A suspected Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) group has been spotted attacking tech companies using a trojanized screen-reader application, replacing the built-in Narrator "Ease of Access" feature in Windows. Threatpost reports: The attackers also deploy a version of the open-source malware known as the PcShare backdoor to gain an initial foothold into victims' systems. Using the two tools, the adversaries are able to surreptitiously control Windows machines via remote desktop logon screens, without the need for credentials.

The attacks begin by delivering the PcShare backdoor to victims via spearphishing campaigns. It has been modified and designed to operate when side-loaded by a legitimate NVIDIA application. It is "specifically tailored to the needs of the campaign, with additional command-and-control (C2) encryption and proxy bypass functionality, and any unused functionality removed from the code," explained researchers with BlackBerry Cylance, in an analysis posted on Wednesday. The unused functionality includes audio/video streaming and keyboard monitoring, suggesting that it's strictly being used to install other malware.

The FBI tried to force the owner of an encrypted phone company to put a backdoor in his devices, Motherboard has learned. From the report: The company involved is Phantom Secure, a firm that sold privacy-focused BlackBerry phones and which ended up catering heavily to the criminal market, including members of the Sinaloa drug cartel, formerly run by JoaquÃn "El Chapo" Guzman. The news signals some of the tactics law enforcement may use as criminals continue to leverage encrypted communications for their own ends. It also comes as Canadian media reported that a former top official in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), who has been charged with leaking state secrets, offered to sell information to Vincent Ramos, Phantom's CEO.

"He was given the opportunity to do significantly less time if he identified users or built in/gave backdoor access," one source who knows Ramos personally and has spoken with him about the issue after his arrest told Motherboard. A backdoor is a general term for some form of technical measure that grants another party, in this case the FBI, surreptitious access to a computer system. What exactly the FBI was technically after is unclear, but the desire for a backdoor was likely to monitor Phantom's clients.

By taking strings from an online gaming program and appending them to malicious files, researchers were able to trick Cylance's AI-based antivirus engine into thinking programs like WannaCry and other malware are benign. From a report: AI has been touted by some in the security community as the silver bullet in malware detection. Its proponents say it's superior to traditional antivirus since it can catch new variants and never-before-seen malware -- think zero-day exploits -- that are the Achilles heel of antivirus. One of its biggest proponents is the security firm BlackBerry Cylance, which has staked its business model on the artificial intelligence engine in its endpoint PROTECT detection system, which the company says has the ability to detect new malicious files two years before their authors even create them. But researchers in Australia say they've found a way to subvert the machine-learning algorithm in PROTECT and cause it to falsely tag already known malware as "goodware." The method doesn't involve altering the malicious code, as hackers generally do to evade detection. Instead, the researchers developed a "global bypass" method that works with almost any malware to fool the Cylance engine. It involves simply taking strings from a non-malicious file and appending them to a malicious one, tricking the system into thinking the malicious file is benign.

The benign strings they used came from an online gaming program, which they have declined to name publicly so that Cylance will have a chance to fix the problem before hackers exploit it. "As far as I know, this is a world-first, proven global attack on the ML [machine learning] mechanism of a security company," says Adi Ashkenazy, CEO of the Sydney-based company Skylight Cyber, who conducted the research with CTO Shahar Zini. "After around four years of super hype [about AI], I think this is a humbling example of how the approach provides a new attack surface that was not possible with legacy [antivirus software]."

Today, Emtek pulls the plug on BlackBerry Messenger. From a report: The company announced last month that it would shut down the consumer service, which has been steadily losing users and failing to attract new ones. As a consolation for diehard fans, BlackBerry opened BBM Enterprise, its enterprise-grade encrypted Messenger (BBMe), for personal use. That's available on Android, iOS, Windows and Mac. Three years ago, the company set out to reinvigorate BBM consumer service, but those efforts fell flat. "We poured our hearts into making this a reality, and we are proud of what we have built to date," BlackBerry wrote on its blog. "The technology industry however, is very fluid, and in spite of our substantial efforts, users have moved on to other platforms, while new users proved difficult to sign on."

The consumer version of Blackberry Messenger is shutting down May 31. CNET reports: Emtek, the company BlackBerry partnered with in 2016 to run the consumer version of the messaging app, said in a blog post Thursday that the technology industry is "very fluid" and despite "substantial efforts," users have moved on to other platforms. "We poured our hearts into making this a reality, and we are proud of what we have built to date," Emtek said.

