security

With fingerprint sensors disappearing, either behind screens or, in the case of the iPhone, completely, there is a great deal of attention and scrutiny being placed on face recognition. Although most of the tests have moved past using photos or even images displayed on a phone screen, there is no expense spared for trying to dupe this new breed of face recognition technologies. A new report uses a carefully crafted 3D printed head to test the iPhone X and four Android phones. And the results, while disappointing, were hardly surprising.

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With the Internet being people’s primary gateway to today’s services, web browsers have often been the target of hackers and security researchers trying to discover potential vulnerabilities. One such vulnerability has been discovered by Tencent’s Blade security team and nicknamed “Magellan”. While it affects a large chunk of browsers that use the open source Chromium engine, including Google Chrome itself, this time it isn’t the web browser that’s at fault. Instead, it’s the SQLite database that’s used not just by Chromium but by hundreds if not thousands of apps as well.

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No, iPhone jailbreaking still isn’t completely dead but it may have just been put on life support. Earlier reports pointed to Cydia’s shutdown, the most popular app store for jailbroken iPhones, but was clarified to affect only its purchasing system. While it simply means you won’t be able to buy apps there anymore, it could be the start of the end for Cydia. And when the last biggest bastion of iOS jailbreaking goes, so too might the other repositories as well.

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Facebook's seemingly never-ending string of privacy and security scandals continues today. The company has announced a security flaw in its photo API that has affected as many as 6.8 million users. This bug potentially exposed user photos to apps that use the photo API, even in some cases impacting photos that were never posted.

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Super Micro has released an independent testing report finding no signs of malicious hardware in its computer parts, after a widely-circulated report claimed servers using the hardware had been compromised by Chinese spies. The claims have been vocally challenged by Amazon, Apple, and more, while independent security researchers have also been critical of the accusations.

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This morning Xiaomi brought a few products to the USA to showcase the future. Xiaomi brought three products that'll be available for sale in the USA, and a few more that aren't (yet) available in the USA. On one hand, this seems like a fairly standard "We've got new products" event. On the other hand, bringing along products that aren't necessarily set to be available in the USA hints at something bigger.

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Google's latest update on Online Security for apps seems to suggest that they mean serious business. They've recently taken targeted action against a set of fraudulent app developers and codes that've been collecting ad bounties in ways that are ... basically just not cool. These developers in this case were guilty of App Install Attribution Abuse - which is basically like tricking companies into paying cash for app installs when they've installed no such thing.

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The US Secret Service (USSS) plans to test facial recognition technology at the White House, the agency revealed in a newly published document. The USSS released a statement detailing its plan, which includes testing the technology on employees as a stepping stone toward potential deployment as a new security feature. The test has raised concerns among some biometric security critics.

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Unlocking your smartphone by pressing your fingertip against the touchscreen is about to go mainstream, with Qualcomm revealing its new 3D Sonic Sensor technology. The latest iteration of smartphone security, it puts an ultrasonic scanner right beneath the display glass, in what Qualcomm says is a much more functional and secure way to open your phone than rival biometrics.

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Quora is one of those silent successes of the Internet. It doesn’t always make headlines but it has become one of the biggest sources of information on the Web.Next to Wikipedia, of course The service has now hit headlines but, unfortunately, not in a good way. Its user data was compromised, in other words, it was hacked. This is what the company says was taken and what you should do, maybe even if you weren’t affected at all.

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Google and Android have yet again come under fire for another batch of apps that either spread malware or practice fraud from under Google’s and users’ noses. Of course, many took the chance to point out Apple’s closed but effective review process that blocks such apps from even getting into the App Store. But it’s precisely because of that tight process that when misbehaving apps do get in, it’s an even bigger problem.

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Marriott has revealed that its Starwood guest reservation database was recently impacted by a security breach. The intrusion was detected on November 19 by a Marriott investigation after the company received an alert on September 8, 2018. Following the alert, Marriott says it tapped security experts as part of an investigation that ultimately discovered "unauthorized access" on its Starwood network. This access had been in place since 2014.

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