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Firefox customers ought to replace their browsers instantly to repair a vital zero-day vulnerability. Anyone utilizing Firefox on a Windows, macOS or Linux desktop is in danger. Mozilla issued a patch Tuesday, however, the vulnerability was found by Samuel Groß of Google Project Zero on April 15. Mozilla carried out the repair after digital foreign money alternate Coinbase reported exploitation of the vulnerability for focused spearphishing assaults. Hackers have been going after cryptocurrency with a vengeance.

The critical flaw (CVE-2019-11707) is a type confusion vulnerability in the Array.pop, which is an array method that is used in JavaScript objects in Firefox. The vulnerability, under active attack, enables bad actors to take full control of systems running the vulnerable Firefox versions.

“On Monday, June 17, 2019, Coinbase reported a vulnerability used as part of targeted attacks for a spear phishing campaign,” Selena Deckelmann, senior director of Firefox Browser Engineering, told Threatpost. “In less than 24 hours, we released a fix for the exploit.”

Critical Flaw

The flaw was discovered by Samuel Groß of Google Project Zero and the Coinbase Security team. In a Twitter thread, Groß  said he found and reported the vulnerability on April 15 and that the first public fix was deployed “about a week ago.”

Essentially the object in the Array.pop method could be manipulated due to a type confusion vulnerability to execute malicious JavaScript on webpages.

“The bug can be exploited for RCE [remote code execution] but would then need a separate sandbox escape,” Groß said on Twitter. “However, most likely it can also be exploited for UXSS [universal cross-site scripting] which might be enough depending on the attacker’s goals.”

“We walked back the entire attack, recovered and reported the 0-day to firefox, pulled apart the malware and infra used in the attack and are working with various organization to continue burning down attacker infrastructure and digging into the attacker involved,” he said on Twitter.

On Twitter, Groß said he didn’t have any insights into the active exploitation of the flaw.

Recently Mozilla has been stomping out critical flaws in its Firefox browser. In May, Mozilla patched several critical vulnerabilities with the release of its Firefox 67 browser. The worst of the bugs patched are two memory safety flaws that could allow attackers to exploit the vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system, according to a security bulletin issued by United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team.

Ransomware is on the rise: Don’t miss our free Threatpost webinar on the ransomware threat landscape, June 19 at 2 p.m. ET. Join Threatpost and a panel of experts from Malwarebytes, Recorded Future and Moss Adams as they discuss how to manage the risk associated with this unique attack type, with exclusive insights into new developments on the ransomware front and how to stay ahead of the attackers.

This story was updated on June 19 at 10 am ET with Mozilla comments, and on June 20 at 9 am ET with further information about the active exploitation attacks.

Text messages are an anachronistic pain in the rear. They don’t support read receipts, group messaging features, or the animated stickers your pals share on apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and WeChat. They are not universal solutions — for example, you can’t send a WhatsApp message if your correspondent uses Facebook Messenger. The answer — or so Google and other companies are hoping — is Rich Communications Services or RCS.

WHAT IS RCS?

RCS is a communication protocol between mobile telephone carriers and between phone and carrier, aiming at replacing SMS messages with a text-message system that is richer, provides phonebook polling (for service discovery), and can transmit in-call multimedia.  It was chosen for adoption by the GSM Association in 2008, which has been around since the 1990s. The GMSA represents a wide variety of organizations in the mobile industry, including device and software companies, internet companies, etc. Naturally, given all those players, it took a while to come to an agreement, and so it wasn’t until 2016 that the GSMA was able to come up with something resembling a standard. Called the Universal Profile, it is, according to the GMSA, a “single, industry-agreed set of features and technical enablers.”

HOW IS RCS BETTER THAN SMS?

