Tag Archive for: Call

Security ramped up and internet suspended in Nuh following call for ‘Shobha Yatra’ on Monday

/in


In the wake of a call for Shobha Yatra, a religious procession in Nuh district of Haryana, strict security precautions have been put in place. Police forces have been deployed across the district, and internet services have been temporarily suspended to prevent the spread of rumours or provocative messages that could lead to unrest.

Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar on Sunday asked devotees to offer prayers at temples in their neighbourhood on Monday instead of holding any ‘yatra’. Permission has not been granted for the ‘yatra’, he said.

“Instead of a ‘yatra’, people can visit temples in their areas for ‘jalabhishek’,” he said and asserted that it is the state government’s responsibility to maintain law and order.

August 28 is the last Monday of the holy month of Shravan.

Despite the fact that the police had rejected authorisation for the religious parade, the Hindu outfit, VHP, stated that it will still take place.

1,900 Haryana Police personnel and 24 companies of paramilitary forces have been deployed. No outsider will be allowed to enter Nuh. All entry points to the district have been sealed and the road leading to the Malhar temple has also been closed, PTI quoted the police spokesperson as saying.

Haryana police chief Kapur on Saturday said the administration has denied permission for the yatra due to a meeting of the G20 Sherpa Group, scheduled to be held in Nuh from September 3 to 7, and to maintain law and order in the aftermath of the July 31 violence.

He also presided over a meeting with senior officers of Punjab, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and the Union Territory of Chandigarh through video-conferencing and called for coordinated efforts to effectively deal with any emerging situation.

In another development, police said Ferozepur Jhirka MLA Mamman Khan has been sent a notice to join the investigation on August 30 in connection with the Nuh violence. Some Hindu organisations had accused Congress MLA Khan of making provocative statements.

According to officials, traffic on the Kundli-Manesar-Palwal Expressway and the Delhi-Mumbai Expressway would resume. However, access to Nuh would be restricted. Meanwhile, the district’s mobile internet…

Source…

Research hack reveals call security risk in smartphones

/in


Research hack reveals call security risk in smartphones
Smartphone manufacturers listen up; malware created by academic researchers showed how call security can be compromised in three areas. Credit: Texas A&M Engineering

Advanced smartphone features attract users who want more from their devices, especially in health and entertainment areas, but do these features create a security risk when making or receiving actual calls? A team of academic researchers from Texas A&M University and four other institutions created malicious software, or malware, to answer that question.

The researchers’ malware, called EarSpy, used machine learning algorithms to filter a surprising amount of caller information from ear speaker vibration data recorded by an Android smartphone‘s own motion sensors—and did so without overcoming any safeguards or needing user permissions.

“A standard attack on a cell phone taps the microphone and records the voices,” said Ahmed Tanvir Mahdad, a doctoral student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M. “We are recording motion sensor data, which is not directly related to speech, and detecting caller information from that in a side-channel attack.”

Mahdad was the primary author of “EarSpy: Spying Caller Speech and Identity through Tiny Vibrations of Smartphone Ear Speakers,” a paper published in December 2022, on the pre-print server arXiv, that explained the project’s results.

Ear speakers at the top of smartphones are traditionally small and produce low sound pressures during conversations. These vibrations improve clarity when the phone is pressed against the user’s ear.

The speakers are not considered a good source for audible eavesdropping because of their size and how they function. Yet some manufacturers are replacing these small speakers with bigger ones to create the stereo sounds needed for videos and streaming without considering how much vibration data the bigger ear speakers emit. Since smartphones are equipped with motion sensors called accelerometers to record vibration data tracking user…

Source…

‘Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’ Players Hit With Worm Malware

/in


According to TechCrunch it is unclear why the malware is spreading or what exactly the impact is on gamers. Valve, the owner of Steam, did not comment on the issue, according to the news website.

Public companies in the United States will soon have to report data breaches and hacking incidents four days after they deem an incident to have a “material” impact on their business. On Wednesday, the US Securities and Exchange Commission voted to introduce the regulations that require firms to disclose cyberattacks once they have determined it will disrupt its operations or finances. The disclosures must detail the “nature, scope, and timing” of the attack, as well as the potential impact it will have on the firm.

Former SEC rules required companies to disclose cyber incidents but did not impose any strict timeline on doing so. This can lead to firms waiting weeks or months to notify customers and lawmakers about data breaches and cyberattacks. A separate part of the new SEC rules also requires companies to detail their processes for “assessing, identifying, and managing material risks,” heaping extra public accountability on firms to make sure they’re taking security issues seriously. The rules will go into effect by no later than December.

Since Vladimir Putin started his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia’s internet censorship has become even more expansive. A new report this week from researchers at Citizen Lab, a research facility at the University of Toronto, shows how the country’s censors have clamped down on the social network VK, which is similar to Facebook. Russia’s government has been ordering VK to remove posts, videos, and accounts almost every day since the start of the war, the researchers found after reviewing court orders issued by the government.

There’s been a thirtyfold increase in censorship since the start of the war, Citizen Lab researchers found. In total, 94,942 videos, 1,569 community accounts, and 787 personal accounts are blocked in Russia, which has clamped down on independent media and blocked social media such as Facebook and YouTube as it looks to control the information people read and access within its borders.

At the end of May,…

Source…

Call of Duty players being infected with self-spreading malware

/in


San Francisco, July 28: Players of an old Call of Duty game are being infected by hackers with a worm that automatically spreads in online lobbies.

On June 26, a player of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 warned other players on a Steam forum that hackers “attack using hacked lobbies,” and advised using an antivirus, reports TechCrunch.

It looks like the malware mentioned in the thread is on the malware online repository VirusTotal.

Another player claimed to have analysed the malware and said in the same forum thread that the malware seems to be a worm, based on a number of text strings inside the malware.

The presence of those strings in the malware, which suggests a worm, was confirmed by a game industry insider who asked to remain anonymous because they were prohibited from speaking to the press.

Neil Wood, spokesperson of Activision, which released the game in 2009, referenced a tweet posted by the company from the ‘Call of Duty Updates’ account on Thursday that indirectly mentioned the malware.

“Multiplayer for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) on Steam was brought offline while we investigate reports of an issue,” the tweet read.

It is still unclear why the hackers are spreading this malware.

The malware is a worm since it seems to automatically spread from one infected gamer to another through online lobbies.

“This means the hackers must have found and are exploiting one or multiple bugs in the game to execute malicious code on the other players’ computers,” the report said.

Source…