Mark Wilson, BlackBerry's chief marketing officer, said that though the company is disappointed, BBM users won't be without a secure messaging platform. They can now go to the Google Play store to download BBMe, the enterprise version of the app that BlackBerry continues to run. The app will be free the first year. Then a 6-month subscription will cost $2.49. BlackBerry is working on an iOS app.

BlackBerry has set its sights on Twitter in a new patent infringement lawsuit, accusing the social media company of illegally using technology in its mobile messaging apps that had been developed by the former smartphone maker. Reuters reports: The lawsuit said Twitter wrongly sought to compensate for being a "relative latecomer" to mobile messaging by co-opting Blackberry's inventions for such services as the main Twitter application and Twitter Ads, infringing six of the company's patents. Twitter "succeeded in diverting consumers away from BlackBerry's products and services" and toward its own by misappropriating features that made BlackBerry "a critical and commercial success in the first place," the complaint said.

The lawsuit resembles patent infringement cases that BlackBerry filed there last March and April against Facebook and Snap. Last August, U.S. District Judge George Wu allowed BlackBerry to pursue most of its infringement claims in those lawsuits, which according to court records remain pending. Wu may be assigned the case against San Francisco-based Twitter because federal courts often assign cases deemed "related" to a single judge. The Facebook and Snap lawsuits were deemed related.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A weather app that comes preinstalled on Alcatel smartphones contained malware that surreptitiously subscribed device owners to premium phone numbers behind their backs. The app, named "Weather Forecast-World Weather Accurate Radar," was developed by TCL Corporation, a Chinese electronics company that among other things owns the Alcatel, BlackBerry, and Palm brands. The app is one of the default apps that TCL installs on Alcatel smartphones, but it was also made available on the Play Store for all Android users --where it had been downloaded and installed more than ten million times. But at one point last year, both the app included on some Alcatel devices and the one that was available on the Play Store were compromised with malware. How the malware was added to the app is unclear. TCL has not responded to phone calls requesting comment made by ZDNet this week. The app reportedly harvested users' data and sent it to China. It collected geographic locations, email addresses, and IMEI codes, which it sent back to TCL.

Upstream, a UK-based mobile security firm, also found that "the malicious code hidden inside the app would also attempt to subscribe users to premium phone numbers that incurred large charges on users' phone bills," reports ZDNet. "All in all, the company says it detected and blocked over 27 million transaction attempts across seven markets, which would have created losses of around $1.5 million to phone owners if they hadn't been blocked."

Upstream notes that most of the behavior they've seen originated only from two types of smartphones: Pixi 4 and A3 Max models.

A popular weather app built by a Chinese tech conglomerate has been collecting an unusual amount of data from smartphones around the world and attempting to subscribe some users to paid services without permission, according to a London-based security firm's research. From a report: The free app, one of the world's most-downloaded weather apps in Google's Play store, is from TCL Communication Technology Holdings, of Shenzhen, China. TCL makes Alcatel- and BlackBerry -branded phones, while a sister company makes televisions. The app, called "Weather Forecast --World Weather Accurate Radar," collects data including smartphone users' geographic locations, email addresses and unique 15-digit International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) numbers on TCL servers in China, according to Upstream Systems, the mobile commerce and security firm that found the activity. Until last month, the app was known as "Weather -- Simple weather forecast."

The weather app also has attempted to surreptitiously subscribe more than 100,000 users of its low-cost Alcatel smartphones in countries such as Brazil, Malaysia and Nigeria to paid virtual-reality services, according to Upstream Systems. The security firm, which discovered the activity as part of its work for mobile operators, said users would have been billed more than $1.5 million had it not blocked the attempts.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The year was 2010 and the future of mobile computing was looking bright. The iPhone was barely three years old, Google's Android had yet to swallow the smartphone market whole, and half a dozen alternative mobile operating systems -- many of which were devoutly open source -- were preparing for launch. Eight years on, you probably haven't even heard of most of these alternative mobile operating systems, much less use them. Today, Android and iOS dominate the global smartphone market and account for 99.9 percent of mobile operating systems. Even Microsoft and Blackberry, longtime players in the mobile space with massive revenue streams, have all but left the space. Then there's Jolla, the small Finnish tech company behind Sailfish OS, which it bills as the "last independent alternative mobile operating system." Jolla has had to walk itself back from the edge of destruction several times over the course of its seven year existence, and each time it has emerged battered, but more determined than ever to carve out a spot in the world for a truly independent, open source mobile operating system.