RCS will add a lot more multimedia capabilities to your messaging. Besides the usual texts (plain and fancy), it will make it simple to send GIFs, high-resolution still photos, and videos. It will let you know if the person you’re texting is available, and can send you a receipt to prove they received your message. It will allow you to create longer messages and attach larger files. It also enables much better group messaging than SMS can handle. In other words, it can make standard text messaging look and work a lot like iMessage.

RCS CAN MAKE STANDARD SMS TEXT MESSAGING LOOK AND WORK A LOT LIKE IMESSAGE

It will also make it easier for companies to interact with customers. So, for example, RCS will allow you to quickly find out the status of an order and will provide a way for companies to encourage customer comments on their sites. (Okay, that may not be top of your list of great features.)

As of this writing, support for RCS has been promised by 55 carriers including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and a slew of secondary companies; 11 hardware manufacturers such as Samsung, Lenovo, and LG (but not Apple), and both Microsoft and Google.

IS ANYONE USING RCS YET?

Google has been a major backer of RCS and even offers back-end services to carriers to help them quickly spin up support for it, but at the end of the day, it’s the carriers that are responsible for launching and supporting it. The big recent news is that Verizon is beginning its rollout of the service, but only in a very limited way to start. Currently, Verizon only offers it on Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL phones — and even then it hasn’t hit all those customers yet. But because Verizon is supporting the “Universal Profile” (more on that in a minute), it will work with any other phone that supports it.

(Somewhat confusingly, most carriers are opting to call their RCS services “Chat.” It’s confusing because Google itself has a product called “Hangouts Chat” which is used in corporate environments and will eventually make its way to consumers.)

If you’ve got Chat, you can still send messages to somebody without the capability — they will just get normal SMS texts. So it’s a fairly limited try-out, for now.

There are some other carriers that support RCS. T-Mobile added Universal Profile version 1.0 of RCS to its Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge phones in June. Sprint announced it was launching RCS with Universal Profile to its devices in early November, and promised that all its new 2019 devices would come with RCS preloaded. Anything using the “Universal Profile” standard should support cross-carrier messaging — but if you look at the carrier sites, they only claim to communicate within their networks, and we have not yet been able to test whether RCS-capable T-Mobile or Sprint devices can exchange RCS messages with Pixel 3 phones.

Muddying the waters, even more, is the fact that some carriers and device makers are currently using RCS, but not the Universal Profile (which is being used by Chat), so their apps and services are not cross-compatible with those being used by other vendors.

WHY ARE PEOPLE SAYING IT’S NOT SECURE?

One issue that a lot of security nerds are pointing out is that RCS — and, therefore, apps such as Chat — lack the end-to-end encryption available in some current messaging tools such as WhatsApp. End-to-end encryption means that the message is impenetrable to everyone — including the app vendor and the network provider — except the message sender and receiver. Do you want to text someone with no chance that the authorities will ever see it? Chat / RCS are not the way.

On the other hand, RCS does have all the standard security protocols, including Transport Layer Security (the underlying tech behind HTTPS), and IPsec (Internet Protocol Security), which is used in VPNs. So for the most part, it’s pretty secure. Whether you’re comfortable using Chat / RCS depends on your security needs.

SO WHAT’S NEXT?

Right now, support for RCS is limited to only a few carriers and even fewer devices, which means that most people can’t yet take advantage of it. Stay tuned to see what — and who — follows.

It is a hugely ambitious – some might say the megalomaniacal – project to create a new global currency. Facebook’s David Marcus tells me it is about giving billions of people more freedom with money and “righting the many wrongs of the present system”.

The message is this is not some little side project a small team at the Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters will try out for a few months before moving on to something else – this is both the future of Facebook and the future of money, an initiative that has seen an alliance of big players in payments such as Paypal and Visa, Silicon Valley players such as Uber and Lyft and major venture capital firms, a kind of Avengers: Endgame of technology and finance superheroes come together to make the world a better place.

But there are still many questions about FaceCoin – or Libra as the company wants us to call it. The principal one I keep coming back to is – why? As in why do we need a new global currency and do we really want it from Facebook?

