This is interesting: The image, a seemingly innocuous sunset (or dawn) sky above placid waters, may be viewed without harm. But if loaded as wallpaper, the phone will crash. The fault does not appear to have been maliciously created. Rather, according to developers following Ice Universe’s Twitter thread, the problem lies in the way color … Read More “Wallpaper that Crashes Android Phones” »
Category: phones
Auto Added by WPeMatico
The New York Times is reporting on the NSA’s phone metadata program, which the NSA shut down last year: A National Security Agency system that analyzed logs of Americans’ domestic phone calls and text messages cost $100 million from 2015 to 2019, but yielded only a single significant investigation, according to a newly declassified study. … Read More “Newly Declassified Study Demonstrates Uselessness of NSA’s Phone Metadata Program” »
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” »
New South Wales is implementing a camera system that automatically detects when a driver is using a mobile phone. Powered by WPeMatico
Interesting analysis: “Examining the Anomalies, Explaining the Value: Should the USA FREEDOM Act’s Metadata Program be Extended?” by Susan Landau and Asaf Lubin. Abstract: The telephony metadata program which was authorized under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, remains one of the most controversial programs launched by the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) in the wake … Read More “Evaluating the NSA’s Telephony Metadata Program” »
The Spanish Soccer League’s smartphone app spies on fans in order to find bars that are illegally streaming its games. The app listens with the microphone for the broadcasts, and then uses geolocation to figure out where the phone is. The Spanish data protection agency has ordered the league to stop doing this. Not because … Read More “Spanish Soccer League App Spies on Fans” »
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” »
This clever attack allows someone to uniquely identify a phone when you visit a website, based on data from the accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer sensors. We have developed a new type of fingerprinting attack, the calibration fingerprinting attack. Our attack uses data gathered from the accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer sensors found in smartphones to construct … Read More “Fingerprinting iPhones” »
Yet another side-channel attack on smartphones: “Hearing your touch: A new acoustic side channel on smartphones,” by Ilia Shumailov, Laurent Simon, Jeff Yan, and Ross Anderson. Abstract: We present the first acoustic side-channel attack that recovers what users type on the virtual keyboard of their touch-screen smartphone or tablet. When a user taps the screen … Read More “Recovering Smartphone Typing from Microphone Sounds” »
This is clever: Malicious apps hosted in the Google Play market are trying a clever trick to avoid detection — they monitor the motion-sensor input of an infected device before installing a powerful banking trojan to make sure it doesn’t load on emulators researchers use to detect attacks. The thinking behind the monitoring is that … Read More “Clever Smartphone Malware Concealment Technique” »