German newspaper Der Spiegel launched a media frenzy last week with the provocative story that the NSA can (and probably has) compromise the iPhone in a way that gives them complete “ownership” of the device for the purposes of surveillance. Fueled by documents released by infamous informant Edward Snowden, the article details a specific program called “Dropout Jeep” that could completely compromise an iPhone…in 2007.
What this means for you:
Today, in the internet economy, media outlets have priorities that aren’t always compatible: keep their audiences informed, and get as many eyeballs/clicks/likes as possible. As you can imagine, stories about iPhones and NSA spying are hot commodities right now, so when the two subjects align, how can you not lead with such an explosive story?
Several articles spurred by the Der Spiegel piece speculated that Apple may have been working with the NSA all along. Most suggested that the NSA can and has owned even current gen iPhones. Apple, of course, has denied any collaboration with the spy agency. The NSA itself continues to remain silent on stories like this. But, as mentioned above, the Dropout Jeep program was active in 2007, and required the hacker to have physical access to the device. As many of you have heard me say before, if someone has physical access to your device, compromising the device (regardless of manufacturer or type) becomes much more straightforward. The Snowden document did indicate that the NSA was working on future versions of the spyware that wouldn’t require physical access to the device, but for the moment, there is no proof that they can “own” modern iPhones.
But there’s no proof that they can’t, either.
In the US, Thanksgiving traditionally marks the start of the holiday season, and most of us will open our hearts and minds (and wallets) just a bit more than we do during the rest of the year, and we let down our guard to enjoy the holiday spirit. Sadly, criminals and other malicious agents are also in the holiday mood, and count on the distractions of the season to really suck the joy out of the holidays. Here are some things you can do to make sure your holidays aren’t marred by the cyber Grinches:
- Stop opening email attachments
This is how the dreaded Cryptolocker virus gets onto your computer. If you receive an email from someone with an attachment that you weren’t expecting, pick up the phone and call that person to confirm that the attachment is legitimate. Hey, it’s holidays. Shouldn’t you be reaching out and touching someone anyways? - Stop clicking links in emails
Just because you received an email from someone you know that has a link to the world’s funniest/scariest/cutest video does not mean you should click that link. At minimum, hover over the link to read where it’s really going to take you. Or pick up the phone and call that person to verify they sent the email in the first place, especially if the email seems to be out of character for the sender. Sensing a trend here? Wouldn’t you rather be on the phone catching up with an old friend rather than explaining to a bunch of angry relatives why you sent them a virus via email? - Beware of fake Holiday Greeting cards, donation solicitations and other holiday-related spam
Hackers will be taking advantage of the increased volume of these types of emails. Observe rules #1 and #2, and watch out for poor grammar and out-of-character emails. Just received an X-mas ecard from someone you haven’t talked to recently? You guessed it…pick up the phone! - Be careful with your personal data
Let’s say you knuckled under the pressure and clicked a link. The website you landed on is asking you for some personal information that seems relatively harmless: Birthdate, ZIP Code, last four of your Social Security number. Unless you are at the website with which you already do business (and have verified its that company’s actual website and not a fake one!), stop what you are doing and back away from the computer. Even these bits of data can be used as a digital wedge to get at other data from your personal life, which can lead to theft of both your money and identity. - Put a password or pin on your phone
See last week’s article on why this is important, and how to do it. Don’t ask why, just do it. Trust me. - Be less conspicuous about using your smartphone
Thieves are targeting smartphone users, especially iPhone users, because the devices are in high demand on the blackmarket, especially overseas where the phones can be reactivated without fear of being tracked. A protective case can help disguise your phone, but if you really want to blend in better, choose one that isn’t blinged out and brightly colored. That case that really helps you stand out in a crowd also paints a big target on you for thieves. Keep it in a deep pocket or a bag/purse that zips or latches shut so it will be less likely to accidentally fall out and picked up by someone looks for a free smartphone. - Keep an eye on your laptop and/or tablet
A lot of us will be traveling during this time of year, and it’s becoming increasingly common to drag along our work laptop so we don’t get too far behind while visiting with family. You’d be surprised at the number of laptops lost/stolen in airports and rental car terminals, primarily because the owners are distracted and overburdened. Having to call your boss to tell them you lost your work laptop and all the data on it will make for a very stressful holiday. It’ll be even worse if you have to call clients to tell them you have lost their sensitive data or may have exposed them to a security risk. - Where possible, don’t let online vendors store your credit card information
Up until very recently, most online stores assumed you wanted to keep your credit card “on file” with them for convenience on future purchases. While this is still the case, many now offer the option to remove that information, or to not store it in the first place. Given how many websites are being hacked these days, you may be better off not keeping that number on file, especially if it’s with a store you don’t frequent. Having to enter your credit card information once or twice is a trivial inconvenience as compared to having to replace all your credit cards because a website you bought something from years ago got hacked. - Beware deals on technology “too low to be believed”
