Security

In 2019, FBI investigators working on a case in Ohio were tasked with executing a search warrant on property owned by Baris Ali Koch, reports Forbes. Among the items seized was a locked iPhone 11 Pro Max that, according to the report, investigators subsequently accessed without Apple's help.

Koch stands accused of misprision of a felony for helping his convicted brother flee the U.S. by providing a duplicate driver's license and lying to federal agents. He is currently awaiting sentencing.

Cisco has released a fresh batch of security updates for its networking and comms gear lines.

The high-priority patch this month is the fix for CVE-2019-16009, a cross-site request forgery, in the web UI of Cisco IOS and Cisco IOS XE that can be exploited to steal credentials from users via malicious links.

Whoever came up with the slogan, "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas," wasn't prepared for a cyberattack. But that's what happened in the early morning hours on Tuesday, when the team monitoring computers for the City of Las Vegas detected it had been "compromised."

The city, which tweeted about the attack, didn't say which systems were affected or how the attack happened, though the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported it may have been an email attack. But its timing couldn't have been worse.

“Chinese Spyware Pre-Installed on All Samsung Phones (& Tablets)” declares the title of a post from earlier this week that’s kicked up quite a storm on Reddit. In it, the author launches into an analysis of a utility in Samsung’s Device Care mobile application — specifically, the storage scanner feature inside the application (which can’t be removed by the user). The scanner is useful, in that it can find unnecessary files junking up your phone and remove them to free up space.

The latest update to Firefox comes with a patch to a critical vulnerability that's being abused by hackers, says Mozilla, the browser's maker. The flaw could let attackers take over your system, according to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

That's about as serious as a vulnerability can get. The good news is that Mozilla, which prides itself on protecting user privacy, released the patch Wednesday. Even better: The company has automatic updates on by default.

An Android phone subsidized by the US government for low-income users comes preinstalled with malware that can't be removed without making the device cease to work, researchers reported on Thursday.

In the wake of the US assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani and the retaliatory missile strike that followed, Iran-watchers have warned that the country could deploy cyberattacks as well, perhaps even targeting US critical infrastructure like the electric grid. A new report lends some fresh details to the nature of that threat: By all appearances, Iranian hackers don't currently have the capability to start causing blackouts in the US. But they’ve been working to gain access to American electric utilities, long before tensions between the two countries came to a head.

Google's Project Zero disclosure program is supposed to encourage releases of security fixes in a timely fashion, but things haven't gone according to plan. Premature disclosures, half-hearted fixes and other issues have been a little too common. The company might address some of those problems in 2020, though. It recently revised its policies in a bid to encourage both more "thorough" security patches and wider adoption of those patches. Most notably, Google will wait 90 days to disclose a flaw even if it's fixed well ahead of that deadline.

Iran has over the past decade built up its own organic hacking and cyberwarfare capabilities. But the groups associated with orchestrating Iran's various cyberwarfare and cyber-espionage activities have also relied significantly on mining the work of others—and in at least one case, they have tried to bring in outside help for the ostensible purpose of training would-be hackers.

UK officials are worried that a London Stock Exchange outage in August wasn't just the glitch that many suspected. Wall Street Journal sources say the GCHQ intelligence agency is investigating the possibility that the failure may have been due to a cyberattack. It's reportedly taking a close look at the associated code, including time stamps, to determine if there was any suspicious activity. The exchange was in the middle of updating its systems when the outage happened, and there's a fear this left systems open to attack.