Scam Calls: Innovation In Hacking Techniques

It has become common knowledge that scammers try to penetrate into the computers and cell phones through cell phone tracking apps and PC tracking malware. These malicious contents play havoc with the system upon entering the device. However, now these hackers have devised another useful way of penetrating into your machine and destroying your privacy – Phone scams.

How to identify a Phone Scam?
The purpose of the phone scam is to extract your personal details by making a fake call that makes your private data accessible to the hackers. Glaring example is of last year’s Microsoft phone scam call, when people called to inform them that their computers had been infected with rogue software. The caller tries to gain trust of the victim by establishing the call from Microsoft, asking some personal data and the user falls prey to the scam and their security and privacy crumbles down like a deck of cards. The scam caller requests to install remote access code, which in turn helps the hacking group, get complete access to the computers and other devices.

More cases of Scam Calls Reported
The trend of scam calls is rising in English speaking countries, particularly America and the United Kingdom. The hackers follow a similar process every time they call the new victim – establish the call from Microsoft, request remote access, install malware under the cloak of updated version of software, run a fake scan and get successful in obtaining their credit card numbers. A survey conducted by the Trustworthy Computing Team revealed, out of 7000 people surveyed, 1000 reported these spam calls – 234 people out of one thousand, fell for the scam, while 184 of the 234 actually lost money, around $800.

How to Avoid the Scam
The first thing to keep in mind is that Microsoft does not call its users and charge them for fixing or updating software. So, this is a clear distinction that you need to be aware of. Here’s how you can counter these spam calls:
-          Never hand over the remote access of your computer to an unknown, third party. Only when you are certain about the credibility of other person, you’re giving the control to a legitimate member of the support team. Ideal way would be to give them a call back to establish the authenticity of the employee.
-          This is one rule we learnt as kids – never give your talk to strangers or give any personal information – also applying to your credit card number and financial information.
-          Always establish the authenticity of the call, which demands paying a fee or needs subscription. Don’t take any risks, if you have any doubts.
-          If you are victim of such calls, then the most pragmatic approach would have been to note down the information of the caller and report it to local authorities, so that the hackers can be traced and arrested. Make sure you cover all your bases with regards to warding off the phony calls.

Blackberries Leaking Juice

A leaked presentation file detailing RIM’s planned out path for the future- the credibility of the file is naturally dubious- is shedding light about the company’s plan regarding the upcoming updates, which according to the announcement made by the company the upgrade to Blackberry 10 platform is going to be delayed as it is now expected to be released in the first quarter of 2013. Although the contents of the not so credible slide are in consonance with the news revealed by RIM lately, the slide was revealed from an anonymous source at BlackBerryOS.com. Earlier on, RIM foretold that BlackBerry 10 devices would come out in the fall of this year, during Blackberry World conference in May, however, the information from the slide coincides with the recent change that RIM only announced last week about delaying the BlackBerry 10 release to next year.


RIM takes a step further in Tablets
The PlayBook 4G (also Winchester) running the version 7 of BlackBerry Os instead of BlackBerry 10 is shown to be released in the last quarter of this year. It may come off as a surprise to many as the previous tab was not that popular, but the company has more planned out in this regard as well. A 10 inch tablet called “Blackforest 128” is going to be released in the third quarter of 2013, according to the slide, while there is no detail as to what 128 stands for, an educated guess would be 128gb memory which be a great advance as most tabs right now go up to a capacity of 64gb. While this raises concerns about the authenticity of the slide, it is also a controversial idea for RIM to launch a tab competing against the iPad considering RIM’s first quarter sales for Playbook were 260 000 where as Apple sold 11.8 million iPads in the second quarter of 2012. According to Ken Dulaney, Gartner analyst, RIM’s upcoming plans regarding tabs are not much of business ideas, the reasons behind them could be maintaining high security users with their platform and devices known for this quality and also completing the company portfolio of devices. So with the new upgrades out, users won’t have to worry about BlackBerry spy or any other malware of the kind. Even in this regard, Android and Apple tabs are advancing in almost every aspect including security features, Microsoft Surface is also going to launch with its own security details, therefore if security is the key area that RIM treasures, it might not be too farfetched to expect contending tablets to exceed RIM in this regard as well by the time they layout an action plan.  However, even with these rivals advancing in the race, RIM has to worry a lot less about mobile spy software as opposed to Android for example, which is a platform much more plagued by malware attacks.

