Author: Mahesh Balan

Hacking Facebook account is one of the major queries on the Internet today. It’s hard to find — how to hack Facebook account, but researchers have just proven by taking control of a Facebook account with only the target’s phone number and some hacking skills.

 

Hackers with skills to exploit the SS7 network can hack your Facebook account. All they need is your phone number.

 

The weaknesses in the part of global telecom network SS7 not only let hackers and spy agencies listen to personal phone calls and intercept SMSes on a potentially massive scale but also let them hijack social media accounts to which you have provided your phone number.

 

SS7 or Signalling System Number 7 is a telephony signaling protocol that is being used by more than 800 telecommunication operators worldwide to exchange information with one another, cross-carrier billing, enabling roaming, and other features.

 

However, an issue with the SS7 network is that it trusts text messages sent over it regardless of their origin. So, malicious hackers could trick SS7 into diverting text messages as well as calls to their own devices.

 

All they need is the target’s phone number and some details of the target’s device to initiate the silent snooping.

 

The researchers from Positive Technologies, who recently showed how they could hijack WhatsApp and Telegram accounts, now gave the demonstration of the Facebook hack using similar tricks, Forbes reported.

 

Read the full article here.

The Apple ecosystem is well known for very rarely letting any dodgy apps enter it because of the company’s stringent security checks.

 

But recently, nearly two dozen malicious pieces of software managed to get hosted on the App Store, and subsequently downloaded by Chinese users. This is because attackers found an unorthodox route to exploit: they targeted some versions of the software used by developers to makes apps for iOS and OS X in the first place.

 

The malware was first highlighted by Chinese developers on Weibo, and was then analyzed by researchers from Alibaba. Security company Palo Alto Networks then verified the results.

 

The hack all hinges around Xcode, a tool used to create iOS and OS X apps. Typically, Xcode is downloaded directly from Apple for free. However, it is possible to get Xcode from other sources too, such as developer forums. Some versions of Xcode found on Baidu Yunpan, a Chinese file-sharing service, come packaged with extra lines of code. The Alibaba researchers have dubbed these malicious variants “XcodeGhost.”

 

Apps constructed with XcodeGhost code will collect a bunch of information about a customer’s device once the app has been downloaded. The data siphoned includes the current time, the name of the device, and the network type—none of which is anything a hacker could really use against you.

 

The malware in the App Store itself is not concerning, but there’s a broader issue here: the way in which it got past Apple’s screening process in the first place.

 

Read the full article here.