With technology, you get what you pay for 99% of the time, which is to say that if you got it cheap, it’s likely that it is cheap. That knock-off iPhone charger might have been a steal, but if it burns up your battery due to an electrical short, your $5 charger just cost you $500. - Give yourself a gift this year: Back up your data
All hard drives fail eventually. Phones break, get lost or stolen. Viruses happen. If your data is important enough to save to a disk, it’s important enough to back up. There are online subscriptions that can take care of your most precious digital assets for pennies a day and are so simple to use that anyone who knows how to click a link can set up an account. You might not be able to keep the cyber Grinches at bay forever, but a good backup can take most of the sting out of worst virus infections or hardware failures.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
The winter holidays are upon us, and with them comes the shopping, traveling and general merry-making. Law enforcement is also warning about the increasing rate of smartphone thefts as criminals take advantage of the increased distraction, armfuls of packages and winter clothing to abscond with devices they know most people carry and use these days. Though you can do a lot to lower your profile as a potential victim, its an virtual guarantee that a certain percentage of you will have your phone stolen or lost, and aside from the loss of the device itself, your data could also be exploited to your further detriment if your device isn’t properly safeguarded against possible theft. CNET has a comprehensive article detailing how you can secure your data and increase your chances of recovering your iOS, Android or Windows smartphone in case it is stolen, but if you are in a hurry (and who isn’t, these days?), I’ll provide a summary of the basics below.
What this means for you:
For all phones:
- Use a pin, password, or fingerprint to lock your phone.
- Encrypt your phone data. iPhones and Windows Phones do this by default, but it must be enabled manually on Android devices.
- Back up your critical data, whether it’s contacts, emails or photos.
For iPhone Users:
- Disable access to any features made available through the lockscreen, such as dialing and texting via Siri.
- Set up an iCloud account and enable “Find my iPhone” so that your device can be tracked in case of loss or theft.
For Android Users:
- Disable access to lock screen features.
- Setup Android Device Manager and make sure tracking and control of your device is enabled.
- If you use a microSD card, be aware that it cannot be wiped remotely like the phone’s internal memory (but it can be encrypted).
For Windows Phone Users:
- Sit back and relax, as tracking is enabled by default and the lock screen doesn’t allow access to anything.
The article is really worth reading. If you truly are pressed for time, skip to the part that is pertinent to your specific phone platform. The author provides much more detail on how each tracking system works, as well as what the systems can and can’t do. It may mean the difference between having a happy holiday or a blue Christmas if (when) you get separated from your smartphone.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
A new app has appeared on Google’s Play store that purportedly offers Android users the ability to chat with iOS users via Apple’s iMessage platform, and it has security eyebrows raised, primarily because it wasn’t released by Apple. Cydia (app store for jailbroken iPhones) developer Jay Freeman delved into the code of “iMessage for Android” and discovered another alarming fact: the app appears to be authenticating not through Apple’s servers, but through some unknown platform in China, even though it requires a legitimate Apple ID to work. Another developer also noted that this app has the ability to silently download code to your Android smartphone, a permission that could lead to a malware infection. The app is very new and these security peculiarities have yet to be widely verified, but it has already been downloaded from the Play store over 10,000 times.
What this means for you:
Firstly, your Apple ID (which may have money and many, many apps, songs, movies, etc. tied to it) is being passed through an unknown server in China. There is no guarantee that the owners of that server aren’t collecting these IDs for nefarious purposes. Add this to the fact that the app can download code without notifying you, and the scales are now dipping alarmingly towards “dangerous” if not outright “malicious”. Also at stake is the trustworthiness of Google’s Play Store app vetting process – how could this app have possibly made it through without raising some red flags. Sure, there is no love lost between Apple and Google, but Google is usually smart enough to not poison its userbase with a dodgy app just so Android users can text chat with iOS users. It remains to be seen whether this app is truly on the up and up, but all signs indicate otherwise at this point. I’d err on the side of caution and avoid installing this app for now. If you really need to talk to that iPhone user, just send them a text!
Image courtesy of Idea go / FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
If you’ve taken to heart any of the security advice or practices that I or many other technology professionals have been dispensing for the past few years, you’ve probably developed a healthy skepticism for any emails that land in your box that are unexpected and contain unfamiliar links. Even more so if your email provider marks the email as spam or a possible phishing attempt.
For example, I recently received an email with the subject “iPhone iPod touch Class Action Settlement” that was immediately marked as spam by Gmail. This email purportedly offered me a part of a class action settlement with Apple. Seeing how many people own iPhones and iPods, it seemed like good phishing bait so I assumed this was yet another scam. It had all the trappings of a well-made con:
- broad target demographic
- based on a recent, actual event
- contained lots of official-sounding text that didn’t read like a 4th grader wrote it
- no overt clues that the sender was an obvious bad agent (non-US domains, inappropriate reply-to addresses, spoofed mail headers, etc.)
