The researchers found that when connected to a target user on a Skype call, they could record the audio of the user’s keystrokes. With a small amount of knowledge about the victim’s typing style and the keyboard he’s using, the researchers could accurately get 91.7 percent of keystrokes. The attack does not require any malware on the victim’s machine and simply takes advantage of the way that VoIP software acquires acoustic emanations from the machine it’s on.

Source: Recording Keystroke Sounds Over Skype to Steal User Data | On the Wire

Redmond’s digital crimes unit senior attorney Courtney Gregoire says half of respondents between the age of 18 and 34 had followed tech support scammer instructions, handing over remote access to their machines or downloading software after encountering a scam page.

Only 17 per cent of respondents 55 years and older took the bait. Meanwhile, one in three (34 per cent) of folks aged between 36 and 54 fell for scams.

Source: Kids today are so stupid they fall for security scams more often than greybeards

A total of 32 lakh debit cards across 19 banks could have been compromised on account of a purported fraud, the National Payment Corporation of India said in a statement.

The issue was brought to light when State Bank of India blocked the debit cards of 6 lakh customers on October 14. This was done after the bank was alerted to a possible fraud by the National Payment Corporation of India, MasterCard and Visa, said Managing Director Rajnish Kumar in a telephonic interview with BloombergQuint.

In a statement released on Thursday evening, the NPCI clarified that the problem was brought to their attention when they received complaints from a few banks that customers’ cards were used fraudulently, mainly in China and the U.S., while those cardholders were in India.

Source: The Big Debit Card Breach: Three Things Card Holders Need To Understand

The BTB provides a history of branches taken by the processor as it runs through its code: after the CPU is told to make a decision, it usually jumps to another part of the program based on the outcome of that decision. For example, if something fetched from memory has a value greater than zero, then jump to location A or jump to location B if not.

If a jump location is in the history buffer then the CPU knows this branch is usually taken so can start priming itself with instructions from the jump landing point. That means branches routinely taken execute with minimal delay.

By flooding the BTB with a range of branch targets, hackers can observe the BTB refilling with values of regularly taken jumps. This allows the miscreants to work out where in memory the operating system has randomly placed the application’s vital components. It takes a few tens of milliseconds to perform, we’re told. The eggheads say this allows an “attacker to identify the locations of known branch instructions in the address space of the victim process or kernel.”

Source: Boffins exploit Intel CPU weakness to run rings around code defenses

For the past two years, since researchers discovered the attack, the term Rowhammer has been used to describe a procedure through which attackers launch read & write operations at a row of memory bits inside a RAM memory card.

The repeated read and write operations cause an electromagnetic field to appear, which changes local memory bits from 0 to 1 and vice versa, in a process called bit flipping.

For their research paper, called Drammer: Deterministic Rowhammer Attacks on Mobile Platforms, researchers tested and found multiple smartphone models to be vulnerable to their attack.

The list includes LG Nexus (4, 5, 5X), LG G4, Motorola Moto G (2013 and 2014), One Plus One, HTC Desire 510, Lenovo K3 Note, Xiaomi Mi 4i, and Samsung Galaxy (S4, S5, and S6) devices. Researchers estimate that millions of Android users might be vulnerable.

Source: Rowhammer Attack Can Now Root Android Devices

iTrack Easy, Nut Smart Tracker, TrackR Bravo en Tile were looked at: both the data the device itself sends and the apps they use. They don’t come out well.

Source: Stalkers volgen je dankzij je eigen GPS-trackers