BUSTED! Secret app on millions of phones logs key taps article tells that Android app developer Trevor Eckhart has published what he says is conclusive proof that millions of smartphones are secretly monitoring the key presses, geographic locations, and received messages of its users. Many Android, Nokia, and BlackBerry smartphones have software called Carrier IQ. →
Outsmarted: Captcha security not much of a gotcha article tells that a team of Stanford University researchers has bad news to report about Captchas, those often unreadable, always annoying distorted letters that you’re required to type in at many a Web site to prove that you’re really a human. Captcha is often used to defend →
Met police using surveillance system to monitor mobile phones article from theguardian magazine article tells that civil liberties group raises concerns over The Metropolitan police purchase of technology to track public handsets over a targeted area. Britain’s largest police force is operating covert surveillance technology that can masquerade as a mobile phone network. This allow →
Researchers have studied keystroke inference based on side channels, such as sound, electromagnetic wave, and timing. Since these attacks exploit characteristics of physical keyboards, they become ineffective on smartphones with soft keyboards. Attacks using sensors on smartphone raises the awareness of privacy attacks on smartphone sensors. Besides the obvious privacy concern over the GPS sensor, →
Many modern cellular phone use USB plug for charging and many places offer nowadays charging possibility. But plugging your phone into an untrusted USB cable is, indeed, a security risk according to Juicejacking – an emergency phone charge can be a security risk article. The article fortunately tells that it’s easy to avoid the risk →
You wouldn’t write your username and passwords on a postcard and mail it for the world to see, so why are you doing it online? Every time you log in to any service that uses a plain HTTP connection that’s essentially what you’re doing. There is a better way, the secure version of HTTP—HTTPS. HTTPS →
A location-based services (LBS) are a hot topic among mobile services developers. A location-based service (LBS) is an information or entertainment service, accessible with mobile devices through the mobile network and utilizing the ability to make use of the geographical position of the mobile device. Modern smart-phones have abilities to locate the position of the →
iPhone mag-stripe reader stalled article tells that Square, the expected to be breakthrough business launched by twitter-founder Jack Dorsey, won’t be shipping as scheduled. Interesting is that Square was just a magnetic-stripe reader, and that there were a dozen credit card-processing applications on the iPhone. Only this time, it comes with a plastic lump that →
Could humans be infected by computer viruses? press release tells that a scientist at the University of Reading has become the first person in the world to be infected by a computer virus. A high-end Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chip was implanted into Dr Gasson’s left hand last year. “Our research shows that implantable technology →
Modern automobiles are no longer mere mechanical devices; they are pervasively monitored and controlled by dozens of digital computers coordinated via internal vehicular networks. Experimental Security Analysis of a Modern Automobile report experimentally evaluates these issues on a modern automobile and demonstrate the fragility of the underlying system structure. The paper demonstrates that an attacker →