A few months ago, the largest U.S. pipeline operator, Colonial Pipeline, was forced to halt operations for nearly a week due to a ransomware attack. While it ultimately didn’t stop consumers from buying gasoline, the incident forced the company to pay $4.4 million in ransom payment and illustrated just how vulnerable energy organizations are to cyberattacks.

Security researchers at the Lookout Threat Lab have identified a new rooting malware distributed on Google Play and prominent third-party stores such as the Amazon Appstore and the Samsung Galaxy Store. We named the malware “AbstractEmu” after its use of code abstraction and anti-emulation checks to avoid running while under analysis. A total of 19 related applications were uncovered, seven of which contain rooting functionality, including one on Play that had more than 10,000 downloads.

iOS is the operating system which powers Apple’s iPhone devices, and includes the special version iPadOS which runs on iPads. Apple claims it to be particularly secure, at least partly as a result of the limitations they place on what it is able to run. But regardless of how secure the OS is, apps built for it still need to be written in a secure way. Getting it wrong will leave your customers vulnerable.

Android is the world’s most widely used operating system. And we’re huge fans of it here at Conseal. But building Android apps can present some unique security challenges to developers. These may be for example as a result of the way that Android operates, the hardware that runs it, or its Linux heritage. This blog post outlines some of the things that our code auditors and penetration testers look for when reviewing Android apps for security vulnerabilities.

I realized early on that if I didn’t teach my kids how to identify and avoid likely attacks on their laptops and phones, that no one would. Nevertheless, when I see an opportunity for a “teachable security moment” I grab it, and last week this mobile phishes appeared on my phone. I captured a screen shot to share with my children and we played a little “spot the phish” game, where they would point out all the things that made this text suspicious.

SSL Pinning is a technique that we use on the client-side to avoid a man-in-the-middle attack by validating the server certificates. The developers embed (or pin) a list of trustful certificates to the client application during development, and use them to compare against the server certificates during runtime. If there is a mismatch between the server and the local copy of certificates, the connection will simply be disrupted, and no further user data will be even sent to that server.