Huawei's new P50 phones lack 5G and Google Services

Huawei just announced its latest flagship phones, the P50 and P50 Pro.

Due to the US trade restrictions, the Huawei P50 phones do not come with Google's apps and services. 

The Chinese company decided to ship the P50 phones with HarmonyOS, its new platform for IoT, mobile and wearable devices.

As Qualcomm is allowed to sell 4G chips to Huawei, only one variant of the P50 Pro is powered by Snapdragon 888. The other variant runs on Kirin 9000 The P50 has only one processor option, the Snapdragon 888.

In terms of display size, the P50 Pro comes with a 6.6-inch 120Hz OLED display while the P50 has a 6.5-inch 90Hz OLED display. 

The P50 Pro sports a bigger 4,360mAh battery and the P50 has a 4,100mAh battery.When it comes to camera hardware, the P50 Pro packs a punch with four rear cameras (50MP main + 64MP telephoto with 3.5x optical zoom + 40MP monochrome + 13MP ultra-wide). 

The P50 has three rear cameras (50MP main + 12MP telephoto with 5x optical zoom + 13MP ultra-wide). Both phones have 13MP front-facing cameras.

Other specs include 66W wired fast charging and IP68 rating for water/dust resistance. The P50 Pro is priced from 5,988 yuan (S$1,250) for a base model (8GB RAM + 128GB ) and the P50 starts from 4,488 yuan for the 8GB + 128GB model.

Brazilian criminals detail however they gain access to bank accounts from purloined iPhones

The Brazilian newspaper Folha de S. Paulo reported  last month however criminals had been stealing iPhones in Brazil to access people’s bank accounts rather than reselling the devices. Now, the police appear to possess finally discovered however they gain access to bank accounts, and to our surprise, the method looks easier than you may suppose.

Folha de S. Paulo currently according that Police in urban center have inactive one amongst the gangs that concentrate on smartphone thievery, and also the criminals have careful however they crack the safety of Apple devices. one amongst them even mentions that he will “unlock all iPhones, from five to eleven.”

At first, it absolutely was believed that the thieves used some exploit or different advanced technique (like Cellebrite’s tools) to unlock the purloined iPhones, however the total factor is far easier than that. captain Fabiano Barbeiro disclosed that criminals would like solely one tool to access all the device’s data: the iPhone SIM card.

Basically, thieves take the SIM card out of the purloined iPhone and so place it into another iPhone. victimisation social networks like Facebook and Instagram, they'll simply establish the e-mail address utilized by the one that had the phone purloined. In most cases, this email address is that the same because the one used for the Apple ID. All they have to try and do is reset the Apple ID countersign victimisation the victim’s signal.

Barbeiro says that the best approach criminals ought to realize passwords is by trying within the Notes app since several users appear to store bank and mastercard passwords there. However, with access to the iCloud account, they'll simply get all the passwords from the iCloud Keychain yet.

When they transfer knowledge from the cloud to the new device, they rummage around for info coupled to the word “password” and, in line with them, they typically get what they have to access the victim’s bank accounts. Once they need this info, they come the SIM card to the victim’s phone and provides the device to the gang member liable for access the bank accounts.

One of the suspects inactive may be a 22-year-old laptop technician, UN agency told police that he is aware of a minimum of 3 others UN agency instruct criminals curious about obtaining passwords from purloined smartphones. The urban center police have inactive twelve individuals and already known twenty eight others UN agency square measure concerned in smartphone thievery. However, the police don't rule out the chance that some gangs have access to additional complicated tools to unlock the victims’ iPhones.

Following the previous report, Apple has secure the Brazilian newspaper that it'll create it easier for users to delete all knowledge from a purloined iPhone. However, the corporate didn't explain of what specifically it'll implement. With iOS fifteen, users can finally be ready to track a powered-off iPhone victimisation the realize My app.

And, of course, the most effective factor you'll be able to do to safeguard your accounts isn't to store your passwords within the Notes app or different non-secure apps. Another sensible possibility is to solely use associate degree eSIM rather than a daily SIM, because the eSIM cannot simply be transferred to a different device.

European spy chiefs warn of hybrid threats from Russia, IS

BERLIN (AP) — European intelligence chiefs warned Monday that Russia is actively seeking to undermine their democracies by disinformation, cyberattacks and more traditional means of espionage.

The heads of Britain and Germany’s domestic intelligence agencies, as well as the European Union and NATO’s top security officials, pinpointed Moscow as the prime source of hybrid threats to Europe, citing attempts to manipulate elections, steal sensitive data and spark a coup in Montenegro. They also cited the nerve agent attack against a former Russian spy in Britain this year that Britain has blamed on Russia.

“Our respect for Russia’s people (...) cannot and must not stop us from calling out and pushing back on the Kremlin’s flagrant breaches of international rules,” the head of Britain’s MI5 spy agency, Andrew Parker, told an intelligence gathering in Berlin.

Parker said the March 4 attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury was swiftly followed by Russian attempts to divert blame. That resulted in at least 30 alternative theories about the attack being spread by Russian authorities and media.

