Security

A day after The Atlantic EIC Jeffrey Goldberg revealed he’d been inadvertently included in a group message on Signal where Trump admin officials discussed details of an upcoming military strike, CBS News reports on an NSA warning from February that the app isn’t approved for “nonpublic unclassified” information. Despite testimony today that no classified material was shared, the NSA noted the danger posed by Russian phishing campaigns attempting to add a linked device and bypass Signal’s encryption for surveillance.

The Citizen Lab just published its investigation into Paragon Solutions, an “ethical” cyber defense company recently linked to a spyware campaign targeting journalists on WhatsApp. Along with the Canadian Ontario Provincial Police, researchers found that governments in Australia, Cyprus, Denmark, Israel, and Singapore may also be potential Paragon customers.

That’s how much Google’s parent company will pay if its $32 billion acquisition of the cloud security startup falls apart, sources tell the Financial Times. The deal reportedly wouldn’t have proceeded without such a high termination fee, which the FT calls “among the largest of all time.”

Security Checkup, an all-in-one security dashboard similar to Google’s identically named tool, allows TikTok users to manage their devices, two-step verification, passkey, security activity, and account recovery options all from a single screen. The new hub can be accessed by selecting “Settings and privacy” within your TikTok profile and tapping “Security & permissions.”

In a lawsuit filed this week, NY Attorney General Letitia James accused Allstate’s subsidiary, National General, of storing customers’ driver’s license numbers in plain text, leading to a 2020 breach that exposed the information of more than 12,000 people.

An anonymous Vancouver school guidance counselor told Associated Press that the Gaggle monitoring software “is good for catching suicide and self-harm” risks, but students then look for workarounds once they’re caught. An AP investigation found that many students’ Gaggle incident documents shared by the district weren’t protected and could be read by anyone with a link.

One of the malicious apps masqueraded as a file manager and had more than 10 downloads, according to the cybersecurity firm Lookout. The app contained Android spyware called KoSpy, which Lookout attributes to the North Korean hacking group APT37. It’s capable of collecting a device’s SMS messages, call logs, location, files, and more.

Android Authority spotted a new beta feature to delete all your passwords, passkeys, and other data from the tool in one go, rather than removing them individually.

A new batch of Apple security updates today that includes iOS 18.3.2 and macOS 15.3.2 might re-enable Apple Intelligence (again), but it also supplements an issue first addressed in iOS 17.2, where “Maliciously crafted web content may be able to break out of Web Content sandbox,” according to an Apple update note spotted by 9to5Mac.

Plankey isn’t new to the Trump administration, as he previously served as the principal deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Energy from 2019 to 2020. He also worked as the director for cyber policy with the National Security Council before that.

While Elon Musk claimed the “massive cyberattack” impacting X’s service had originated from Ukrainian IP addresses, security researchers note that this isn’t conclusive as attackers often obfuscate their true locations via compromised devices, proxy networks, and VPNs.

The platform has been going down intermittently since around 5:40AM ET on Monday, with no official ETA for when the outages will be resolved, and no details provided about what’s causing the issues. Musk made similar claims about cyberattacks impacting X’s services last year when Spaces crashed out during a scheduled conversation with Donald Trump, though X staffers at the time told The Verge that an attack hadn’t occurred.

The best of us can be swindled, but one banker’s particular enthrallment to an overseas cryptocurrency crime network was so dire that it almost devastated his entire community. Read this New York Times report about Shan Hanes embezzling more than $31 million into a suspicious crypto investment before the money disappeared.

The encrypted messaging app has already pushed out an update for a vulnerability that Russian hackers have been using to target Ukrainian soldiers. The attacks, discovered by Google, used malicious QR codes to link targets’ devices to the hackers’, allowing them to receive all their future messages. Signal’s update prompts users to confirm they want to create the link, but WhatsApp and Telegram may be vulnerable too.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a memo freezing its election security efforts to review all work and positions “related to election security and countering mis- and- disinformation” at the state and local level since 2017, reports Wired. The review is reportedly set to conclude on March 6th.

A clever and since-fixed exploit allowed a security researcher to find the email address belonging to any YouTube account through a roundabout series of steps. Strangely enough, the Pixel Recorder app played an important role in spilling the Google account details.

Two zero-day holes being fixed on this Patch Tuesday could potentially allow attackers to delete your files and gain unmitigated system-level privileges, Bleeping Computer reports, so update ASAP.