Tag: smartphone
Microsoft 365 accounts are being compromised worldwide
A vast botnet of over 130,000 compromised devices is now attacking Microsoft 365 accounts worldwide. A botnet is a network of computing devices that have been surreptitiously taken over by hackers and are being controlled remotely without the owners’ knowledge. Microsoft 365 accounts are suffering from ‘password spray attacks’ by the botnet. This involves mass attempts to use large numbers of common passwords to infiltrate users’ Microsoft accounts, targeting basic authentication procedures and thereby bypassing multi-factor authentication.
Tough Times ahead for Apple
These are troubled times for Silicon Valley tech giant, Apple. Hard on the heels of the US Justice Department suing Apple for monopolizing the smartphone market comes news of a major security flaw in Apple M-series chips (M1, M2, and M3). The US Justice Department appears determined to call time on Apple’s long-standing domination of the smartphone market. It holds that “Apple’s broad-based, exclusionary conduct” makes it harder for Americans to switch smartphones. Apple also stands accused of undermining innovation for apps, products, and services, and imposing extraordinary costs on developers, businesses, as well as on consumers.
Nation-state spyware goes mainstream
Commercial surveillance technology targeting smartphones, once the province of spymasters, is now becoming widely available on the open market. It is not only high-profile individuals such as politicians who are now threatened but also business people and ordinary smartphone users. Half of the known zero-day exploits (a previously unknown vulnerability) used against Google and Android devices can be attributed to commercial surveillance vendors (CSVs), according to a new 50-page report from Google, Buying Spying: Insights into Commercial Surveillance Vendors. “The commercial surveillance industry has emerged to fill a lucrative market niche: selling cutting edge technology to governments around the world that exploit vulnerabilities in consumer devices and applications to surreptitiously install spyware on individuals’ devices,” says Google.