Author: shrinath7d

Google’s Chrome browser, Microsoft’s Windows operating system, and Apple’s iPhones were all in the crosshairs. But no one was breaking the law. These were just some of the people taking part in Pwn2Own, one of the world’s most prestigious hacking competitions. It was the 10th anniversary for Pwn2Own, a contest that draws elite hackers from around the globe with the lure of big cash prizes if they manage to exploit previously undiscovered software vulnerabilities, known as “zero-days.” Once a flaw is found, the details are handed over to the companies…

Computing experts thought they had developed adequate security patches after the major worldwide Spectre flaw of 2018, but UVA’s discovery shows processors are open to hackers again. In 2018, industry and academic researchers revealed a potentially devastating hardware flaw that made computers and other devices worldwide vulnerable to attack. Researchers named the vulnerability Spectre because the flaw was built into modern computer processors that get their speed from a technique called “speculative execution,” in which the processor predicts instructions it might end up executing and preps by following the predicted…

An Indian-origin researcher has warned that billions of computers and other devices across the globe are vulnerable today owing to a vulnerability named ‘Spectre’ that was first discovered in 2018 but is open to hackers again. Since ‘Spectre’ was discovered, the world’s most talented computer scientists from industry and academia have worked on software patches and hardware defenses, confident they’ve been able to protect the most vulnerable points in the speculative execution process without slowing down computing speeds too much. However, researchers, led by Ashish Venkat at the University of…

Criminal lawyers could soon begin challenging a tool Australian police routinely rely on to extract messages, photos and other information from mobile phones for investigations after the discovery of security flaws that meant data could be falsified. Last week Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of encrypted messaging app Signal, published a blog post outlining a series of vulnerabilities in Israeli company Cellebrite’s surveillance devices. Marlinspike said the weaknesses make it easy for anyone to plant code on a phone that would take over Cellebrite’s hardware if it was used to scan…