Ransomware is a serious enough threat for most organisations, but just imagine if you’re in the business of keeping people healthy and saving lives.
Read more in my article on the Hot for Security blog.
Google has shut down an operation that combined malicious AdSense advertisements with a zero-day attack exploiting Chrome for Android to force devices to download banking fraud malware.
Over a two-month span, the campaign downloaded the Banker.AndroidOS.Svpeng banking trojan on about 318,000 devices monitored by Kaspersky Lab, researchers from the Moscow-based anti-malware provider reported in a blog post published Monday. While the malicious installation files weren’t automatically executed, they carried names such as last-browser-update.apk and WhatsApp.apk that were designed to trick targets into manually installing them. Kaspersky privately reported the scam to Google, and engineers from the search company put an end to the campaign, although the timing of those two events wasn’t immediately clear.
“So far, those behind Svpeng have limited their attacks to smartphone users in Russia,” Kaspersky Lab researchers Nikita Buchka and Anton Kivva wrote in Monday’s post. “However, next time they push their ‘adverts’ on AdSense they may well choose to attack users in other countries; we have seen similar cases in the past. After all, what could be more convenient than exploiting the most popular advertising platform to download their malicious creations to hundreds of thousands of mobile devices?”
Over the past few years, the Air Force has been trying to retire the A-10 Thunderbolt II. In 2013, the Air Force brought most of its Europe-deployed A-10s home as it consolidated its bases. But now two squadrons of the close air support planes have been sent back to Europe, according to the Air Force’s European commander, Gen. Frank Gorenc. The move comes as Russian armor has become a fresh concern for some European allies.
In a briefing with reporters at the Air Force Association’s Air & Space Summit today, Gorenc said that the planes, which include a dozen aircraft deployed from Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, were sent as part of a larger “security package” of additional Air Force and Army units for Operation Atlantic Resolve, an ongoing set of multinational training and “security cooperation” missions in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria that began in April 2014. This follows a deployment of 12 A-10s of the 354th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron to Romania in April.
“We’ve had the A-10s and F-15s all over the continent in many countries, 20-plus countries, that they engaged with,” he told reporters. The A-10s have been involved in a number of joint exercises “doing particularly JTAC training [joint terminal attack controller training] and then to support [US Army Europe commander] Gen. [Ben] Hodges with all of the rotation force that the Army is bringing in.”
Google has worked hard to lock down the personal data it collects since revelations in the last year and a half about mass surveillance programs at the U.S. National Security Agency, company Chairman Eric Schmidt said.
The news of surveillance by the NSA and intelligence agency counterparts at allied nations has damaged the U.S. tech industry on “many levels,” with many Europeans now distrusting U.S. tech companies to hold on to their personal data, Schmidt said Friday at a surveillance conference at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
Schmidt learned of efforts by U.K. intelligence agency GCHQ to intercept traffic between Google data centers through a newspaper article, he told the audience. “I was shocked,” Schmidt said.
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