Jolla's Sailfish OS rose from the ashes of Nokia and Intel's ill-fated collaboration, MeeGo. The MeeGo project launched in 2010 in an attempt to merge Intel's Linux-based Moblin OS and Nokia's Maemo software platform into a single open-source mobile operating system that could take on Google. By 2011, Android had already surpassed Nokia in the smartphone market, a fact that wasn't lost on Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop, who in a memo described the company as standing on a "burning platform." Nokia only ever released one phone running MeeGo: the Nokia N9, which ended up being well received despite its limited release. But it was too little, too late. By 2011, Nokia was bleeding talent and it was clear that MeeGo wasn't going to keep the company competitive in the rapidly changing smartphone market. In a last-ditch effort, Nokia struck a partnership with Microsoft to provide the hardware for its next generation of Windows Phones, abandoning MeeGo entirely. The same couldn't be said for those developers who had worked on MeeGo and, before that, an open source mobile OS called Mer, based on Intel's Maemo system. In October 2011, three developers that had worked on Mer sent a message on a mailing list calling for the creation of a "MeeGo 2.0." At the same time, developer Sami Pienimaki and two others left Nokia to found their own company, which would use this new version of MeeGo as the basis for an open source mobile OS. And thus, Sailfish was born. In a cheeky homage to the "burning platform" memo, Pienimaki and his fellow defectors decided to name their company Jolla, a Finnish word connoting a small boat or life raft. Jolla has since turned to Russia and China, both of which were hungry for a secure alternative to Google-based systems. In late 2016, Sailfish OS achieved domestic certification in Russia for government and corporate us. Around the same time, Sailfish was also making moves in China. In early 2017, the Sailfish China Consortium gained the exclusive rights and license to develop a Chinese OS based on Sailfish.

wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: BlackBerry on Friday announced that it has agreed to acquire endpoint security firm Cylance for $1.4 billion in cash. "We plan on immediately expanding the capabilities across BlackBerry's 'chip-to-edge' portfolio, including QNX, our safety-certified embedded OS that is deployed in more than 120 million vehicles, robot dogs, medical devices, and more," a BlackBerry company spokesperson told SecurityWeek. "Over time, we plan to integrate Cylance technology with our Spark platform, which is at the center of our strategy to ensure data flowing between endpoints (in a car, business, or smart city) is secured, private, and trusted." Cylance has raised roughly $300 million in funding [prior being acquired]. BlackBerry describes the "Spark platform" as a secure chip-to-edge communications platform "designed for ultra-security and industry-specific safety-certifications, such as ISO 26262 in automobiles."

An anonymous reader shares a report: VR was supposed to be a revolution, with companies like Oculus pioneering a whole new way for gamers and non-gamers alike to be immersed in digital environments -- but that excitement has markedly cooled. The media has gone through several cycles of fawning, optimistic prognostication, and... wishful thinking? -- but for all the hype we have very little consumer interest to show for it. Oculus sold off to Facebook and has become little more than a parlor trick Mark Zuckerberg shows off at every F8 event. As Ben Thompson recently noted, the bet on the company is an awkward fit for Facebook that strays from Zuckerberg's strengths in several ways.

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey is now tooling around on right wing defense projects, while co-founder Brendan Iribe has just left the company amid rumors of future headsets being shelved. Several prominent studios have shut down or ceased VR efforts, including Viacom and AltspaceVR, and Microsoft is a steadfast "no" when it comes to dipping its toes in the water via the Xbox. Sony has boasted about sales of the PSVR hitting 3 million in two years, but there are 82 million PS4 units in the hands of consumers (and keep in mind that Microsoft sold 35 million Kinects but still discontinued the product). With cumbersome hardware (which, let's be honest, looks really stupid to most people), absurd PC requirements, and nearly no AAA titles to lure the curious into the world of VR, it's becoming increasingly unlikely that we'll see a major shift to virtual reality any time soon.

