Category: Security

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What app permissions should I be wary of?

Mobile applications increasingly want access to various functions on your smartphones and tablets, such as your location and contacts book. But some of these app permissions should not be granted.App Store, Google Play and Windows Phone store users will know by now that, when installing an app or using a particular feature for the first time, the app will ask their permission to access certain features of the device. For example, a map application will ask for access to the GPS, while VoIP and other voice-calling applications may require access to the phone and device ID.

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Google reveals failure of ‘secret question’ password recall

A research paper from Google has looked into the difficulties of standard ‘forgotten password’ personal information verification.The paper, entitled ‘Secrets, Lies, and Account Recovery: Lessons from the Use of Personal Knowledge Questions at Google‘ examined the usage of personal information to trigger a password reset, and discovered that it presents a number of difficulties, including forgetful users, guessable answers and fake responses.The study, which according to Silicon Beat covered ‘hundreds of millions of secret answers and millions of account recovery claims’, discovered that a massive 40 percent of American Google users couldn’t remember the answers to their own security questions.

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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.

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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.

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