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Category: mobile phones

Fake Call History Apps Stole Payments From Users After 7.3 Million Play Store Downloads

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered fraudulent apps on the official Google Play Store for Android that falsely claimed to offer access to call histories for any phone number, only to trick users into joining a subscription that provided fake data and incurred financial loss.

The 28 apps have collectively racked up more than 7.3 million downloads, with one of them alone accounting for over 3 million downloads, before they were taken down from the official app storefront. The activity, codenamed CallPhantom by Slovakian cybersecurity company ESET, primarily targeted Android users in India and the broader Asia-Pacific region.

“The offending apps, which we named CallPhantom based on their false claims, purport to provide access to call histories, SMS records, and even WhatsApp call logs for any phone number,” ESET security researcher Lukáš Štefanko said in a report shared with The Hacker News. “To unlock this supposed feature, users are asked to pay — but all they get in return is randomly generated data.”

AI data center boom is leaving consumer electronics short of chips − even though they don’t use the same kinds

Data centers need powerful chips, while smartphones need chips that are energy efficient. A supply chain scholar explains why chipmakers’ focus on the former comes at the expense of the latter.

Researchers combine five metals to build a better nanocrystal

A nanocrystal is an extraordinarily tiny piece of material—composed of anywhere from a few to a few thousand atoms—in which atoms are arranged in a precise, ordered structure. Think of it like taking a piece of gold and shrinking it down to the size of a few hundred atoms. It’s still gold, still crystalline, just almost incomprehensibly small.

Nanocrystals are in the transistors inside computers and smartphones, in smartphone displays and TV screens, in the gold-nanoparticle sensors that power COVID and pregnancy tests, and in the pipes of your car exhaust system, among countless other innovations.

Their small size gives them a dramatically higher ratio of surface area to volume, making them especially useful as catalysts—materials that speed up chemical reactions without being consumed in the process.

Twisting atom-thin materials reveals new way to save computing energy

A recent study shows a new and potentially more energy-efficient way for information to be transmitted inside electronic systems, including computers and phones—without relying on electric currents or external magnetic fields.

In today’s electronics, information is transmitted by moving electrons through circuits, where ones and zeros are represented by high or low electrical signals. While this approach has enabled modern computing, the movement of electrical charge inevitably generates heat, leading to energy loss and limiting how much devices can be miniaturized and improved.

In the new study, published in Nano Letters, researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and international collaborators demonstrate that simply twisting two layers of certain atom-thin magnetic materials allows magnetic signals to carry information instead of relying on electrical currents to do the work.

Researchers discover a new pathway to building energy-efficient computing chips

The growing popularity of electronic devices—from fitness trackers and laptops to smartphones—is driving demand for more energy-efficient computing chips. Now, researchers have found a way to change the electronic properties of a common semiconductor material, potentially laying the foundation for faster, lower-power data storage and processing.

In a study published in Science, a UC Berkeley-led team of researchers discovered they can transform titanium dioxide (TiO₂) into a ferroelectric material by reducing its thickness to less than 3 nanometers (nm), roughly the diameter of a single strand of human DNA. These findings, according to the researchers, could open a pathway toward ultra-scaled, energy-efficient electronic devices.

Ferroelectric materials, with their ability to switch electric polarizations, have a long history in the semiconductor industry. Today, many researchers believe that they may hold the key to enabling next-generation, energy-efficient nanoelectronics, including non-volatile memory, logic devices and emerging computing technologies.

CloudZ malware abuses Microsoft Phone Link to steal SMS and OTPs

A new version of the CloudZ remote access tool (RAT) is deploying a previously unseen malicious plugin called Pheno that hijacks the Microsoft Phone Link connection to steal sensitive codes from mobile devices.

The malware was discovered in an intrusion that was active since at least January and researchers believe the threat actor’s purpose was to steal credentials and temporary passcodes.

Microsoft Phone Link comes installed on Windows 10 and 11, and allows using the computer to make and take calls, respond to texts, or view notifications received on the mobile device (Android and iOS).

Google now offers up to $1.5 million for some Android exploits

Google overhauls its Android and Chrome vulnerability rewards programs, offering bounties of up to $1.5 million for the most difficult exploits while scaling back payouts for flaws that artificial intelligence (AI) has made easier to find.

The top reward of $1.5 million is reserved for zero-click Pixel Titan M2 security chip full-chain exploits with persistence, the most technically demanding attack scenario in the program, while the same exploits, but without persistence, are also eligible for up to $750,000.

On the Google Chrome side, full-chain browser process exploits on up-to-date operating systems and hardware now come with rewards of up to $250,000, plus an additional $250,128 bonus for successfully exploiting MiraclePtr-protected memory allocations.

Magnon lifetime extended 100x paves the way for mini quantum computers

Magnons are tiny waves in magnetization that travel through solid magnetic materials, much like the ripples that spread across a pond when a stone is thrown into it. Unlike photons, which travel through empty space or optical fibers, magnons propagate within a magnetic solid. Their wavelengths can be reduced to the nanometer range, meaning that magnonic circuits could, in principle, fit onto a chip no larger than those found in today’s smartphones. Furthermore, as an excitation of a solid, a magnon naturally couples to numerous other fundamental quasi-particles—phonons, photons and others—making it an ideal building block for hybrid quantum systems and quantum metrology.

Until now, there has been one major obstacle: magnons have had a very short lifetime. This lifetime—the period during which they can reliably carry quantum information—was limited to a few hundred nanoseconds at best. Far too short for any practical quantum computation. The team led by Wiener has now achieved a breakthrough: the physicists were able to measure magnon lifetimes of up to 18 microseconds—almost a hundred times longer than any value observed to date.

In this state, magnons are no longer fleeting signals, but become long-lived, reliable carriers of quantum information, comparable to the superconducting qubits used in today’s leading quantum processors. The study has recently been published in the journal Science Advances.

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