Cellebrite cuts off Serbia over abuse of phone-cracking software against civil society

The Israeli company Cellebrite announced Tuesday that it will no longer allow Serbia to use its software, which is deployed by law enforcement worldwide to unlock mobile phones. The decision comes on the heels of an Amnesty International report in December alleging that Serbian authorities used the powerful technology to secretly break into phones belonging to civilians and then installed spyware. Cellebrite has been “systematically deployed” in Serbia and regularly targets members of civil society, Amnesty said in its report.

Wallbleed vulnerability unearths secrets of China’s Great Firewall 125 bytes at a time

Smart folks investigating a memory-dumping vulnerability in the Great Firewall of China (GFW) finally released their findings after probing it for years. The eight-strong team of security pros and academics found the data-leaking flaw, and started using it to learn about the GFW’s inner workings in October 2021. It named the flaw Wallbleed after the Heartbleed disaster in OpenSSL. To clear things up right from the start, this is no Heartbleed. Yes, it’s a memory-leaking bug, specifically an out-of-bounds read, but the team was only able to get it to reveal up to 125 bytes from the firewall’s equipment. Wallbleed is not something that can be used to unearth the deepest secrets locked up by the Middle Kingdom but still… finding a bug in the GFW is a pretty cool thing.

Ransomware Group Takes Credit for Lee Enterprises Attack

The cyberattack came to light in early February, when the American media company, which owns roughly 350 weekly and specialty publications across 25 states, revealed that the incident had impacted business applications and resulted in operational disruptions.  The attack reportedly impacted at least 75 newspapers across the US, including the distribution of print publications and online operations. The company later clarified that the attackers encrypted files and exfiltrated information from its systems, which indicated that it had been targeted in a ransomware attack.

Belgium probes if Chinese hackers breached its intelligence service

The Belgian federal prosecutor’s office is investigating whether Chinese hackers were behind a breach of the country’s State Security Service (VSSE). Chinese state-backed attackers reportedly gained access to VSSE’s external email server between 2021 and May 2023, siphoning around 10% of all emails sent and received by the agency’s staff. The compromised server was only used for exchanging emails with public prosecutors, government ministries, law enforcement, and other public Belgian administration bodies, as Belgian news outlet Le Soir reported on Wednesday.

Alleged Data Breach: Threat Actor Claims to Sell 25 Million Truecaller Contacts from the USA

A threat actor has allegedly put up for sale a database containing 25 million contacts from the Truecaller platform, purportedly belonging to users in the United States. The claims surfaced on a dark web forum, where the individual behind the post shared details about the alleged dataset and offered a sample as proof. In the post, the seller claimed that the dataset includes contact details of millions of users and is available for purchase through private channels. The actor also stated that transactions would be conducted securely via escrow services to ensure anonymity and trust between buyers and sellers.