Google is used to taking a beating over Android vulnerabilities, but it says too often its hard work fixing vulnerabilities and keeping the platform safe goes unnoticed. “Over the seven years working on Android security vulnerabilities I’ve seen a lot of bugs and a lot of fear uncertainty and doubt,” said Nick Kralevich, Android platform...

LAS VEGAS—Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek figuratively drove off into the sunset today at Black Hat, hanging up their car hacking exploits for good and leaving behind a pioneering legacy that elevated this type of research into the mainstream. “It’s time someone else pick it up,” Valasek said. “We did our part and it’s time...

Does dropping an infected USB drive in a parking work when it comes to a hacker luring its prey into a digital trap? The answer is a resounding yes. At Black Hat USA, security researcher Elie Bursztein shared the results of an experiment where he dropped 297 USB drives with phone-home capabilities on the University...

Joshua Drake of Zimperium Labs talks to Mike Mimoso about the last year post-Stagefright, the effectiveness of Google’s monthly patching cycle, and some of the security enhancements forthcoming in Android N. Download: Joshua_Drake_on_Post-Stagefright_Android.mp3 Music by Chris Gonsalves

LAS VEGAS – Poor operational security on the part of Nigerian scammers running a Business Email Compromise (BEC) scheme has given researchers a window into their operations. Dell SecureWorks today published a report at Black Hat USA 2016 on what the criminals involved call wire-wire, or “waya-waya.” These attackers aren’t particularly sophisticated malware coders, for...

LAS VEGAS – Credit card companies for the most part have moved away from “swipe and signature” credit cards to chip and pin cards by this point; the technology known as EMV (Europay, MasterCard, and Visa) which is supposed to provide consumers with an added layer of security is beginning to see some wear, according to researchers....

LAS VEGAS—Buried in the pages of the secure configuration guide for Oracle EBusiness Suite 11i is a declaration that SQL injection just isn’t a thing for the ubiquitous enterprise software. “Of the many potential SQL injections we have seen reported, we have yet to find a single confirmed example,” the guide says. “That’s a like...

LAS VEGAS – There is no guarantee that the internet will succeed. And if we aren’t careful we can really screw it up. It has happened before and we can do it again. The warning comes from technologist Dan Kaminsky who says there is a need to treat the internet similarly to the way the...

LAS VEGAS – The FREAK, LOGJAM and DROWN attacks of the last 17 months weren’t just the work of academics and security researchers who found a cool way to unmask encrypted traffic. They were ugly reminders of the Crypto Wars of the 1990s and why export-grade cryptography and intentional encryption backdoors are fraught with potential...

LAS VEGAS — Black market machine trading of PC and server resources is maturing at alarming speeds. Underground networks such as xDedic have fine-tuned their compute platform to the point where they are almost indistinguishable to legitimate networks such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. Those observations come from Israel Barak, head of incident response...