Also worth noting: if you're looking to Magic Leap for a kind of bridge to the future with its AR efforts, don't get too wound up. Brian Merchant's excellent and detailed feature story for Gizmodo on the company's struggles to get around the same hardware, software, and consumer adoption issues that plague VR make it clear there is no easy answer in this space. In my opinion -- as someone who watched this new generation of virtual reality emerge from the earliest days, and was one of its biggest fans -- VR adoption will only happen when the barrier to entry is akin to slipping on a pair of sunglasses (and even then it's no sure thing). Most people don't want to wear a bulky headset, even in private, there's no must have "killer app" for VR, and no one has made a simple plug-and-play option that lets a novice user engage casually. Everyone I know who's tried a VR headset is blown away by the experience, but no one really wants to go deep on it except for what amounts to a rounding-error percentage of enthusiasts. Further reading: 'We Expected VR To Be Two To Three Times as Big', Says CCP Games CEO.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Quantum computing represents tremendous promise to completely alter technology as we've known it, allowing operations that weren't previously possible with traditional computing. The downside of these powerful machines is that they could be strong enough to break conventional cryptography schemes. Today, BlackBerry announced a new quantum-resistant code signing service to help battle that possibility. The solution, which will be available next month, is actually the product of a partnership between BlackBerry and Isara Corporation, a company whose mission is to build quantum-safe security solutions. BlackBerry is using Isara's cryptographic libraries to help sign and protect code as security evolves.

"By adding the quantum-resistant code signing server to our cybersecurity tools, we will be able to address a major security concern for industries that rely on assets that will be in use for a long time. If your product, whether it's a car or critical piece of infrastructure, needs to be functional 10-15 years from now, you need to be concerned about quantum computing attacks," Charles Eagan, BlackBerry's chief technology officer, said in a statement. Some of the long-lived assets include aerospace equipment, connected cars, or transportation infrastructure -- basically anything that will still be in use several years from now when quantum computing attacks are expected to emerge.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Washington Post: A unit of Google's parent company Alphabet is proposing to turn a rundown part of Toronto's waterfront into what may be the most wired community in history -- to "fundamentally refine what urban life can be." Sidewalk Labs has partnered with a government agency known as Waterfront Toronto with plans to erect mid-rise apartments, offices, shops and a school on a 12-acre (4.9-hectare) site -- a first step toward what it hopes will eventually be a 800-acre (325-hectare) development. High-level interest is clear: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Alphabet's then-Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt appeared together to announce the plan in October. But some Canadians are rethinking the privacy implications (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source) of giving one of the most data-hungry companies on the planet the means to wire up everything from street lights to pavement. And some want the public to get a cut of the revenue from products developed using Canada's largest city as an urban laboratory.

"The Waterfront Toronto executives and board are too dumb to realize they are getting played," said former BlackBerry chief executive Jim Balsillie, a smartphone pioneer considered a national hero who also said the federal government is pushing the board to approve it. "Google knew what they wanted. And the politicians wanted a PR splash and the Waterfront board didn't know what they are doing. And the citizens of Toronto and Canada are going to pay the price," Balsillie said. Complaints about the proposed development prompted Waterfront Toronto to re-do the agreement to ensure a greater role for the official agency, which represents city, provincial and federal governments. So far the project is still in the embryonic stage. After consultations, the developers plan to present a formal master plan early next year. Sidewalk Labs' CEO, Dan Doctoroff, says the company isn't looking to monetizing people's personal information in the way that Google does now with search information. He said the plan is to invent so-far-undefined products and services that Sidewalk Labs can market elsewhere. "People automatically assume because of our relationship to Alphabet and Google that they will be treated one way or another. We have never said anythingâ about the data issue, he said. "To be honest people should give us some time. Be patient."

Facebook is suing BlackBerry, claiming the company stole its voice-messaging technology and other patented processes. The social media company is seeking unspecified damages for infringement of six patents. Bloomberg reports: In addition to the voice-messaging patent, Facebook cites infringement of patented technology that improves how a mobile device delivers graphics, video and audio and another that centralizes tracking and analysis of GPS data. In March, BlackBerry sued Facebook in federal court in Los Angeles, accusing the social media giant of infringing on its mobile messaging patents. BlackBerry claimed Facebook made unauthorized use of its technology in its own instant messenger service, Facebook Messenger, and in WhatsApp Messenger and Instagram.

Let's Encrypt has announced that it is now directly trusted by all major root certificates including those from Microsoft, Google, Apple, Mozilla, Oracle, and Blackberry. With this announcement, Let's Encrypt is now directly trusted by all major browsers and operating systems. From a report: While Let's Encrypt has already been trusted by almost all browsers, it was done so through intermediate certificate that were cross-signed by IdenTrust. As IdenTrust was directly trusted by all major browser vendors and operating systems, it also allowed Let's Encrypt to be trusted as well. With Let's Encrypt now being directly trusted, if there is ever a problem with IdenTrust and they themselves become untrusted, Let's Encrypt users will still be able to function properly.

