5 hackers who came over from the dark side

There have been some notorious cybercriminals over the years, but only a select few hackers have swapped ‘black’ hats for ‘white’.In hacking terms, ‘black’ hats are usually used for the bad guys. They hack the innocent victims, pilfer personal and sensitive data for financial gain and remain largely in the shadows of enterprise IT networks. They’re forever chased by law enforcement.‘White’ hats, by contrast, are the good guys. They are security researchers, who spend their time hacking to find vulnerabilities, and then inform enterprises and web developers of the changes that need to be made.There has been a clear distinction between both and there are enough of them around.

Read on, source: 5 hackers who came over from the dark side

Bug causes iPhones to crash when sent malicious text message

An exploit has been discovered that causes iPhones and iPads to reboot when sent a string of malicious text.The bug was found on Reddit, reports 9to5Mac, but the exploit has since been confirmed by Apple. If the offending 75-byte sequence of unicode characters are sent via a text message, and appear on a user’s iPhone lockscreen, the device will crash and reboot.

Read on, source: Bug causes iPhones to crash when sent malicious text message

Scareware: Fake Minecraft apps Scare Hundreds of Thousands on Google Play

ESET has discovered over 30 scareware applications available for download from the Google Play store. The malicious applications, which pretended to be cheats for the popular Minecraft game, have been installed by more than 600.000 Android users.It’s not easy to slip a malicious application into Google’s official Play Store these days. Google’s automated application scanner, Bouncer, helps in reducing the number of malware on the official app store. Yet, some baddies do occasionally get by, as demonstrated by our recent discovery of over 30 scareware applications that have been uploaded to the Play store in the course of the last 9 months

Read on, source: Scareware: Fake Minecraft apps Scare Hundreds of Thousands on Google Play

De-crapping the Windows Store, take two

Last August, Microsoft announced efforts to remove misleading and deceptive applications from the Windows Store. Apps needed to have clear names and proper categorization, plus they couldn’t use misleading icons.Less than a year later, Microsoft has announced a new effort to remove misleading and deceptive applications from the Windows Store. While this new decrapification process isn’t identical to the old one, it nonetheless feels very similar.

Read on, source: De-crapping the Windows Store, take two | Ars Technica