Tag: signal | Page 2

Crooks can hack your Honda’s key fob signal to unlock or steal your car

July 15, 2022/in Computer Security

When a manufacturer releases a defective product, it can volunteer to recall it. If the risk is significant enough, the government will step in and enforce it. Either way, the consumer may not know about the recall until later.

Regarding cars, problems with the mechanical parts, safety issues or software upgrades are the usual culprits. We compiled a list of the latest recalls affecting thousands of Fords, Nissans, Hyundais and Hondas. Tap or click here to see if your car is on the list and what you need to do about it.

No matter the fault, the line between cybercrime and the real world is becoming blurrier by the day. A technological trick is exposing Honda vehicles to criminals. The worst part is that the scheme is almost as old as some of the affected models, but luckily there is something you can do about it.

Here’s the backstory

When you park your car and walk away, how sure are you that the familiar beep from the vehicle indicates that it’s locked? You might hear the right sounds, but you’ll never know unless you go back to check.

In a research paper detailing how the Rolling-PWN attack works, the authors from Star-V Lab explain that the vulnerability has been known for some time. The research team tested 10 Honda vehicles ranging from 2012 to 2022 models, and guess what? All the tested vehicles failed.

Activating the key fob sends an electronic code to lock the car. The same code must be transmitted from the fob to unlock it. Each time you press the button, the rolling code system ensures that it increases the synchronizing counter. But criminals figured out a way to send the codes in a consecutive sequence, resynchronizing the counter.

“This weakness allows anyone to permanently open the car door or even start the car engine from a long distance,” researchers explained.

Honda’s letting it go

This isn’t the first time that the problem has come to light. Two years ago, computer scientist Blake Berry and researcher Ayyappan Rajesh ran similar tests with the same results.

The pair tested 2016-2020 Honda Civic (LX, EX, EX-L, Touring, Si, Type R) models, while the Star-V Lab team…

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How to Move WhatsApp Chats to Android, iPhone, Signal, and Telegram

June 25, 2022/in Mobile Security

Since early 2016, WhatsApp has protected messages and conversations sent in its app with end-to-end encryption. This means that nobody other than the sender and receiver of messages can read their content—not even Meta can read or snoop on the contents of your conversations.

Despite WhatsApp being omnipresent—more than 2 billion people use it each month—securely moving your encrypted chats and photos to different platforms or apps has been a challenge. Transferring your WhatsApp chats from Android to iPhone and from iPhone to Android has historically only been possible using third-party apps. These apps are often fiddly and don’t necessarily protect your data at the level offered by WhatsApp’s ecosystem.

But in recent months WhatsApp has made it possible to officially switch between iPhones and Android (and vice versa), rolling out processes to securely move data between operating systems and working with phone manufacturers to enable the move.

If you’re fed up with Meta’s ecosystem, it’s also possible to move your groups and some chat data to other messaging apps. Here’s how to move all of your WhatsApp chats and backups.

Android to iPhone

Moving your WhatsApp account from Android to an iPhone involves a few steps. But it should be possible to bring most of your information with you: Your profile photo, individual and group chats, history, photos, videos, and settings can all make the jump from one device to another. Your call history and display name can’t be moved across, however, WhatsApp says.

Most of the work in moving your WhatsApp data comes before you make the shift. To move between devices, you need to ensure you have the same phone number on each. Before you start the process, make sure you have a recently updated version of WhatsApp on your Android phone. You also need to be running at least Android 5 on the device you’re moving from and iOS 15.5 on the iPhone you’re moving to. (The iPhone needs to be a new device or have been recently reset to its factory settings.)

Next, download and install the “Move to iOS” app from Google’s Play Store—this Apple-owned app will do all the heavy lifting. When you’re ready to migrate your data, plug both…

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A radio telescope in China reportedly discovers a possible alien signal

June 18, 2022/in Computer Security

Humans have invented a rogue’s gallery of nightmarish fictional aliens over the decades: acid-blooded xenomorphs who want to eat us and lay their eggs in our chest cavities; Twilight Zone Kanamits who want to fatten us up like cows and eat us; those lizard creatures in the 1980s miniseries V who want to harvest us for food. (You may be sensing a theme here.)

But the most frightening vision isn’t an alien being at all — it’s a computer program.

In the 1961 sci-fi drama A for Andromeda, written by the British cosmologist Fred Hoyle, a group of scientists running a radio telescope receive a signal originating from the Andromeda Nebula in outer space. They realize the message contains blueprints for the development of a highly advanced computer that generates a living organism called Andromeda.

Andromeda is quickly co-opted by the military for its technological skills, but the scientists discover that its true purpose — and that of the computer and the original signal from space — is to subjugate humanity and prepare the way for alien colonization.

No one gets eaten in A for Andromeda, but it’s chilling precisely because it outlines a scenario that some scientists believe could represent a real existential threat from outer space, one that takes advantage of the very curiosity that leads us to look to the stars. If highly advanced aliens really wanted to conquer Earth, the most effective way likely wouldn’t be through fleets of warships crossing the stellar vastness. It would be through information that could be sent far faster. Call it “cosmic malware.”

Phoning ET

To discuss the possibility of alien life seriously is to embark upon an uncharted sea of hypotheses. Personally, I fall on the Agent Scully end of the alien believer spectrum. The revelation of intelligent extraterrestrials would be an extraordinary event, and as SETI pioneer Carl Sagan himself once said, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

Intelligent extraterrestrials who also want to hack our planet would be even more extraordinary. But this scenario became a bit easier to envision this week.

On Wednesday, a story published in China’s state-backed Science and…

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