The latest earnings report from Sony indicates the company's already tiny smartphone business has shrunk by almost half. "In the quarter ending in July 2018, Sony managed to sell only 2 million mobile devices, down 1.4 million from the same period in the proceeding year," reports The Verge. From the report: In its 2017 accounting year, Sony sold 13.5 million phones, and back in April its modest estimate for 2018 was 10 million, but now that's been revised down to 9 million. Anticipating it will make only $5.49 billion of mobile sales for the entire fiscal 2018, Sony is now in a close contest with HTC for the title of being the least relevant global Android device vendor. At least BlackBerry has its promise of uniquely secure phones and keyboards with actual, physical buttons on them. Sony's signature mobile feature in recent times has been an insistence on shipping massive bezels for way too long. It's important to note that while Sony's mobile business is hurting, Sony as a whole is in good financial health.

The Key2 smartphone, which BlackBerry unveiled earlier this week, is the "most secure Android smartphone," the Canadian company claims. Brian Fagioli, writing for BetaNews: While BlackBerry no longer makes smartphones, it does license its name to a company called TCL which makes Android devices that carry the branding -- and sometimes, a physical keyboard. It isn't just slapping the BlackBerry name on a random low-quality Android phone, however. Actually, these TCL devices have been fairly well received thanks to an adherence to traditional BlackBerry designs. Today, TCL unveils its latest such smartphone, called "KEY2," and it looks quite nice. In fact, the company says it is "the most secure Android smartphone."

According to a report from The New York Times, Facebook formed data-sharing partnerships with Apple, Samsung, and dozens of other device makers, allowing them to access vast amounts of its users' personal information (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). From the report: Facebook has reached data-sharing partnerships with at least 60 device makers -- including Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Samsung -- over the last decade, starting before Facebook apps were widely available on smartphones, company officials said. The deals allowed Facebook to expand its reach and let device makers offer customers popular features of the social network, such as messaging, "like" buttons and address books.

But the partnerships, whose scope has not previously been reported, raise concerns about the company's privacy protections and compliance with a 2011 consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission. Facebook allowed the device companies access to the data of users' friends without their explicit consent, even after declaring that it would no longer share such information with outsiders. Some device makers could retrieve personal information even from users' friends who believed they had barred any sharing, The New York Times found. Most of the partnerships remain in effect, though Facebook began winding them down in April.

Verizon is planning on launch a Palm-branded smartphone later this year, an anonymous source told Android Police. The rumor backs up what a TCL executive said last August, when they confirmed that the company would launch a Palm phone this year. From the report: Sadly, we don't know anything about the phone itself at this time (well, we know it runs Android), but the fact that TCL is working with Verizon is telling. The carrier was a longtime Palm partner, selling most of the brand's webOS handsets all the way through the Pre 2. Verizon had intended to carry the ill-fated Pre 3, but the phone was cancelled by Palm's then-buyer HP before it could be released in the U.S. TCL acquired the rights to the Palm name back in 2015, and it's starting to get something of a reputation for reviving dead and dying brands: the Chinese firm manufactures BlackBerry handsets, which have received a surprising amount of attention in the mainstream press.

An anonymous reader shares a post: The Smartphone 2.0 era has destroyed many companies: Nokia, Blackberry, Palm... Will Intel be another victim, either as a result of the proposed Broadcom-Qualcomm combination, or as a consequence of a suicidal defense move? Intel sees the Qualcomm+Broadcom combination as an existential threat, an urgent one. But rather than going to the Feds to try and scuttle the deal through a long and uncertain process, Intel is rumored to be "working with advisors" (in plainer English, the company's Investment Bankers) on a countermove: acquire Broadcom. Why the sudden sense of urgency? What is the existential threat? And wouldn't the always risky move of combining two cultures, employees, and physical plants introduce an even greater peril?

To begin with, the threat to Intel's business isn't new; the company has been at risk for more than a decade. By declining Steve Jobs' proposal to make the original iPhone CPU in 2005, Intel missed a huge opportunity. The company's disbelief in Apple's ambitious forecast is belied by the numbers: More than 1.8 billion iOS devices have been sold thus far. Intel passed on the biggest product wave the industry has seen, bigger than the PC. Samsung and now TSMC manufacture iPhone CPUs. Just as important, there are billions of Android-powered machines, as well. One doesn't have to assume 100% share in the smartphone CPU market to see Intel's gigantic loss.