Google revealed that it blocked more than 1.9 billion installations of Android malware from non-Play Store sources over the course of 2019.On 11 February, Google revealed on the Android Developers Blog that it had succeeded in scanning billions of potential malware installations by creating a revamped Play Protect experience in 2019.This built-in malware pro

The places where online life directly intersection with that lived offline will be forever fascinating, illustrated perfectly through a recent performance piece involving Google Maps, a cart, and an awful lot of mobile phones. Simon Weckert, an artist based in Berlin, Germany, showed how a little ingenuity could work magic on the ubiquitous Google Maps syste

byJohn E DunnDoes WhatsApp have a lot of vulnerabilities or are there simply a lot of people looking for them?Ask PerimeterX researcher Gal Weizman, who last year set about poking the world’s most popular messaging platform to see whether he could turn up any new weaknesses.Sure enough, this week we learned that he uncovered a clutch of vulnerabilities that

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs, we reported on a Ryuk ransomware attack on The Tampa Bay Times, a newspaper in Florida; unmasked an elaborate browser locking scheme behind the more advanced tech support operations that are currently active; and looked at the latest laws on regulating deepfakes. Other cybersecurity news Cisco’s Talos Intelligence Group

byJohn E DunnFar from protecting the security and privacy of Safari users as advertised, Apple’s much-vaunted Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) could leave them exposed to a raft of privacy issues, including – ironically – being tracked.That’s the surprising conclusion of a group of Google researchers who this week published a short but sharp

byPaul DucklinLast September, we wrote about “fleeceware“, a term we coined to describe apps that charge huge amounts but give you very little in return.Technically, the apps themselves aren’t malware, because the code in the app doesn’t do anything illegal, dangerous, sneaky, snoopy, subversive or surreptitious.The treachery lies in

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs, we told readers how to check the safety of websites and their related files, explored the shady behavior taking place within the billion-dollar search industry, broke down the top six ways that hackers target retail businesses, and put a spotlight on the ransomware family Phobos. We also broke a major new story when we dis

Government-supported hackers tried to steal 12,000 Google credentials in 2019 Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) revealed in a report that they distributed more than 12,000 warnings to users in nearly 150 countries that include the United States of America. The recipients were notified that they have been subject of state-sponsored phishing attempts.

The bevy of mobile device sensors in modern smartphones and tablets make them more akin to pocket-sized laboratories and media studios than mere communication devices. Cameras, microphones, accelerometers, and gyroscopes give incredible flexibility to app developers and utility to mobile device users. But the variety of inputs also give clever hackers new me

byJohn E DunnFor anyone lucky enough to get them, Android’s December 2019 updates arrived this week, patching a small list of system and Qualcomm flaws across the operating system’s two patch levels.In Google’s estimation, at the top of the urgent list on the 2019-12-01 patch level (see below for explanation) is CVE-2019-2232, a critical flaw affecting Andro

byJohn E DunnWeb inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee is so worried his 30-year-old creation is turning into a “digital dystopia” that he’s proposed a Contract for the Web to rescue it from a headlong plunge into a moral abyss.It’s not an original worry – Berners-Lee has publicly fretted about the web’s direction many times in recent years – and it’s not

byJohn E DunnFor fans of DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) privacy, it must feel like a dam of resistance is starting to break.Mozilla Firefox and Cloudflare were the earliest adopters of this controversial new way to make DNS queries private by encrypting them, followed not long after by the weight of Google, which embedded DoH into Chrome as a non-default setting.This

Data privacy is back in Congressional lawmakers’ sights, as a new, legislative proposal focuses not on data collection, storage, and selling, but on the idea that Americans should be able to more easily pack up their user data and take it to a competing service—perhaps one that better respects their data privacy. The new bill would also require certain t

Who owns data owns the world. And with the Internet taking over much of our daily lives, it has become far easier and faster to receive, collect, and analyze data. The average user cannot even imagine how much data gets collected on them. Besides technical information (for example, about a smartphone) harvested by a manufacturer to patch vulnerabilities, com

byLisa VaasApparently caught off-guard by a question from the BBC, Google hardware chief Rick Osterloh made up a privacy etiquette rule on the spot last week when he said that yes, homeowners should tell guests that they’ve got smart speakers running in their homes.At any rate, that’s what he does, he said.Here’s his reported response after