Lucky for you it is already gone from Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store.
The post InstaAgent – The App Who Does FAR More than It Promises appeared first on Avira Blog.
Tag Archives: app
Ins0mnia Will Let Your Apps Run Forever …
What if you wanted to terminate a malicious app but it would continue to run and run and run and run?
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“Unicode of Death†Crashes Your iPhone
The newly discovered security flaw on iOS crashes different messaging apps (like iMessage and your SMS app – basically all apps that use Apple’s CoreText library) on your iPhone and possibly your Apple watch when being sent a specific string of text. In addition to that it causes your mobile to reboot immediately. The bug was first reported on Reddit.com where some people were complaining about it.
According to TheRegister, this is what happens once your mobile receives the message containing the “Unicode of Death”, a string of text including Arabic characters and different symbols: “The bug causes CoreText to access memory that is invalid, which forces the operating system to kill off the currently running program: which could be your text message app, your terminal, or in the case of the notification screen, a core part of the OS.”
And sickestdancer98 from Reddit explains: “I can tell you it is due to how the banner notifications process the Unicode text. The banner briefly attempts to present the incoming text and then “gives up” thus the crash. On a jailbroken device, this ultimately leads to safe mode. However, on a stock iOS device, there is no safe mode hence the respring after the crash. That is why this only happens when you are not in the message because the banner is what truly crashes the entire system. Is this a possible vulnerability? Maybe. Has this been around already? Roughly since iOS 6. Can it be fixed/patched? That, my friends, is up to Apple. I hope I cleared things up a little bit if it did help in anyway, shape, or form.“
Apple is already working on fix which they’ll make available in an upcoming software update. Until then there are a couple of workarounds floating around online, one if them being to just turn off the lock screen notifications for now.
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100,000 Tax Accounts Breached Through IRS “Get Transcript†App
While nothing is impossible to breach you’d think that it would be really really hard to gain access to information like the one from the IRS. At least that’s what I thought – until I saw their press release today. According to the statement cybercriminals managed to illegally gain access to data from about 100,000 accounts by using the IRS’ very own “Get Transcript” app. Accessed data include things like addresses, birthdates, Social Security information, and the tax filing statuses.
Now don’t misunderstand the situation: The IRS has not been hacked. Well. Not in the usual sense of the word anyway. “These third parties gained sufficient information from an outside source before trying to access the IRS site, which allowed them to clear a multi-step authentication process, including several personal verification questions that typically are only known by the taxpayer”, explains the IRS statement. What does that mean? The criminals collected a lot of data and information on a lot of unlucky people – be it through phishing of by buying data from shady online sources – and used them to actually access taxpayers past tax records.
According to the information supplied the attackers tried to access 200,000 accounts between February and mid-May which leaves them with a success rate of 50%.
Once the IRS identified the questionable attempts to gain access to its data it decided to shut down the “Get Transcript” app temporarily. The whole affair is now also under investigation of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration and the IRS’ Criminal Investigation unit.
The IRS closes the statement with the following: “The IRS will be working aggressively to protect affected taxpayers and strengthen our protocols even further going forward.”
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