“Whatever nonsense they conjure up, the case is clear,” said Parker.

He later told reporters that since allied governments were first briefed on Russia’s involvement in the attack by the British government, ” the case, if anything, has got stronger since then.”

Germany’s domestic intelligence chief, Hans-Georg Maassen, said his agency, known as BfV, blames Russian authorities for orchestrating a persistent cyberattack aimed at stealing sensitive data so it can be used in future intelligence campaigns, such as what happened with the Democratic National Committee emails leaked during the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign.

Maassen said authorities are particularly concerned about the possible funding of extremist groups aiming to divide European societies, and he called for greater awareness of hybrid attacks to counter such threats.

Sir Julian King, the EU’s security commissioner, warned that social media had “turbocharged” state actors’ ability to spread disinformation, citing the recent revelations about Cambridge Analytica’s gathering of personal data from Facebook users to help manipulate elections.

King warned of future threats posed by sophisticated fake videos that are undiscernible from real footage, calling it an example of a “deadly weapon of mass disinformation” that societies need to find ways of becoming resilient to.

He also said the European Commission is working with social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter to better inform users about why they are seeing certain posts and who is paying for them, to help protect against disinformation campaigns by groups or governments outside the country.

NATO’s assistant secretary general for intelligence and security, Arndt Freytag von Loringhoven, said the price of launching hybrid attacks needs to increase, citing the expulsion of 150 undeclared spies by Britain and its allies in the wake of the Salisbury attack.

Intelligence chiefs also noted the continued threat posed by Islamist extremism and the need to cooperate closely among European agencies, despite Britain’s departure from the EU next year.

Parker, whose speech in Berlin was the first by a serving MI5 director outside Britain, said security agencies had thwarted 12 terrorist plots in the U.K. since Parliament was attacked in March 2017.

“We remain unwaveringly and absolutely committed to working together with European partners,” he said, calling for security cooperation to be enshrined in future treaties between Britain and the EU.

Asked about whether disinformation played a role in Britain’s Brexit referendum two years ago, Parker said: “I’m not aware of any information that suggests that the outcome was determined by any sort of interference.”

He declined to say whether MI5 had registered any attempts at influencing the outcome.

Maassen, his German counterpart, said the Brexit referendum likely prompted spy chief in some countries “to nearly laugh their heads off” because it suited their interests.

On the question of foreign funding for political parties in Germany — an issue that has been repeatedly raised in connection with the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany party — Maassen said: “There is no information I can give to you.”

Ukraine computer involved in Tennessee elections attack

Investigators found evidence of a “malicious intrusion” into a Tennessee county’s elections website from a computer in Ukraine during a concerted cyberattack, which likely caused the site to crash just as it was reporting vote totals in this month’s primary.

Cyber-security experts hired by Knox County to analyze the so-called “denial of service” cyberattack, said Friday that “a suspiciously large number of foreign countries” accessed the site as votes were being reported on May 1.

That intense activity was among the likely causes of the crash, according to the report by Sword & Shield Enterprise Security.

“Given the circumstantial evidence_especially the simultaneous proven malicious intrusion from a Ukraine IP address_I think it is reasonable to at least hypothesize that it was an intended event,” David Ball, the county’s deputy director of information technology, added in an email to The Associated Press.

County officials said no voting data was affected, but the site was down for an hour after the polls closed, causing confusion before technicians fixed the problem.

The vulnerability identified by Sword & Shield has been fixed and additional safeguards are now in place, said Ball.

The election results, to be officially certified later this month, left Glenn Jacobs, also known as the pro wrestler Kane, ahead by 17 votes in the Republican primary for Knox County’s mayor.

Investigators said it’s impossible to prove just where the so-called “denial of service” attack originated from, since the county can’t store all the “packet data” needed to identify the source.

“The effect was clearly a loss of service, but it is unclear, with the information provided, if the outage was an intended event or a side effect of the events,” the report said.

Ball said “the bottom line is that there was a proven malicious attack from a foreign source occurring simultaneously with an apparent deliberate DOS attack. Nothing was held back from Sword and Shield, and their assessment was well aligned with our initial assessment on election night.”

Knox County uses Hart InterCivic’s eSlate electronic voting machines, which do not create a paper record of the votes. Ball said Hart’s equipment “is not networked in any way.”

Joyce McCants, a spokeswoman for the FBI in Knoxville, said Knox County has not reached out to the FBI in relation to the website crash.

Election security experts have raised concerns that foreign state actors could use such attacks to erode public confidence in the democratic process. Projects like Defend Digital Democracy at Harvard University have been urging elections officials across the country to prepare for exactly such scenarios.

Richard Moran, the county’s information and technology senior director, has said that while heavy traffic came from overseas servers, it doesn’t mean that the attacker was in a foreign country.

Dan Wallach, a computer science professor at Rice University, notes that the internet is a “messy place” with a lot of background traffic, and it would be difficult to find its origin because attackers are very good at hiding their location.

“What attackers will do is, they’ll break into other computers and then launch their attacks from there,” he said.

The report said the website received requests for access from about 100 countries, from all over the world. (AP)