London and Nevada rediscovered in 2013
As per the leaked information, the new handsets will also be released in the first quarter of 2013, including RIM’s first device without a hardware keyboard running BlackBerry 10 being the “London” handset and the other one being “Nevada”. BlackBerry 10 will launch in Europe in January 2013, prior to U.S. launch which is expected in February, according to BB OS’s sources.
BlackBerry Handsets have always found their clientele in the cell phone market, where as the Playbook has not yet been as popular. RIM is counting on the response for these new upgrades, let’s all hope that it turns out to be great for the company as well the users.

Malicious Malware Creeps Into Android Market

 In times when technology is a household phenomenon and markets are flooded with various kinds of devices – security is a constant challenge faced by the users. Market for Android and Apple devices is expanding every day, with innovations pouring in every month. Advancement in smart phones has led to certain issues in the field of mobile phone technology. The most important of them is security issue.
Recent reports have suggested that security researchers have unearthed a new malware in Google Play Store, which is an app market for Google’s Android. This discovery proves the limitations of the scanning service used to detect the presence of spywares in the apps just before downloading them.

A Trojan War!
Irfan Asrar, researcher from an antivirus provider company, Symantec said that Android Dropdialer, a Trojan was detected in different titles, which went unseen for weeks. Asrar gave out this information in his blog. Naming the two titles, Asrar said that the Trojan was hidden in "Super Mario Bros" and "GTA 3 Moscow City" – generating at least a 100,000 downloads of these apps.

Explaining the nature of the Trojan, the researcher said that the interesting thing is that this spyware went unnoticed on Google Play for a long time – affecting other downloads, due to its remote payload used by this Trojan.

Earlier Asrar mentioned on his blog post about the process of disintegrating a harmful app into separate, staged payloads protected the malware from being detected by the Android monitoring software.  The major purpose behind this procedure is to break the malware into separate files, instead of using it as single file, which will make it easier for it to go undetected for a longer period of time. The malware in question, Android.Dropdialer, was first found on on Google Play (earlier known as the Android Market) – once this malware is installed, it will download other packages as well.

Who to blame?
The blog post writer went on to say that users affected by this Trojan – after installing the app - were still shown a list of notifications including "services that cost you money" -  meaning the users who were victims of this threat were equally responsible for being affected. But keeping it fair and taking into account the fact that this malicious Android spyware was available on Google's own servers, it appears that the company should also be blamed for the act.

Google is not sitting idle. The search engine giant discovered Bouncer, a cloud-based malware scanner in February. Since this discovery, researchers have been successful in their independent discovery of malicious apps in Google Play on several occasions. They were also able to detect malware in the Google Chrome Web store.

Two mobile security experts, Jon Oberheide and Charlie Miller have made a shocking announcement that they've found multiple loopholes in the malware scanner, Bouncer – enabling them to sneak malicious apps into Google Play by bypassing Bouncer. Google representatives have not responded to this threat so far, with no attempt made to check the accuracy of the claim.

The Grinch who stole data

Source: MobiStealth.com

App Review: ThisLife

App Review: ThisLife

ThisLife conjures a simplistic, yet majestic, way to browse, organize and share photo collections of any magnitude whatsoever. The app allows pictures to be imported from other services that include Facebook, Instagram, Flick and Twitter among others. Plus of course the app allows the user to upload the pictures from their computer or other devices as well.

Once the pictures are uploaded in the photo library, they can be organized into a ‘Story’ or even several stories if you want to. The ‘Story’ is the most fascinating part of the app. It could be anything between something and general – like the pictures of your child growing up – to something specific – like a birthday party or a weekend away from home. As expected the stories can be shared with other users – your friends, family, cousins, colleagues, etc – who can also participate in it by adding their own pictures, which are known as ‘Moments’ in ThisLife’s lingua franca. They can also participate via liking pictures or commenting on them.

The free starter plan of ThisLife allows the user to upload up to a thousand pictures or upload a video of up to sixty minutes (or one hour). These numbers can be up-graded to 20,000 photos or 10 hours of recorded video footage for $7.99/month, or with the Family Plan the number can be augmented to 20,000 pictures or 25 hours of video footage for $14.99/month.

There are further, less costly ways of storing pictures online as well, but the price that is being paid over here results in a user interface that is significantly superior. What else is being offeres is a feature range that runs the wide gamut from face recognition to advanced tagging, which one can’t get through straight services for online storage.

