The recently released Microsoft Security Intelligence Report shows that web-based propagation vectors have surpassed traditional malware propagation vectors as the largest threats to distributed network environments. While I agree with Microsoft’s assessment of the threat landscape, I don’t think this is anything new; it is just the current state of a long running trend.

[UPDATE! April 15: Pandora removes all advertising libraries from its Android and iPhone apps!]

The blog post we made earlier this week entitled, Mobile Apps Invading Your Privacy, gives detail around the information being requested by the advertisement libraries embedded inside a popular online radio application. There have been a number of great posts and comments that got us thinking more about the issues and the types of data being requested.

First off we want to thank some people who commented about the Pandora application not having permission to actually access the GPS on the device. Below are the …

[April 8: We've added some more information in a follow-up post]

Background

An article in the Wall Street Journal, dated April 5, 2011, disclosed that Federal prosecutors in New Jersey are investigating numerous smart phone application manufacturers for allegedly, illegally obtaining and distributing personal private information to third party advertisement groups. The allegations state that mobile applications are gathering data such as GPS location, device identifiers, gender, and even user age without proper notice or authorization from the end user. The Journal tested 101 applications and found that 56 of them transmitted the device unique identifier off the device, while …

I’ve been focused on conducting research into the mobile spyware arena these last few months and the results have been very interesting. As I’m sure you are aware, I released a fully functional piece of Blackberry Spyware called txsBBSpy at the Shmoocon security conference in February 2010 and have done a number of interviews and podcasts on the topic. While my research is interesting, other high profile attacks just this week could really make this type of spyware/trojan a lot more dangerous.

At CanSecWest security conference this week, iPhone, Firefox, Safari, and other mobile operating systems and browsers were …

There have been a lot of great articles written in the wake of my presentation on Mobile Spyware at Shmoocon 2010. Many of them show wonderful insight into the problems that mobile carriers and owners of the mobile applications stores are facing. However, for every handful of great articles, we occasionally come across a technical expert that presents a different viewpoint. Usually it’s best to let the articles stand on their own merit and let the readers decide for themselves, but in this instance I think it might be best to use a recent article to demonstrate how …

Some of the media coverage to date has described Tyler Shields’ proof-of-concept spyware as a “BlackBerry hack”, much to our chagrin. In this blog post, we’d like to clarify some of the misconceptions that have surfaced both in the media and in the BlackBerry user community. Feel free to post additional questions in the comments section and we’ll do our best to respond.

Q: This isn’t a real hack, is it? Tyler’s program is similar to many applications already on the market.

We’ve tried to make it clear from the beginning that txsBBSpy is a demonstration of public, documented …

[UPDATE, 2/10/2010: We've written a follow-up blog post to address some of the questions and misconceptions we've been seeing.]

Tyler Shields gave a presentation earlier today at ShmooCon 2010 on the threats of mobile spyware, particularly as it relates to data privacy. Smart phones and mobile applications have grown tremendously popular over the past couple of years, and it seemed like an appropriate time to raise awareness of what these applications are capable of.

Our goal was to demonstrate how BlackBerry applications can access and leak sensitive information, using only RIM-provided APIs and no trickery or …

Neil MacDonald at Gartner asks the question, “Why Don’t Mobile Application Stores Require Security Testing?”

I couldn’t agree more that we may be missing an opportunity to bring whitelisting to these new important mobile platforms. We need to leave the “detect and revoke” mentality of the PC world behind as we move to new platforms. Attackers are able to game the PC antivirus model by continuously flooding the software ecosystem with new unknown malware. The attackers will win in the mobile world too if we don’t change it. The mobile app store is a form of whitelisting that …

Yesterday it was reported by various media outlets that a recent BlackBerry software update from Etisalat (a UAE-based carrier) contained spyware that would intercept emails and text messages and send copies to a central Etisalat server. We decided to take a look to find out more.

We’re not sure why the software was delivered in both .jar and .cod form. The .cod file is a RIM proprietary format that contains the compiled Java classes along with a signature. Therefore it’s not even necessary to send the .jar, but they did, completely unobfuscated. Arrogance or incompetence? Here’s what’s …

Why bother setting up dedicated websites to host malicious content when you can just infect trusted sites like BusinessWeek? This is becoming something of a trend, as evidenced by the mass SQL Injection attacks from a few months ago.

The idea is simple — find SQL Injection vulnerabilities in high-traffic, trusted websites where the site’s content is dynamically fetched from a database (i.e. just about any content-rich site). Then use an automated tool to prepend or append malicious content to that content in the database. When the unsuspecting user visits the page to read an article, …

I spent the weekend in Berlin attending a conference called PH-Neutral, run primarily by the Phenoelit crew. This was the first European security conference I’ve attended and I found it quite different from any North American security gathering I’ve been to, such as BlackHat, CanSecWest, SOURCE Boston, BlueHat, or RSA. Everything was far more casual and laid back, which is something I had heard about European conferences but hadn’t experienced until now (even EUSecWest is held in a club whereas CanSecWest is in a Marriott).

I took part in the L0pht Reunion Panel at the Source Boston conference in Cambridge, MA last Friday. It was a lot of fun to get back together with the “band” and pontificate with no holds barred about the latest security threats, just like we did in the old days.

One of the questions asked of the panel by moderator Michael Fitzgerald (who did a kick-ass job) was, “What scares you the most these days?”. My answer was the proliferation of of inexpensive digital devices made in China that we plug into our computers. …

So it seems that SquirrelMail 1.4.11 and 1.4.12 were recently backdoored. Similar to some high-profile backdoors in the past, this was done by modifying the distribution tarball on rather than infiltrating the source code repository [1]. In this case, the backdoor was detected when a user noticed that the MD5 published on SquirrelMail’s website didn’t match the calculated MD5 from the SourceForge distribution.

Since the SVN repository remained intact, we can’t go back and examine the backdoor in detail. However, we do have a newsgroup posting that sheds a little light on the …

There has been some talk in the press lately about backdoors due to the recent court case where it was disclosed that federal agents planted a keystroke logger on a suspect’s computer using a trojan program. Many of the articles don’t report on the court case but raise the question as Declan McCullagh titles his article, “Will security firms detect police spyware?”

You can see the security cat and mouse game playing out between the police and suspected criminals although the roles here are reversed. The criminals are trying to secure their communications and the …

Client-side browser vulnerabilities, the ones that require the browser software on your computer to make a request to a web site hosting a malicious web page, are on a sharp rise. Sophos reports:

From January to the end of March, Sophos identified an average of 5,000 new infected webpages every day, indicating that this route to infection is becoming more popular with cybercriminals.

and

Not all of the infected websites were created by the hackers themselves. Sophos has found that the majority, 70 percent, were bonafide websites that were vulnerable to attack because they were unpatched, poorly coded or had …