Black Hat Briefings – Hackers crack the Androids

It is indeed difficult to decide whether hackers are overly-brilliant-people or average humans who make attempts to show off their computer skills. Decide upon anything, but it is through these people that we at least make efforts to improve the security features of anything. But, it is generally believed that hackers are driven by three reasons, which are:

• Money
• Revolution
• Challenge

The Conference:

Every year over hundreds of executives from around 1000 corporations and national agencies throng at the ever-lit city of Las Vegas and explore over various security aspects. The conference is scheduled for two sessions: The Black Hat briefings and the Black Hat Trainings. The topics explored by these officials include reverse engineering, identity and hacks. This time, the experts were summoned on the 24^th July at the Ceaser’s palace, presided by Jeff Moss.

It seemed that the 2012 conference was more inclined towards Google’s security. Like any other company, Google too wants its products and services to be safe from any angle, until this conference. This year hackers and experts put forth some ways to compromise security on Android devices.

Google developed the Bouncer feature, so that its Play Store could be safe from malware and other threats. But, this feature seemed nothing for the team of experts when they avoided the bouncer feature.

How? Read on,

• The team first uploaded a completely genuine App to the play store.
• By using Java Script, the team then included new features to the app, which eliminated the need for the user to visit the Play store to get the update.
• They then add some unusual codes through a script that enabled them to acquire some codes, with which they could easily control user information.

The second one was more like an eye-opener to Android’s Near Filed Communication strategy. Ace security researcher Charlie Miller, demonstrated how security can be breached with the NFC powered mobile devices. According to Miller, placing a small device near an NFC range could easily corrupt an Android phone. However, he also claimed that the device should be closest to the device in order for this action to take effect. But, one thing that came out as a result was – Android could be hacked! Also, a further discussion over NFC threat revealed that it was a “piece of cake” task for hackers and identity thieves to extract information regarding payments and other potential information, from the sales counters.

Since, this is a conference of ace security researchers, these possible threats can be easily surpassed even before they are put into action by the criminals. One of the major reasons why the conference takes place is basically to create awareness among the security providers about the possible vulnerabilities of their products or services. Depending on this, the security agencies will work on software patches and come up with new and advanced ways to avoid the threats. Thus, Black Hat briefings have this time shown us that even a company like Google can be hunted. So, let’s hope that researchers like them come out with more possibilities before the hackers do and contribute towards a much healthier techno-society.