The glowing lack of public, real-world Stagefright exploits didn’t stop the U.S. government from using last summer’s blockbuster Android vulnerability as an illustration of the dangers facing mobile device users. Under the context of Stagefright exposing up to 1 billion devices to attack, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission yesterday said they...

Mike Mimoso, Chris Brook, and Threatpost’s newest reporter, Tom Spring, discuss the week in news, including a first hand account of an online casino’s experience with a Teslacrypt infection, Brazil shutting down WhatsApp, and attackers mining an ADP portal for W-2s. Download: Threatpost_News_Wrap_May_6_2016.mp3 Music by Chris Gonsalves

A five-year-old Android vulnerability disclosed today affects hundreds of different device models going back to Jelly Bean 4.3. Older devices are at the greatest risk; newer devices running Android with SE Android, the OS’ implementation of Security Enhanced Linux, are at a lesser risk. The vulnerability allows attackers to escalate privileges on a device, leading...

WhatsApp’s presence in Brazil has been rocky at best from a legal standpoint, but it got even more tenuous this week when for the second time in the last six months a judge ordered the country’s telecommunications companies to block the messaging app. The judge demanded that WhatsApp be blocked for 72 hours after WhatsApp’s...

Following an appeal from WhatsApp’s lawyers, on Tuesday afternoon a Brazilian judge overturned a suspension previously handed down this week that would’ve blocked usage of the messaging app for 72 hours. According to Reuters, on Tuesday afternoon a “different judge from the state tribunal intervened” and canceled Monday’s ruling. WhatsApp’s presence in Brazil has been...

It took close to two months, but free wireless and mobile provider FreedomPop has acknowledged reports of a serious vulnerability in its service. U.K.-based researcher Paul Moore told Threatpost that FreedomPop, which has been operating in the U.K. since last September, finally responded to a bug report that Moore had sent twice since March 24,...

Google has re-branded its monthly patch release, bringing a new name and new scope to the newly renamed Android Security Bulletin. While that may be new, the content is definitely familiar. Once again, critical remote code execution Mediaserver vulnerabilities dominate this month’s patches. Mediaserver has been a front and center security issue since last summer’s...

Android users are being warned of a phony Google update that is pushing malware onto devices. The attackers behind this scheme are domain squatting URLs that are similar to ones used by Google for legitimate updates, hoping to snare less-than-vigilant users. Researchers at Zscaler said yesterday in a report that the attackers invested heavily in...

The black market for malicious Android software is heating up thanks to a rise in popularity of overlay malware, which can siphon credentials off Android devices and give crooks a tool to defeat two-factor identification schemes, according to security researchers at IBM’s X-Force. Overlay malware allows attackers to create an overlay to be displayed on top...

A menacing wave of ransomware that locks up Android devices and demands victims pay $200 in Apple iTunes gift card codes is raising concern among security researchers. The ransomware attacks, they say, open a new chapter for Android vulnerabilities similar to Microsoft’s obsolete, unpatched and unsupported Windows XP operating system. “This is a new and...