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Beware the Sturnus malware attacks that bypass instant messenger encryption to read your texts.<\/p>\n
Photothek via Getty Images<\/p>\n
Nobody wants their secrets to leak, whether that is the Department of War<\/a>, FTSE 100 companies<\/a>, or your average consumer VPN<\/a> user. One place where many secrets exist is within the encrypted instant messages we send via apps such as Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp. So, what if I were to tell you that a new threat has been identified, targeting Android smartphone users, that effectively bypasses the secure encryption that protects the privacy of your messages, and captures them for cybercriminal hackers to read? Welcome to the distinctly dangerous world of the Sturnus trojan. <\/p>\n ForbesAll Microsoft Windows Users Warned As New Bot Attacks ConfirmedBy Davey Winder<\/a>These Hackers Can Read Your \u2018Private\u2019 Instant Messages<\/p>\n Security researchers at threat intelligence outfit ThreatFabric have confirmed that they have observed a new and dangerous piece of Android malware, a banking trojan that goes beyond the normal boundaries of such malicious software. Not only can Sturnus, which the ThreatFabric analysis said is \u201ccurrently in a development or limited testing phase,\u201d provide hackers with the ability to gain full device control and harvest banking credentials, but also, and here\u2019s the killer blow, it can \u201cbypass encrypted messaging\u201d according to the in-depth technical report<\/a>.<\/p>\n I\u2019m a user of all three of these instant messaging apps, for different use-cases, and rely upon Signal and WhatsApp encryption for some of them. The good news is that this has not been broken, the attackers have not found a way to read your encrypted messages. What they have done, however, is put together a complex technical process that, ultimately, does something very simple indeed: it reads your messages after you\u2019ve decrypted them and they are displayed on the smartphone screen. This harks back to a warning that I used to give people all the time when secure messengers made a big play on the fact that screenshots could be disabled on time-limited, one-hit and done, messages, so the recipient couldn\u2019t take a copy and share it around. They could if they took a photo of the screen with another device. <\/p>\n It\u2019s also a good time to remind people not to download apps from untrusted sources, even if they appear to be a legitimate Google Chrome update, which seems to be one of the distribution methods for the Sturnus malware.<\/p>\n ForbesWhatsApp And Meta Pay Hackers $4 Million \u2014 What To KnowBy Davey Winder<\/a>Hackers Can Read Everything That Appears On Your Smartphone Screen<\/p>\n \u201cBecause it relies on Accessibility Service logging rather than network interception,\u201d the report said, \u201cthe malware can read everything that appears on screen\u2014including contacts, full conversation threads, and the content of incoming and outgoing messages\u2014in real time.\u201d It is this capability that makes Sturnus particularly dangerous, in the view of the researchers and me, as it side-steps the protection that end-to-end encryption provides. As I\u2019ve often stated, a compromised device is not secure, and nor is anything on it. \u201cThe user sees a secure interface, but from the moment the device is compromised,\u201d the researchers confirmed, \u201cevery sensitive exchange becomes visible to the operator, with no cryptographic protection left to rely on.\u201d<\/p>\n You can read more about instant messenger security here:<\/p>\n Signal<\/a> <\/p>\n Telegram<\/a> <\/p>\n