It is expected that soon the site should offer publishing tools, which should make the creation of photo books considerably easy, among other products.
This app summons the exact experience for the Apple devices – the iPhone and iPad – according to our iPhone spy, while our Android spy has confirmed that a version for Android devices would be launched pretty soon as well. The apps have a two pronged benefit as compared to the website. First up there is the touch interface that makes photo browsing prodigiously more intimate and the user can navigate through the service levels; like for instance if they were to simply use pinches and taps they would be doing exactly that. Secondly the pictures taken from iPhone or iPad can be directly uploaded to ThisLife, courtesy of the app.
The free services of ThisLife are a lot more than just worth a shot. Once you have put some pictures in it, it would be impossible for you to not want to upgrade it. Once you’ve joined the party the apps would be an important part of your service. ThisLife can add a lot of pictures into your life, and join them together to form a memorable story that you’d want to share with everyone you can.

RIM’s Lifeline

It is becoming increasingly obvious that RIM is putting all its hopes of a sensational comeback on BlackBerry 10. The new BlackBerry operating system does seem like proving itself to be up to the challenge, if its initial look is anything to go by. The first thing that has brought BB10 into the limelight is its interface, which is set to completely revamp multitasking. The BlackBerry Hub, sort of like the nerve center of the new OS, is another landmark feature, which blends in nicely with BlackBerry Flow and Active Frames to give the user an all-round package. However, the thing that RIM must keep in mind while competing with Android and iOS is the number of apps – over 600,000 – that the big two have on offer. The current BlackBerry devices do not offer anything along similar lines or numbers and RIM needs to focus on filling this void if it needs to return to the spotlight of the smart phone market.

MappleGate
Apple latest mapping app touted by the company as the “most beautiful, powerful mapping service ever” didn’t exactly turn out to be that I’m afraid, forcing Apple’s CEO Tim Cook to not only apologize, but also go as far as recommending the mapping apps of rivals to iPhone users. While any quasi howler that Apple conjures generates multiple times as many hoopla as that of any of its rivals, and there is no doubt that if Steve Jobs were alive Tim Cook would have been fired, the app isn’t exactly an unmitigated disaster. I’ve used Apple’s Maps app and everything works rather fine, especially the turn by turn directions. But yes it was a bit of a joke to launch it without public transit, a logical design and with incomplete data of location. The app is not the best in the world, but it’s far from being the worst as well. But the thing with Apple is, Steve Jobs raised the bar to such towering heights that his followers were always going to have a tough time satisfying the oh-so-demanding Apple aficionados.

Google’s Low-Blow
 Who would’ve thought that a big name like Google would have to resort to low blows for survival? But that is precisely what has happened. Google has been taking down a lot of affiliate websites which were in direct competition with Adwords – Google’s advertising system – only to set up its own affiliate network for advertising purposes. While Google’s wild beasts Panda and Penguin have been on a hunt to track down and shut down sites that use the affiliate technique to increase their search engine ratings, Google’s skewed rulebook continues to label its own affiliate sites as legal and authentic. It is becoming increasingly clear, and is equally sorry to note, that Google taking down the affiliate sites was owing to the search engine giant’s insecurity and its fear of simmering competition after the sites that were taken down showed unprecedented profits.

Patent Wars: Guess Who’s joining the Party

Make room Samsung and Apple, HTC and Nokia have decided to join the patent war bandwagon. This time around it’s Nokia that’s trying to hold HTC by its ears for creating a phone that looks like a close relative of their Lumia 920. This is problematic since the phone hasn’t even hit the market yet, it can’t have other phones that look exactly the same walking around the market. HTC’s new phone wouldn’t have been such a problem, except that it runs on the Windows 8 platform, as does the Lumia 920 – what consumers see basically is a yellow phone on the outside, and the same interface on the inside.

That’s not to say that both the phones are the same, obviously the HTC phone can’t match the supposed prowess of the camera that’s the Lumia 920 comes embellished with – the trouble is that some consumers follow the “if it walks like a duck and talk like a duck…” philosophy while shopping for phones, which was the main reason that patent wards sprung up to begin. The sad part is that this would be the first Windows 8 Phone from the HTC franchise, leaving some wondering why they couldn’t come up with something a little more innovative in terms of its design. Not only that, the phone has nothing of the HTC taste that users are used to. HTC, like any other manufacturer, has its own design philosophy and the new Windows 8 Phone is nothing but the oddball out in the crowd.

The current situation is made worse by the fact that Nokia is actually supporting certain apps on the Windows 8 platform i.e. maps and the Nokia Drive – making the identity crisis between the two phones all the more messed up. Could consumers actually get confused between two phones? Do people really buy a phone without doing proper research? I mean I personally go through painstaking details of the phone that I’m putting my money into so the idea that I’ll buy an HTC instead of Lumia 920 by mistake seems ludicrous… but evidently both Apple and now Nokia think it’s a big enough deal.