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29/08/2020

China's Tecno sold thousands of smartphones with malware in Africa

Software that eats up mobile data and registers people for unwanted subscriptions has been found pre-installed on thousands of low-cost Chinese smartphones in Africa more than two years after it was first detected.

The Triada malware signs mobile users up to subscription services without their permission and has been discovered on Tecno W2 smartphones in countries such as Ethiopia, Ghana, Cameroon and South Africa, according to a report published this week in partnership with BuzzFeed.

Africa's favorite smartphone maker is now worth $4 billion
Secure-D, the anti-fraud platform that conducted the research, recorded 19.2 million suspicious transactions since March 2019 from over 200,000 unique devices. "The fact that the malware arrives pre-installed on handsets that are bought in their millions by typically low-income households tells you everything you need to know about what the industry is currently up against," said managing director, Geoffrey Cleaves.

"This particular threat takes advantage of those most vulnerable," he added.

China's Transsion Holdings manufactures the Android devices, which dominate Africa's smartphone market with a 41% share, according to market research firm IDC. Shenzhen-based Transsion, which listed on China's version of the Nasdaq last year, has ignored its home market to focus almost exclusively on the continent. It sells more affordable handsets than rivals such as Samsung (SSNLF) and Apple (AAPL) under the brand Tecno Mobile.

In a statement to CNN Business, Tecno Mobile said the problem "was an old and solved mobile security issue globally" for which it issued a fix in March 2018. Consumers currently experiencing difficulties should download the fix through their phones or contact after sales support, it added.

Transsion blamed an "unidentified vendor in the supply chain process," according to BuzzFeed.

Triada malware installs a piece of code known as xHelper onto compromised devices, automatically subscribing users without their knowledge to services that consume pre-paid airtime — the only way to pay for digital products in many developing countries.

"The xHelper trojan persists across reboots, app removals and even factory resets, making it extremely difficult to deal with even for experienced professionals, let alone the average mobile user," Secure-D, which is owned by mobile technology company Upstream, said in a statement.

The Chinese phone giant that beat Apple to Africa
The Chinese phone giant that beat Apple to Africa
The company's investigation found evidence in code and traffic data to link at least one of the xHelper components to fraudulent subscription requests via Transsion's Tecno W2 handset. Its analysis was carried out on phones from existing users and newly purchased handsets. No signs of Triada malware were found to affect other mobile phones manufactured by Transsion, Secure-D said.

In a 2016 blog post, Google, which developed the Android operating software, attributed the presence of Triada to the actions of third-party suppliers within the production process.

"We have always attached great importance to consumers' data security and products safety," said Tecno Mobile. "Every single software installed on each device runs through a series of rigorous security checks," it added, noting that security updates are periodically sent to mobile users.

(CNN Business)

29/03/2020

Windows 10 has a nasty bug that might affect people working from home

Windows 10 has a new bug which is affecting the internet connectivity of some users, and in some cases is keeping major apps – like Office 365 – from getting online, thereby making life very difficult for those people trying to use these applications to work from home under lockdown during the outbreak of Covid-19.

The problem can affect those using Windows 10 May 2019 Update, or November 2019 Update, and is caused by Microsoft’s KB4535996 cumulative update (which is an optional update deployed late February)

The bug may prevent Office 365, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams – and other software besides, including Microsoft’s web browsers – from connecting to the internet, with obvious issues therein for those working from home using these apps in these troubled times.

Microsoft notes that any software which uses WinHTTP or WinInet might (and note that use of the word might – the problem isn’t guaranteed to manifest) experience issues reaching the internet.

The caveat is that many of those affected by this issue are using a VPN, and these are the folks most likely to be hit by the gremlin. But of course those working from home, and having to log on to remote systems and work with sensitive business data, are those most likely to be using a VPN for the better security it provides.

Apparently the problem can happen when either connecting to, or disconnecting from, a VPN.

Microsoft explains: “Devices using a manual or auto-configured proxy, especially with a virtual private network (VPN), might show limited or no internet connection status in the Network Connectivity Status Indicator (NCSI) in the notification area.

“This might happen when connected or disconnected to a VPN or after changing state between the two.”

Fix imminent?
In terms of a fix, Microsoft is prioritizing this as you might imagine, rushing a patch out the door before the usual scheduled monthly release, and it should be available in early April we are told.

Meantime, the more positive news is that there is a very easy potential workaround, and that’s simply to reboot your machine. This may or may not work, but at least it’s not a difficult thing to do.

On the other hand, if you have to keep doing it throughout the working day, that could obviously be pretty frustrating, and you’ll potentially be wasting a fair amount of time looking at the boot screen or the desktop loading up. And of course this isn’t a guaranteed solution – although at least it’s a low-effort mitigation.

