer and longer — Gordon’s reaches over 160,000 characters —…

  • New Android ransomware locks out victims by changing lock screen PIN

    Ars Technica reported on a new Android ransomware that locks out victims by changing lock screen PIN. Dubbed Android/Lockerpin.A, the app first tricks inexperienced users into granting it device administrator privileges. To achieve this, it overlays a bogus patch installation window on top of an activation notice. When targets click on the continue button, they…

  • It may seem silly

    John Gruber wrote about the Jon Evans piece, “Don’t be Apple”. Jon Evans argued that since Apple has a centralised ecosystem, there is a chance that Apple can turn it into a surveillance system for the government. Hence, we shouldn’t be using Apple products. Can you work out the logic in that? At which point…