Many people have grown accustomed to talking to their smart devices, asking them to read a text, play a song or set an alarm. But someone else might be secretly talking to them, too.

Over the last two years, researchers in China and the United States have begun demonstrating that they can send hidden commands that are undetectable to the human ear to Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant. Inside university labs, the researchers have been able to secretly activate the artificial intelligence systems on smartphones and smart speakers, making them dial phone numbers or open websites. 

A new malware campaign has been uncovered on Facebook which not only steals account credentials but also installs scripts for covert cryptocurrency mining.

Cybersecurity firm Radware said in a blog post on Thursday that Nigelthorn is a new campaign which focuses on the Facebook social network. The malware is so called due to the abuse of a legitimate Google Chrome extension called "Nigelify," which replaces images displayed on a web page with pictures of Nigel Thornberry, a cartoon character from the television show The Wild Thornberrys. 

An advanced type of malware can spy on nearly every Android smartphone function and steal passwords, photos, video, screenshots and data from WhatsApp, Telegram and other apps. "ZooPark" targets subjects in the Middle East and was likely developed by a state actor, according to Kaspersky Lab, which first spotted and identified it.

ZooPark has evolved over four generations, having started as simple malware that could "only" steal device account details and address book contacts. The last generation, however, can monitor and exfiltrate keylogs, clipboard data, browser data. 

A bug that Oracle recently patched broke the main functionality of Oracle Access Manager (OAM), which should only give authorized users access to protected enterprise data.

OAM provides an authentication function for web applications based on Oracle Fusion Middleware. It can be used to provide and block access to external mobile and cloud applications. However, researchers at Austrian security firm SEC-Consult found a flaw in OAM's cryptographic format that allowed them to create session tokens for any user, which the attacker could use to impersonate any legitimate user and access web apps that OAM should be protecting. 

Russia's Fancy Bear APT group is likely behind the malicious command and control domains found in Lojack agents, according to the Arbor Security Engineering & Response Team.

LoJack, a popular laptop recovery solution, “makes an excellent double-agent due to appearing as legit software while natively allowing remote code execution,” researchers said, noting that while “the initial intrusion vector for this activity remains unknown, Fancy Bear often utilizes phishing email to deliver payloads.” Because many antivirus programs don't flag the malware as a concern, it's largely able to do its dirty work without detection.

GitHub has said a bug exposed some user passwords -- in plaintext. The code repository site, with more than 27 million users as of last year, sent an email to affected users Tuesday.

"During the course of regular auditing, GitHub discovered that a recently introduced bug exposed a small number of users' passwords to our internal logging system," said the email, received by some users. The email said that a handful of GitHub staff could have seen those passwords -- and that it's "unlikely" that any GitHub staff accessed the site's internal logs. "We have corrected this, but you'll need to reset your password to regain access to your account," the email added. 

Twitter Inc. sold data access to the Cambridge University academic who also obtained millions of Facebook Inc. users’ information that was later passed to a political consulting firm without the users’ consent.

Aleksandr Kogan, who created a personality quiz on Facebook to harvest information later used by Cambridge Analytica, established his own commercial enterprise, Global Science Research (GSR). That firm was granted access to large-scale public Twitter data, covering months of posts, for one day in 2015, according to Twitter. “In 2015, GSR did have one-time API access to a random sample of public tweets from a five-month period from December 2014 to April 2015,” Twitter said.

U.S. prosecutors in New York have been investigating whether Chinese tech company Huawei violated U.S. sanctions in relation to Iran, according to sources familiar with the situation.

Since at least 2016, U.S. authorities have been probing Huawei’s alleged shipping of U.S.-origin products to Iran and other countries in violation of U.S. export and sanctions laws, two of the sources said. News of the Justice Department probe follows a series of U.S. actions aimed at stopping or reducing access by Huawei and Chinese smartphone maker ZTE Corp to the U.S. economy amid allegations the companies could be using their technology to spy on Americans.

At midnight ET last night, MyEtherWallet users started noticing something odd. Connecting to the service, users were faced with an unsigned SSL certificate, a broken link in the site’s verification. It was unusual, but it’s the kind of thing web users routinely click through without thinking.

But anyone who clicked through this certificate warning was redirected to a server in Russia, which proceeded to empty the user’s wallet. Judging by wallet activity, the attackers appear to have taken at least $13,000 in Ethereum during two hours before the attack was shut down. The attackers’ wallet already contains more than $17 million in Ethereum. MyEtherWallet confirmed the attack in a statement on Reddit. 

Yet another hacker crew has been battering the healthcare industry in recent months.

But rather than just aim for the PCs, its also gotten footholds on the computers controlling X-Ray, MRI and other medical machines, according to a report from Symantec on Thursday. The hacker group, dubbed Orangeworm, is mainly targeting American healthcare organizations, though there are a number of victims worldwide, including in Asia and Europe.  But rather than do anything destructive, Orangeworm is likely using leverage on those medical devices to learn more about them as part of an ongoing corporate espionage operation, Symantec said.