Uber Tracking your location after completing your Ride.

Uber has said that it will track your location for 5 mins after completing your ride.
It claims, it will help in better consumer experience as location is key in it's game.

Till now we do not know how long it has been tracking its users after completing their ride. I did happen to read the wired article, which says how Uber has a "God View" and how it is a source of entertainment at parties :|
Yes, Uber app in the background can also track your location.



To disable the tracking, you will need to disable location permission on ur phone;
for all your apps or Uber specific location permission(Android Marshmallow and above)

Rise of the Mirai Botnet

 

Mirai Botnet is the one which you might have heard that kicked dyn out of gear.
Thats right it is indeed the recruiter of an army of zombies ie. unsecured Internet Connected devices.

Internet connected devices such as your computer, router, webcam etc are all vulnerable to this malware.

The malware follows a simple strategy of compromising the internet connected devives by

Take Over the Device

using the default username and password of the device to gain access and add it to its army.
It also uses BruteForce Dictionary attack to gain passwords.

Clear the hurdles

Mirai also kills any existing malwares on the devices, so that it maximizes its potential. It also prevents
remote login so that it can not be stopped in the middle of the attack.

Execute

Once Mirai is in control of the device it waits for commands to be executed by the central server.


The Do-Not List: It also has a list which it refrains from scanning.(for unknown purpose or to prevent from gaining attention.)

Once the botnet has enough devices in its army, it begins attacking the target via DDOS.



How to Prevent Mirai.?
Change your default/ weak password of your devices.

Disable remote logging/ wan . (if not used.)


Attack on DYN.
DYN is a DNS management systems which helps in the lookup of the the domain names to the IP addresses.
Since this DNS infra was attacked by mirai botnet the DNS lookupsites like amazon, twitter and many other sites were unable to access to the consumers.

The attack was mitigated by using scrubbing services (the traffic is rerouted to new servers or data centers which identifies fake trafficfrom the real one)
On rebooting the devices, the attack can be stopped.

The source code has been released on one of the hacker forums,
https://github.com/jgamblin/Mirai-Source-Code

 

Watchout for Gooligan- Check if you are affected now!

Gooligan is a malware that affects android os phones particularly V4 &5. This malware was reported first mid of 2016. This malware steals the authentication tokens of your google accounts such as drive, mail etc and installs adwares which inturn generates revenue for the installed apps.

More Details:https://plus.google.com/+AdrianLudwig/posts/GXzJ8vaAFsi

List of Apps installed by Gooligan: http://blog.checkpoint.com/2016/11/30/1-million-google-accounts-breached-gooligan/

Check here if your account is being compromised
https://gooligan.checkpoint.com/

If you find your account is compromised then it would be safe to do a clean install of the OS on your phone, a  factory reset on your phone wont get you that far. Also change passwords immediately of your google accounts. Gooligan does not access user data nor modifies OS/ system files.

Use Google Play Store to download apps and be careful while installing apps from 3rd party websites.