Month: March 2020

Enlarge / The keyboard and trackpad attachment for the iPad Pro. (credit: Apple)

In the notes for its iPad Pro announcement earlier today, Apple announced a couple of major new features coming to the iWork suite that are specifically oriented around new offerings for the iPad.

Pages, Numbers, and Keynote will all get full trackpad support on the platform, but they'll also gain iCloud Folder Sharing. "Collaboration will also become easier than ever with support for iCloud folder sharing and the ability to edit shared documents while offline," Apple wrote in its newsroom article.

Users have been asking for iCloud folder sharing for a while, and there have been indications that the company has been working on it for a while, but it hadn't come to fruition yet. In fact, it seems to have been delayed before.

Enlarge / A General Motors assembly line in Flint, Michigan, in 2019. (credit: Jeff Kowalsky/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The nation's "Big Three" automakers (General Motors, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler) will shut down their factories for at least two weeks, reports indicate. The Associated Press first broke the news, which was confirmed by The Wall Street Journal.

The United Auto Workers has been pushing for plant closures for days. The union has argued that continuing to manufacture cars during a pandemic puts US autoworkers' lives at risk. But as recently as Tuesday evening, carmakers and the UAW were still hashing out a plan to make automaking safer by limiting work hours and physically spreading out workers.

Union leaders' hands may have been strengthened by news that two autoworkers—one with Fiat Chrysler, the other with Ford—had tested positive for coronavirus.

Enlarge (credit: ShellyS / Flickr)

Researchers have uncovered a mobile surveillance campaign that has used more than 30 malicious Android apps to spy on targets over the past 11 months. Two of the most recent samples are exploiting the coronavirus by hiding off-the-shelf surveillanceware inside apps that promise to provide information about the ongoing pandemic.

One of the apps, “corona live 1.1,” is a trojanized version of “corona live,” a legitimate app that provides an interface to data found on this tracker from Johns Hopkins University. Buried inside the spoofed app is a sample of SpyMax, a commercially available piece of surveillanceware that gives attackers real-time control of infected devices. A second app used in the same campaign is called “Crona.” The campaign, which has been active since April 2019 at the latest, was discovered by researchers from mobile-security provider Lookout.

“This surveillance campaign highlights how in times of crisis, our innate need to seek out information can be used against us for malicious ends,” Lookout researcher Kristin Del Rosso wrote in a post published on Wednesday. “Furthermore, the commercialization of off-the-shelf’ spyware kits makes it fairly easy for these malicious actors to spin up these bespoke campaigns almost as quickly as a crisis like COVID-19 takes hold.”