Interesting story about a barcode scanner app that has been pushing malware on to Android phones. The app is called Barcode Scanner. It’s been around since 2017 and is owned by the Ukrainian company Lavabird Ldt. But a December 2020 update included some new features:

However, a rash of malicious activity was recently traced back to the app. Users began noticing something weird going on with their phones: their default browsers kept getting hijacked and redirected to random advertisements, seemingly out of nowhere.

Generally, when this sort of thing happens it’s because the app was recently sold. That’s not the case here…

As a total sucker for anything skimming-related, I was interested to hear from a reader working security for a retail chain in the United States that recently found bluetooth-enabled skimming devices placed over top of payment card terminals at several stores. Interestingly, these skimmers interfered with the terminal’s ability to read chip-based cards, forcing customers to swipe the stripe instead.

The US Cyber Command has released a series of ten Valentine’s Day “Cryptography Challenge Puzzles.”
Slashdot thread. Reddit thread. (And here’s the archived link, in case Cyber Command takes the page down.)

The US Cyber Command has released a series of ten Valentine’s Day “Cryptography Challenge Puzzles.”
Slashdot thread. Reddit thread. (And here’s the archived link, in case Cyber Command takes the page down.)

Vice is reporting on a new police hack: playing copyrighted music when being filmed by citizens, trying to provoke social media sites into taking the videos down and maybe even banning the filmers:

In a separate part of the video, which Devermont says was filmed later that same afternoon, Devermont approaches [BHPD Sgt. Billy] Fair outside. The interaction plays out almost exactly like it did in the department — when Devermont starts asking questions, Fair turns on the music.

Devermont backs away, and asks him to stop playing music. Fair says “I can’t hear you” — again, despite holding a phone that is blasting tunes…

At the virtual Enigma Conference, Google’s Project Zero’s Maggie Stone gave a talk about zero-day exploits in the wild. In it, she talked about how often vendors fix vulnerabilities only to have the attackers tweak their exploits to work again. From a MIT Technology Review article:

Soon after they were spotted, the researchers saw one exploit being used in the wild. Microsoft issued a patch and fixed the flaw, sort of. In September 2019, another similar vulnerability was found being exploited by the same hacking group.

More discoveries in November 2019, January 2020, and April 2020 added up to at least five zero-day vulnerabilities being exploited from the same bug class in short order. Microsoft issued multiple security updates: some failed to actually fix the vulnerability being targeted, while others required only slight changes that required just a line or two to change in the hacker’s code to make the exploit work again…

Bloomberg News has a major story about the Chinese hacking computer motherboards made by Supermicro, Levono, and others. It’s been going on since at least 2008. The US government has known about it for almost as long, and has tried to keep the attack secret:

China’s exploitation of products made by Supermicro, as the U.S. company is known, has been under federal scrutiny for much of the past decade, according to 14 former law enforcement and intelligence officials familiar with the matter. That included an FBI counterintelligence investigation that began around 2012, when agents started monitoring the communications of a small group of Supermicro workers, using warrants obtained under the …

How squid fly.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.

Sonja Drummer describes (with photographs) two medieval security techniques. The first is a for authentication: a document has been cut in half with an irregular pattern, so that the two halves can be brought together to prove authenticity. The second …

Sonja Drummer describes (with photographs) two medieval security techniques. The first is a for authentication: a document has been cut in half with an irregular pattern, so that the two halves can be brought together to prove authenticity. The second …