Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from July, 2016

Snowden Designs a Device to Warn if Your iPhone’s Radios Are Snitching

When Edward Snowden met with reporters in a Hong Kong hotel room to spill the NSA’s secrets, he famously asked them put their phones in the fridge to block any radio signals that might be used to silently activate the devices’ microphones or cameras. So it’s fitting that three years later, he’s returned to that smartphone radio surveillance problem. Now Snowden’s attempting to build a solution that’s far more compact than a hotel mini-bar. On Thursday at the MIT Media Lab, Snowden and well-known hardware hacker Andrew “Bunnie” Huang plan to present designs for a case-like device that wires into your iPhone’s guts to monitor the electrical signals sent to its internal antennas. The aim of that add-on, Huang and Snowden say, is to offer a constant check on whether your phone’s radios are transmitting. They say it’s an infinitely more trustworthy method of knowing your phone’s radios are off than “airplane mode,” which people have shown can be hacked and spoofed. Snowden and Huang ...

Did You Install This Malicious Pokémon Go App?

People all over have been trying to enjoy the new  Pokémon Go  app, which released this week to so much fanfare that it’s experiencing massive  server overload . The hype was so real that people were passing around APK files so that people outside the countries where it’s available could side-load it on Android, something We saw in my own friend groups. Security firm Proofpoint is now cautioning those who couldn’t wait for an official app store release, saying that one specific APK was modified to install a backdoor called DroidJack. The app is different form the official version, but is close enough to fool anyone who may have picked it up. The firm discovered the infected Android version of the app less than 72 hours after the game was released in New Zealand and Australia on July 4. Proofpoint highlights some ways to tell if this particular version has been installed. For example, in the list of permissions (which you can access by going to your Settings, t...