The update that Microsoft has acknowledged as the origin of the problem, KB4535996, applied a number of fixes including a solution for a problem where the Windows search box doesn’t render properly, and it also improved battery performance for laptops in Modern Standby mode.

Sadly, as too often seems to be the case with Microsoft’s cumulative updates for Windows 10 these days, it gave with one hand, and took with another, introducing this fresh net connectivity bugbear.

The timing of the emergence of this Windows 10 flaw is obviously problematic, but with any luck those who are suffering at the hands of this bug will get a solution perhaps as soon as next week, depending on exactly how early in April Microsoft is targeting for a resolution.

07/03/2020

Data consumers in East Africa could see a significant reduction in their bills with the landing of East Africa’s largest submarine cable, Djibouti Africa Regional Express with the moniker DARE 1.

The 4000 kilometers fibre optic cable which has landed in Nyali, Mombasa City is further expected to enhance high broadband connectivity in the region delivering 36 terabytes of data.

Dare 1 becomes the fifth undersea cable broadband infrastructure to link Kenya with the rest of the world after landing of SEACOM, Easts African Marine Cable System, Eastern African Submarine Cable System (EASsy) and Madagascar linked, Lion2.

Building and laying of DARE 1 cable undersea has been ongoing for the past three months and terminated in Mombasa, leaving Telkom with the Task of laying and managing the inland fibre optic cable to the various regions across the country.

The Kshs 8.6 Billion is backed to position Kenya as a data connectivity hub in Africa for international cables in ICT bandwidth market through reduced data charges.

The DARE 1 sub-sea cable is a 3-fiber pair, with a capacity of 36TB each with a lifespan of 20 years. Kenya has access to both, one an express route from Djibouti to Mombasa and the second one terminating into Somalia and then Kenya.

The data cable is also expected to cut latency for firms and customers relying on cloud-based solutions.

According to the World Bank, for every 10% of the population that is connected to the broadband, there is a 1.38% impact to GDP in developing nations. The subsea cable is a joint project involving the government of Kenya through Telkom Kenya, Djibouti Telcom and Somalia’s Somtel.

26/01/2020

What's the difference between flash and SSD storage?

The technologies are related, but it's like comparing eggs to an omelette.
PC hardware terms are often used interchangeably, get their abbreviations cut down, or have multiple words for the same component. Take DRAM/RAM/memory, for example. Those three words all reference the same PC component that gets installed into the skinny slots next to the CPU socket—random access memory. We call CPUs processors, GPUs graphics cards, motherboards mobos—the list goes on.

Flash storage and SSD are two terms that are sometimes used interchangeably, too. But when you break each one down into detail, there are several key differences that set them apart from one another. Unlike DRAM/RAM/memory, flash and SSD are not referring to the same thing, even though flash memory is used in SSDs and flash storage can be considered an SSD. But using an analogy that gets used a lot when talking about the differences between the two, think of one as the eggs and the other as the omelette.

What is flash storage?
Flash storage (or flash memory) is the 'eggs' parts of the analogy. Most SSDs (solid state drives) are made mostly of flash memory, like an omelet is made mostly of eggs, but flash memory can be used in lots of other ways.

Let's start with the similarities between flash and SSD storage: both are faster than HDDs and do not have moving parts like HDDs. Both are also forms of non-volatile memory, so they retain any information saved to them even after you shut down your computer (unlike RAM, which only temporarily stores information), and flash and SSD storage are easily rewriteable. So, if you are constantly uninstalling and reinstalling games or downloading every new Sims 4 game pack that comes out, these two types of memory have you covered.

Flash can be used in many other devices or components in addition to SSDs: phones, digital cameras, calculators, USB drives (also called flash drives). It used to be super expensive, but as storage capacities have increased, prices have decreased. A 4GB USB flash drive cost around $65 in 2006, while a 128GB flash drive costs around $25 today. Cheaper flash memory means cheaper SSDs, too.

However, the flash memory in flash drives is often much slower than the flash used in SSDs. Plus, there's less of it, with a far more simplistic controller.

What is SSD storage?
SSD storage is the omelet part of the recipe, and it's probably your primary storage device in your PC or laptop. HDDs as primary storage are pretty much dead, but still make a great, secondary storage solution.

However, while most SSDs do use flash memory, not all SSDs do. Calling something an SSD is just a way of differentiating a storage solution that is designed with moving parts, like an HDD, from one that has no moving parts. Any type of storage that doesn't move is an SSD, but while flash memory can technically be considered a type of solid state drive, it's more accurate to differentiate it from an actual SSD like the Samsung 970 EVO because flash memory is just an ingredient, not the recipe. Flash is the storage medium for an SSD.

In fact, the earliest SSDs did not use flash storage, but something called EAROM (electrically erasable read only memory), an early type of non-volatile memory that had read/write capabilities, but processed data very slowly. Some SSDs were also RAM-based from the '70s to the '00s to increase read/write speeds, but this meant you could never turn your computer off, unless you wanted to lose all your data. Flash-based SSDs didn't hit the market until the 90s, and they were prohibitively expensive—$1,000 or more compared to $100 today.