It would probably lure people into clicking a link that would either load up their machines with malware, or entice them into giving up some personal information that would later be used in an identity theft attempt. I opened it up with the intent of warning my audience and clients about the potentially well-crafted fraud.
As it turns out, this is a legitimate email that Gmail incorrectly identified as spam, probably because the sender was flagged as a spammer by justifiably suspicious readers like you and me. A little research online reveals this is part of the original case that made headlines back in May of this year. Emboldened by this information, I used Chrome (bolstered by a variety of anti-scripting extensions) to visit the included link, and, lo and behold, it’s a legitimate website. Because of the relative newness of this initiative, there isn’t a lot out on the web about this yet, so unless you are an experienced internet researcher, your searches might have come up with little evidence that this was a legitimate email.
What this means for you:
Most cautious internet citizens might have trusted their email provider’s guidance on this and just deleted this email, potentially missing out on as much as $200 as a settlement award. False positives are an unfortunate side-effect of a proper security protocol, and in this case, even Google didn’t provide enough information to immediately assuage my suspicions, and a few search results actually led to conversations where people immediately labeled it as a scam. Sometimes the internet does not provide instantaneous answers, nor is it always right, and as always, you should always take your search results with a grain of salt, especially if there is money at stake. If your search results turns up a dearth of information, your best course of action is to wait a few days for the internet to catch up (it always does!) and research again, or to contact a tech expert like C2 Technology to get a second opinion.
Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Security researchers at Skycure have discovered another weakness in smartphone security, and this could impact you despite whatever security measures you’ve taken personally. Most smartphone operating systems, iOS and Android included, offer the ability to “remember” the SSID’s and passwords of Wifi networks you have accessed with your smartphone, and have the ability to automatically connect to that network the next time you are in range. Skycure has alleged that at least one major carrier, if not all of them, are also pre-programming certain SSID’s into phones straight from the factory, ostensibly to provide customers with a convenient connection with carrier-hosted or sponsored Wifi hotspots. For example, AT&T iPhones allegedly are shipping with the “attwifi” SSID preprogrammed into the phone, and will supposedly automatically join that wifi network, presumably in use by AT&T’s retail storefronts, if it comes across it.
Here’s why this is bad: hackers could spoof any SSID that you’ve set your smartphone to remember and autoconnect, and they’ve got a straight shot at your phone. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem, as this requires guessing what SSIDs are stored on your phone, and then getting close enough to that phone with the spoofed Wifi network. But with the above, it would be trivial to sit in a crowded mall or any high-traffic walkway, scanning for AT&T iPhones, knowing that some, if not all, will autoconnect to a fake “attwifi” SSID without the owner ever being aware that they just got hacked.
What this means for you:
This exploit seems to be fairly new, and though Skycure claims to have seen this happening in the wild, it’s not widespread, yet. The best course of action is to disable the “autoconnect” setting for any wifi network you have used with your mobile device, whether it be smartphone, tablet or laptop. It will mean a few seconds of inconvenience anytime you are out and about and trying to get internet access, but it may mean the difference between keeping your cellphone secure or getting it hacked.
UPDATE: By default, Android phones will store SSIDs and passwords for any wifi network you add to your phone, and will automatically connect to that network whenever it is range. There is NO way to disable the autoconnect functionality built into the native Android settings. However, you can use an app to control automatic connections. I am currently testing this app, which is “free” but ad-supported. I’ve not tested it long enough to give a recommendation, but it does allow you to toggle the autoconnect functionality on or off per hotspot. On iOS devices, the only way to natively disable the “auto-join” feature is to actually connect to one of the pre-defined hotspots, eg. visit a local AT&T store, and then turn “Auto-join” off for that particular network.
Apple officially announced the next version of their mobile device operating system at the Worldwide Developer Conference on June 10th. The rumors of a redesigned interface proved to be true, as iOS 7 showed off a completely reskinned interface that features a more muted color scheme with “flattened” elements, a marked departure from the infamous “lickable” buttons and widgets of previous iterations. The new look was also backed by many updates to interface mechanics, expanded multitasking, redesigns of some of the built-in apps, and the launch of Apple’s own streaming music service, a direct competitor of similar services like Spotify, Pandora, and Google’s Music All Access.
What this means for you:
If you have an iPhone 4 or iPad 2 or newer, then the OS update will be automatically pushed out to you when it is released this Fall. Aside from the new look, iPhone users will enjoy the new “control center” function – a slide-up widget that allows you to access commonly used iPhone settings like toggles for Wifi, Bluetooth, Airplane Mode. The expanded multi-tasking capabilities will now grant the ability to all apps to work in the background (iOS 6 restricted this capability to a handful Apple apps only) without significant drains on the battery, so content-based apps can grab content as it becomes available (push-based) versus when requested by the user (pull-based).
