Category: google

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Contact Tracing COVID-19 Infections via Smartphone Apps

Posted on By infossl
apple, covid19, epidemiology, google, privacy, Security technology, tracing, tracking

Google and Apple have announced a joint project to create a privacy-preserving COVID-19 contact tracing app. (Details, such as we have them, are here.) It’s similar to the app being developed at MIT, and similar to others being described and developed elsewhere. It’s nice seeing the privacy protections; they’re well thought out. I was going … Read More “Contact Tracing COVID-19 Infections via Smartphone Apps” »

Hacking Voice Assistants with Ultrasonic Waves

Posted on By infossl
academicpapers, android, apple, google, hacking, iphone, Security technology, sidechannelattacks, smartphones, video

I previously wrote about hacking voice assistants with lasers. Turns you can do much the same thing with ultrasonic waves: Voice assistants — the demo targeted Siri, Google Assistant, and Bixby — are designed to respond when they detect the owner’s voice after noticing a trigger phrase such as ‘Ok, Google’. Ultimately, commands are just … Read More “Hacking Voice Assistants with Ultrasonic Waves” »

Deep Learning to Find Malicious Email Attachments

Posted on By infossl
email, gmail, google, machinelearning, malware, phishing, Security technology

Google presented its system of using deep-learning techniques to identify malicious email attachments: At the RSA security conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Google’s security and anti-abuse research lead Elie Bursztein will present findings on how the new deep-learning scanner for documents is faring against the 300 billion attachments it has to process each week. … Read More “Deep Learning to Find Malicious Email Attachments” »

Google Receives Geofence Warrants

Posted on By infossl
geolocation, google, lawenforcement, nsa, privacy, Security technology, surveillance, tracking

Sometimes it’s hard to tell the corporate surveillance operations from the government ones: Google reportedly has a database called Sensorvault in which it stores location data for millions of devices going back almost a decade. The article is about geofence warrants, where the police go to companies like Google and ask for information about every … Read More “Google Receives Geofence Warrants” »

ToTok Is an Emirati Spying Tool

Posted on By infossl
apple, eavesdropping, google, malware, phones, privacy, Security technology, smartphones, spyware, surveillance, unitedarabemirates

The smartphone messaging app ToTok is actually an Emirati spying tool: But the service, ToTok, is actually a spying tool, according to American officials familiar with a classified intelligence assessment and a New York Times investigation into the app and its developers. It is used by the government of the United Arab Emirates to try … Read More “ToTok Is an Emirati Spying Tool” »

Fooling Voice Assistants with Lasers

Posted on By infossl
amazon, apple, authentication, google, hacking, Security technology

Interesting: Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are vulnerable to attacks that use lasers to inject inaudible­ — and sometimes invisible­ — commands into the devices and surreptitiously cause them to unlock doors, visit websites, and locate, unlock, and start vehicles, researchers report in a research paper published on Monday. Dubbed Light Commands, the attack works … Read More “Fooling Voice Assistants with Lasers” »

Phone Pfarming for Ad Fraud

Posted on By infossl
facebook, fraud, google, Security technology, smartphones

Interesting article on people using banks of smartphones to commit ad fraud for profit. No one knows how prevalent ad fraud is on the Internet. I believe it is surprisingly high — here’s an article that places losses between $6.5 and $19 billion annually — and something companies like Google and Facebook would prefer remain … Read More “Phone Pfarming for Ad Fraud” »

Google Releases Basic Homomorphic Encryption Tool

Posted on By infossl
cryptography, encryption, google, Security technology

Google has released an open-source cryptographic tool: Private Join and Compute. From a Wired article: Private Join and Compute uses a 1970s methodology known as “commutative encryption” to allow data in the data sets to be encrypted with multiple keys, without it mattering which order the keys are used in. This is helpful for multiparty … Read More “Google Releases Basic Homomorphic Encryption Tool” »

Backdoor Built into Android Firmware

Posted on By infossl
android, backdoors, crime, firmware, google, malware, phones, Security technology, supplychain

In 2017, some Android phones came with a backdoor pre-installed: Criminals in 2017 managed to get an advanced backdoor preinstalled on Android devices before they left the factories of manufacturers, Google researchers confirmed on Thursday. Triada first came to light in 2016 in articles published by Kaspersky here and here, the first of which said … Read More “Backdoor Built into Android Firmware” »