Omg Techies !

Micro Systemation is a Swedish company that sells software capable of skirting privacy controls on iOS and Android gadgets. Law enforcement and military agencies use this software in order to access data on devices used by criminal suspects.

In a video (see below) Micro Systemation is able to hack an iPhone in just seconds. Granted, the password wasn't very complicated – it was "0000."

Forbes explains that the hack is possible through a Micro Systemation application called XRY, which deciphers the phone's password, siphons its data to a computer, and decrypts it in order to gain data like GPS logs, call history, contacts, text messages, keystrokes, and so forth. XRY works a lot like a jailbreak, Forbes said. The Micro Systemation team doesn't look for backdoor vulnerabilities made by the phone's manufacturer, but rather weaknesses in the software.

"Every week a new phone comes out with a different operating system and we have to reverse engineer them," Micro Systemation's marketing director Mike Dickinson told Forbes. "We're constantly chasing the market."

Dickinson told Forbes that his company sells products that are able to breach iPhone and Android security in 60 countries. It provides software to 98 percent of the U.K.'s police departments and also sells to U.S. police departments and the FBI. However, its largest client is the U.S. military, Forbes said.

As the smartphone business grows worldwide, so does Micro Systemation's business.

"It's a massive boom industry, the growth in evidence from mobile phones," Dickinson said. "After twenty years or so, people understand they shouldn't do naughty things on their personal computers, but they still don't understand that about phones. From an evidential point of view, it's of tremendous value… if they've done something wrong."

It was not clear when the attack took place and Congress party leaders were not available for comment. The official website(www.congress.org.in/) was inaccessible to the public at noon on Friday, a couple of hours after the hacked post was noticed on Gandhi's profile page.

The attack came just days after India urged social media networks including Facebook, Twitter and Google to remove offensive material from their websites, unleashing a storm of criticism from Internet users complaining of censorship.

A New York Times report Monday said Telecoms and Information Technology Minister Kapil Sibal called executives about six weeks ago and showed them a Facebook page that maligned Gandhi and told them it was "unacceptable."

The government is very sensitive to criticism of Gandhi, whose family has dominated Indian politics for over six decades.

Source - [ in.reuters.com ]

A mobile security expert says he has found new ways for hackers to attack phones running Google Inc's Android operating system.

Riley Hassell, who caused a stir when he called off an appearance at a hacker's conference last week, told Reuters he and colleague Shane Macaulay decided not to lay out their research at the gathering for fear criminals would use it attack Android phones.

He said in an interview he identified more than a dozen widely used Android applications that make the phones vulnerable to attack.

"App developers frequently fail to follow security guidelines and write applications properly," he said.

"Some apps expose themselves to outside contact. If these apps are vulnerable, then an attacker can remotely compromise that app and potentially the phone using something as simple as a text message."

He declined to identify those apps, saying he fears hackers might exploit the vulnerabilities.

"When you release a threat and there's no patch ready, then there is mayhem," said Hassell, founder of boutique security firm Privateer Labs.

Hassell said he and Macaulay alerted Google to the software shortcomings they unearthed.

Google spokesman Jay Nancarrow said Android security experts discussed the research with Hassell and did not believe he had uncovered problems with Android.

"The identified bugs are not present in Android," he said, declining to elaborate.

It was the first public explanation for the failure of Hassell and Macaulay to make a scheduled presentation at the annual Black Hat hacking conference in Las Vegas, the hacking community's largest annual gathering.

They had been scheduled to talk about "Hacking Androids for Profit." Hundreds of people waited for them to show up at a crowded conference room.

Hassell said in an interview late on Thursday the pair also learned -- at the last minute -- that some of their work may have replicated previously published research and they wanted to make sure they properly acknowledged that work.

"This was a choice we made, to prevent an unacceptable window of risk to consumers worldwide and to guarantee credit where it was due," he said.

A mobile security researcher familiar with the work of Hassell and Macaulay said he understood why the pair decided not to disclose their findings.

"When something can be used for exploitation and there is no way to fix it, it is very dangerous to go out publicly with that information," the researcher said. "When there is not a lot that people can do to protect themselves, disclosure is sometimes not the best policy."

Hassell said he plans to give his talk at the Hack in The Box security conference in Kuala Lumpur in October.

(Reporting by Jim Finkle; editing by John Wallace and Andre Grenon)

Source - [ in.news.yahoo.com ]

A 10-year-old hacker from California who goes by the online handle CyFi announced in a presentation Sunday to the DefCon Kids crowd that she had discovered a bug in several games for Apple iOS and Google Android smartphones, CNET reported.

The vulnerability CyFi discovered has to do with time-processing factors in farm-themed smartphone games. The girl told CNET the flaw she found was borne out of her own frustration with the slow pace of these games.

"It was hard to make progress in the game, because it took so long for things to grow," she told CNET. "So I thought, 'Why don't I just change the time?'"

Doing so forced the game further ahead, exposing the exploit.

(To allow the game companies time to fix the errors in the Android and iPhone games, CyFi is not revealing the specific games that contain this flaw.)

Apparently CyFi has talents that extend beyond cybersecurity research: she told CNET she is a state-ranked downhill skier, a Girl Scout and has performed a spoken-word piece before 1,000 people at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.