Some manufactures, like Intel, have created an alternative to flash, too. Intel's Optane SSDs utilize a different technology called 3D Xpoint.

One of the major differences between a modern SSD using NAND flash and a micro-SSD card that also uses NAND flash is in the way the flash is accessed. SSDs have high-speed controllers designed to read and write data at speeds of up to 5GB/s (and 7GB/s models are coming). They do this by reading or writing to multiple flash chips at the same time. SSDs typically have anywhere from four to as many as 16 channels that can be used for accessing flash storage. Eight channels, each doing 500MB/s of data transfers, gives 4GB/s of potential performance.

The fastest SSDs also have DRAM caches to help store commonly accessed data. A 1TB SSD for example might have a 256MB DRAM cache that holds the mapping tables. Flash memory can be fast, but DRAM is even faster. Plus DRAM doesn't eventually wear out.

Going back to the earlier analogy, the flash memory is the eggs. The SSD then whips those together, eight eggs at a time, with extra flavors and ingredients in the way of DRAM caches and a high speed controller to make a tasty omelette.

15/09/2019

Microsoft is up to its old tricks again, sneaking in some cheeky telemetry software with an update.

Users of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 have once again been greeted this month with a 'security only' update rollup which actually hides some telemetry spyware within, designed to allow Microsoft to keep tabs on your usage.

What's particularly annoying about this is Microsoft claimed during the last rollout in July that the telemetry software was there to make the end-of-life experience for Windows 7 users, who will see their operating system breathe its last this coming January, a bit easier.

Thing is, including Windows 8.1 in that completely belies that point. It's not due to reach EoL until 2023.

'Security Only' updates are a user-choice designed to stop exactly this sort of nonsense. It's for people that just want to protect their PCs without any Microsoft sass. So that's gone well, hasn't it? This is of course in addition to the existing telemetry in Windows 10, already ruled illegal in the Netherlands.

The official line on the subject from Microsoft has been [cue tumbleweed] though the inside track is that it's all about the EoL, which we've pretty much established, it isn't.

Indeed, since the launch of Windows 10, its predecessor has had very little of anything out of Microsoft - it's just sitting, waiting to reach EoL itself, except that's in over three years time.

If you want to see if you've ended up with the telemetry on your machine, check your Task Manager for the processes ProgramDataUpdater, Microsoft Compatibility Appraiser, and AitAgent. Officially, there's no telemetry, but multiple teardowns have reported that its exactly what it is.

As ever these days, the biggest problem is Microsoft's seeming inability to be straight with customers. We'd probably have a lot more respect if they just said: "we're adding this, is that ok?".

It's the whole "we know what's good for you" mantra which has silently emanated from Redmond in recent years, that has frustrated us, and frustrates us, still.

30/08/2019

If you are using the CamScanner app on your Android phone then remove it immediately. Researchers at Internet security firm Kaspersky Labs have unearthed a malware in the CamScanner app that is mainly used by people to create PDF. The app has been downloaded in over 100 million Android phones. Interestingly, the CamScanner app is not a malware and it started out as a completely legit Android app.
“CamScanner was actually a legitimate app, with no malicious intentions whatsoever, for quite some time. It used ads for monetization and even allowed in-app purchases,” said Kaspersky Labs in a blog post.

However, the problem is with the recent versions of the CamScanner app. “Recent versions of the app shipped with an advertising library containing a malicious module,” it claimed.
The researchers claimed that the CamScanner app detected a module called “Trojan-Dropper.AndroidOS.Necro.n”. “The module is a Trojan Dropper that means the module extracts and runs another malicious module from an encrypted file included in the app’s resources. This “dropped” malware, in turn, is a Trojan Downloader that downloads more malicious modules depending on what its creators are up to at the moment,” explained the report. With this Trojan Dropper module, a particular app may show intrusive ads and sign users up for paid subscriptions.

Google has removed the app from the Android app store and users are recommended that they uninstall the app immediately.
Meanwhile, Google has made some silent changes for publishing new Android app on the Google Play store. Google has now made it mandatory that all new Android apps would need at least three days for approval. This means you simply cannot publish your Android app instantly on Google Play. Also, the developers will not be given any specific date or time frame as to when the “approval process” would get over. The reason for this minimum three days approval process is “to help better protect users”.
However, this CamScanner episode makes one question the security of app updates and the privacy risks associated with an innocent legit app turning into a malware.

The 130 one you guys talking is just a 83kb app . If you have camm scanner free one and install cam scanner 130 one now the free CS will turn on its paid feature the 130 rupess CSapp is not a full CS app it just a licence key which when installed triger the CS free app to unlock its paid options