If you are an Android user, you may be scratching your head and wondering why it’s taken Apple so long to bring features like the above to the iPhone. To be fair, Apple has been focusing their energy on a foolproof OS, which sometimes means making compromises on capabilities, but with an eroding marketshare and Samsung hot on their heels, the gloves have come off in the smartphone wars. For a full list of features, you can visit Apple’s iOS 7 website.
Proving that sometimes our Congress people come by their paychecks honestly, a bi-partisan privacy caucus led by Joe Barton (Rep. TX) sent a list of questions to Google’s CEO Larry Page, asking him point blank about several privacy issues, including whether or not Google would allow the use of facial recognition technology on the device.
Supposedly, Google has maintained from the start that facial recognition would never be implemented without “strong privacy protections in place.” In a Google+ post Friday, they reiterated this position and stated that Google “…won’t be approving any facial recognition Glassware at this time.”
What this means for you:
By default, Android OS-based devices can only install software via Google’s Play store. Software distributed via Play must go through Google’s approval process, much like apps on Apple’s iTunes store, so you can assume that Google will be true to their word and prevent distribution of facial recognition apps simply by not approving them. However, unlike iPhones, many versions of Android allow “sideloading” of apps with a simple settings change. Sideloading in the Android ecosystem is well established – Amazon.com has an app store that requires sideloading to be enabled, and instructions for enabling this capability are easily found on their website and many, many others.
Bottom line: this is yet another Pandora’s box that won’t be closed. Facial recognition is a reality, and portable, undetectable devices capable of performing this function are only a step away from today’s consumer technology. Technology (and scientific progress in general) advances despite legal or cultural ramifications. One could argue that society only advances in light of controversial technologies like Google Glass. We are only beginning to glimpse the potential of an always connected and much less private world. Google Glass is only one step in a long, uphill climb.
The upcomign Black Hat security conference features a topic that may give traveling iPhone users second thoughts about using a public charging station to juice up their phones. Three security researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology have built a prototype device that can hack an iPhone through the dock connector merely by being plugged in. Supposedly this hack can be accomplished on the latest iOS update, and does not require any interaction from the user, nor does it rely on the device being jailbroken.
What this means for you:
I’ve always viewed public charging stations as being rather sketchy to begin with, especially the ones that charge you for the service and offer “highspeed charging” which could easily fry your phone’s battery if not the device itself. I’d rather spend a few extra minutes locating a regular wall outlet and using my own equipment. Supposedly the prototype that will be demonstrated at the upcoming conference is too big to fit into a standard Apple-branded iPhone charger, but the designers of the device inferred that stealthier versions wouldn’t be hard to produce at all.
Most modern smartphones combine data and power in the same port (Android phones and most tablets also feature this same convenience) so it may not be just iPhones that will be vulnerable to this method of attack. For now, make sure you use chargers you know are safe regardless of what type of mobile device you use, and avoid public charging stations. This particular cow is well on its way out of that barn.
In an announcement that surprised pretty much no one in the technology industry, Facebook frontman Mark Zuckerberg announced the arrival of both a Facebook application suite, dubbed “Facebook Home” as well as a phone from HTC called “First” that will have Facebook Home pre-installed. It’s not an operating system, like iOS or Android, nor is the “First” a dedicated Facebook phone. Facebook Home is really a set of apps (only for Android phones at the moment) that essentially makes your phone more like Facebook and less like Android.
What this means for you:
If you live and breathe Facebook (and millions of Americans do just that), then you’ll want to give this app a try, but only if you have an Android phone. iPhone users will be out of luck for the forseeable future, as Apple does not allow the sort of access to the base operating systen that Facebook Home requires. For those of you wondering why anyone would want such a thing on your smartphone, consider this: For many, the Android OS is overwhelming and complicated. They just want to make calls, answer email, and connect with friends. These users are looking for what’s known as a “Walled Garden” experience, very similar to the way AOL offered the “internet” to millions who weren’t interested in (or bewildered by) the unfiltered and un-curated experience of the 1990’s world wide web. You could think of Facebook Home as the new “AOL” for your smartphone.
One thing to keep in mind: Facebook’s revenue model is based upon knowing as much as they can about all of their users. By using Facebook Home, it’s conceivable that Facebook will harvest much more data about you, including location data and browsing habits above and beyond what they can collect while you are sitting at home in front of a computer. If you’ve been living your life on the internet and have nothing to hide, and you don’t mind Facebook mining your smartphone activity for marketing data, Facebook Home might just give you the Facebook phone you’ve always dreamed of.