Cybersecurity is the rickety scaffolding supporting everything you do online. For every new feature or app, there are a thousand different ways it can break – and a hundred of those can be exploited by criminals for data breaches, identity theft, or outright cyber heists. Staying ahead of those exploits is a full-time job, and one of the most lucrative and sought-after skills in the tech industry. All too often, it’s something up-and-coming companies decide to skip out on, only to pay the price later on.
The Citizen Lab just published its investigation into Paragon Solutions, an “ethical” cyber defense company recently linked to a spyware campaign targeting journalists on WhatsApp. Along with the Canadian Ontario Provincial Police, researchers found that governments in Australia, Cyprus, Denmark, Israel, and Singapore may also be potential Paragon customers.
That’s how much Google’s parent company will pay if its $32 billion acquisition of the cloud security startup falls apart, sources tell the Financial Times. The deal reportedly wouldn’t have proceeded without such a high termination fee, which the FT calls “among the largest of all time.”
Security Checkup, an all-in-one security dashboard similar to Google’s identically named tool, allows TikTok users to manage their devices, two-step verification, passkey, security activity, and account recovery options all from a single screen. The new hub can be accessed by selecting “Settings and privacy” within your TikTok profile and tapping “Security & permissions.”
In a lawsuit filed this week, NY Attorney General Letitia James accused Allstate’s subsidiary, National General, of storing customers’ driver’s license numbers in plain text, leading to a 2020 breach that exposed the information of more than 12,000 people.
Following this incident, James alleges National General “continued to leave driver’s license numbers exposed” on a separate website, which allowed hackers to get ahold of the personal information of more than 187,000 customers the following year. She also claims National General failed to properly notify affected customers.
An anonymous Vancouver school guidance counselor told Associated Press that the Gaggle monitoring software “is good for catching suicide and self-harm” risks, but students then look for workarounds once they’re caught. An AP investigation found that many students’ Gaggle incident documents shared by the district weren’t protected and could be read by anyone with a link.
One of the malicious apps masqueraded as a file manager and had more than 10 downloads, according to the cybersecurity firm Lookout. The app contained Android spyware called KoSpy, which Lookout attributes to the North Korean hacking group APT37. It’s capable of collecting a device’s SMS messages, call logs, location, files, and more.
Lookout says the apps it found have since been removed from the Google Play Store.
Android Authority spotted a new beta feature to delete all your passwords, passkeys, and other data from the tool in one go, rather than removing them individually.
In October Google made it easier to use third-party password managers in Chrome on Android, and this change should help users move from Google’s option to another without leaving a load of data behind.
[androidauthority.com]
A new batch of Apple security updates today that includes iOS 18.3.2 and macOS 15.3.2 might re-enable Apple Intelligence (again), but it also supplements an issue first addressed in iOS 17.2, where “Maliciously crafted web content may be able to break out of Web Content sandbox,” according to an Apple update note spotted by 9to5Mac.
Plankey isn’t new to the Trump administration, as he previously served as the principal deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Energy from 2019 to 2020. He also worked as the director for cyber policy with the National Security Council before that.
[cyberscoop.com]
While Elon Musk claimed the “massive cyberattack” impacting X’s service had originated from Ukrainian IP addresses, security researchers note that this isn’t conclusive as attackers often obfuscate their true locations via compromised devices, proxy networks, and VPNs.
Analysts told Wired that there’s also evidence that some of X’s servers were publicly visible before being secured behind the company’s Cloudflare DDoS protection, which may have exposed the platform to direct attacks.
The platform has been going down intermittently since around 5:40AM ET on Monday, with no official ETA for when the outages will be resolved, and no details provided about what’s causing the issues. Musk made similar claims about cyberattacks impacting X’s services last year when Spaces crashed out during a scheduled conversation with Donald Trump, though X staffers at the time told The Verge that an attack hadn’t occurred.
The best of us can be swindled, but one banker’s particular enthrallment to an overseas cryptocurrency crime network was so dire that it almost devastated his entire community. Read this New York Times report about Shan Hanes embezzling more than $31 million into a suspicious crypto investment before the money disappeared.
“I’ll forever struggle understanding how I was duped,” Hanes said. “I should have caught it, but I didn’t.”
The encrypted messaging app has already pushed out an update for a vulnerability that Russian hackers have been using to target Ukrainian soldiers. The attacks, discovered by Google, used malicious QR codes to link targets’ devices to the hackers’, allowing them to receive all their future messages. Signal’s update prompts users to confirm they want to create the link, but WhatsApp and Telegram may be vulnerable too.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a memo freezing its election security efforts to review all work and positions “related to election security and countering mis- and- disinformation” at the state and local level since 2017, reports Wired. The review is reportedly set to conclude on March 6th.
The outlet writes that the memo also confirms an earlier Politico report that CISA employees associated with the work were placed on administrative leave on February 7th.
A clever and since-fixed exploit allowed a security researcher to find the email address belonging to any YouTube account through a roundabout series of steps. Strangely enough, the Pixel Recorder app played an important role in spilling the Google account details.
Google’s security panel initially awarded the researcher $3,133 before upping the total to $10,000 — a sum that many on Hacker News still find rather low considering the exploit.
[brutecat.com]
Two zero-day holes being fixed on this Patch Tuesday could potentially allow attackers to delete your files and gain unmitigated system-level privileges, Bleeping Computer reports, so update ASAP.
In lighter news, the KB5051987 update continues rolling out a feature that improves taskbar previews. Plus, a new system tray icon will appear when using apps that support Windows Studio Effects on computers with a neural processing unit, like new Copilot Plus PCs.
This recent video from YouTuber Chuppl highlights a 2023 pre-print estimating people have wasted as many as 819 million hours solving reCAPTCHA since Google acquired it in 2009, as spotted earlier by Boing Boing. Dr. Andrew Searles, the researcher who submitted the study, told Chuppl that Google collects a trove of data through reCAPTCHA, including keystrokes, clicks, IP addresses, and more.
