Avast Security News

At DEFCON last week, white hat hackers explained during a presentation that it is indeed possible to hack an Amazon Echo. Security researchers from Chinese conglomerate Tencent described the steps they took to turn a regular, working Echo into a spying device, completely through remote activation. And while this may sound like alarming news, it’s important to note that a key factor of the hack is that the interceptor must be on the same LAN.

A slice of Pie Grabbing headlines this week was the release of Google’s Android 9 Pie software, which started rolling out on Tuesday to Google Pixel phones. Standard whiz-bang OS enhancements aside, from a security perspective, here’s what we found noteworthy: The software update "restricts access to mic, camera, and all SensorManager sensors from apps that are idle.” That means that when you stop using an app, that app will no longer have permission to access your phone's mic, camera, etc. As app permissions have become increasingly invasive, this is a very welcome update.

When you’re using a Wi-Fi network these days, chances are you are counting on one of these protocols: WPA or WPA2. In short, your Wi-Fi signal is protected by the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA or WPA2) encryption standard. These wireless industry standards were designed to prevent potential hackers from intercepting the signal and reading your browsing data. Here’s the bad news: It was just reported that while investigating the new WP3 standard, a security researcher managed to break the encryption. So what’s the good news? At least now we know.

Questions still surround the TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) computer virus incident which shut down operations for the world’s largest semiconductor foundry last Friday, August 3. While the company maintains this was not due to a cyberattack, it also reports that the virus was a variant of WannaCry, the ransomware that terrorized the world last year.

Steam game found to be secretly cryptomining “Malicious cryptomining has become so popular among cybercriminals that it has earned its own name: cryptojacking,” states Avast security evangelist Luis Corrons. “It is one of the most popular ways to make easy money nowadays, and we have seen in the last months how thousands of vulnerable websites have been hacked to make their visitors cryptomine, or using ads to push cryptomining JavaScript.”