Enlarge (credit: Palo Alto Networks ) It’s a mystery that left researchers scratching their heads: 132 Android apps in the official Google Play market attempted to infect users with… Windows malware. The apps, which were spawned by seven different developers, mostly contained carefully concealed HTML-based iframe tags that connected to two heavily obfuscated malicious domains. In one case, an app didn’t use iframes but instead used Microsoft’s Visual Basic language to inject an entire obfuscated Windows executable into the HTML. The apps were equipped with two capabilities. One was to load interstitial ads, and the other was to load the main app. The main apps loaded WebView components that were configured to allow loaded JavaScript code to access the app’s native functionality. An example of one infected app’s user interface and underlying code. (credit: Palo Alto Networks ) That was a lot of work considering that the Windows-based malware was incapable of executing on an Android device. On top of that, the two malicious domains in the iframes—brenz.pl and chura.pl—were taken over by Polish security authorities in 2013. So what, precisely, was going on? Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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132 Google Play apps tried to infect Android users with… Windows malware
sciencehabit writes Researchers working in Argentina have discovered the most complete skeleton of a titanosaur, a group of gigantic plant-eating dinosaurs that dominated the Southern Hemisphere beginning about 90 million years ago. The new dino, named Dreadnoughtus schrani, was 26 meters long and weighed about 59 metric tons—that is, twice as long as Tyrannosaurus rex and as heavy as a herd of elephants. That puts it on a par with other well-known giants such as Argentinosaurus (but it’s four times as large as the perhaps better known Diplodocus). The researchers say that the beast was so big it would have had no fear of predators. And it was about to get bigger: A close examination of the fossils, especially its back and shoulder bones, indicates that the animal was still growing when it died. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader writes “Earlier this week, reports surfaced that the Windows RT operating system had been jailbroken to allow for the execution of unsigned ARM desktop applications. Microsoft quickly issued a statement saying it does not consider the findings to be part of a security vulnerability, and applauded the hacker for his ingenuity. Now, a Windows RT jailbreak tool has been released.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.