Who is it for?

The Libra mission statement makes great play of the 1.7 billion people who do not have a bank account and how expensive it is for them to transfer money to relatives. But there are already plenty of organisations addressing this issue, from Kenya’s Mpesa scheme to technology start-ups such as WorldRemit.

And this will apply not just to unbanked Facebook users in Kenya but to lucrative markets such as the United States and Britain, where national identity cards do not exist as a relatively easy way of verifying someone is who they say they are.If Libra does allow people to send money from their phones as simply as they send a text, that will prove very attractive. But doing this cheaply and in a secure fashion will be extremely challenging.

Is this really a global project?

Facebook, perhaps aware of the reputational issues it faces, appears very keen to stress Libra is a global coalition in which it is just one little player.

Sceptics recall Facebook launched its global internet access scheme, Internet.org, as a similar international coalition. Then it became the controversial Free Basics service, denounced in India as a vehicle solely Since then, the other coalition partners seem to have melted away.

How does Facebook make money from it?

There will be what Facebook describes as a “negligible” fee for every transaction, mainly, it says, to stop the network being spammed by millions of back and forth payments in a denial-of-service attack.

Through its Calibra subsidiary, the social giant may eventually seek to offer users additional financial services. But the real prize is simply making people spend longer on Facebook or WhatsApp so that they can be served more adverts.

What do the partners get out of it?

It is being reported that partners such as Paypal, Mastercard and Visa are paying $10m (£8m) each for the privilege of operating a node in the Libra network. It seems bizarre they would want to support an organization whose whole pitch is it can do a better job than them.

But, then again, they will have access to the data flowing across the network, albeit in pseudonymous form, and that should give them valuable insights into what is being spent and where.

Why is it a cryptocurrency and why does it need the blockchain?

Facebook insists that Face coin – sorry, Libra – will have all the benefits of Bitcoin without the downside. It will be “global and instantaneous” as the original cryptocurrency but also secure and stable. And because it does not rely on mining, it will not have a major environmental impact.

But Bitcoin skeptic David Gerard says it is not clear why Libra is being implemented as a cryptocurrency – or needs a blockchain, an immutable distributed ledger visible to anyone.

“The usual reason for saying ‘blockchain’ is to lend magical marketing dust to unmagical ideas,” he says.

“But Libra is intended to be a service people use – so it’ll stand or fall on being useful and convenient, not whether it has a buzzword.”

Designers have an anxious relationship with the idea of trends. On one hand, following the crowd feels wrong — after all, isn’t creativity doing anything but what everyone else is doing? To this line of thinking, the only value in knowing what’s trendy knows what you’re pushing against. You can’t simply do the opposite of a trend, of course. But knowing what the trends are making it easier to subtly comment on and/or critique them.

What matters understanding the hows and whys of trends’ emergence and adoption? Because at the end of the day, trends have a lot to tell us about our cultural moment: what we love, what we hate, what we want to move toward. The closer we get to understand those things, the closer we get to get inside others’ heads — to empathizing with them.

Glitch Art

Glitch art is the practice of using digital or analog errors for aesthetic purposes by either corrupting digital data or physically manipulating electronic devices. Glitches are significant in our modern times when computers are so pervasive.

The breakdown of technology makes for appealing subject matter both as an idea and in its design execution, where it can draw the viewer’s eye to those parts of the site that are warped, double exposed and glitchy. Glitch art amplifies this feeling of disorientation by giving websites a distinctly psychedelic look.

Purposeful Animation

Animation get more attention on web, it draws users to certain parts of the design, helps drive engagement or interest or tells a story. Use animation in web projects to provide a great depth of understanding to users who engage with the design.

Vibrant Color Palettes

On the site Bright color is everywhere. From gradient backgrounds too bright image overlays to animations that feature moving colors, vibrant color palettes will continue to gain popularity.

Many of these bright colors have evolved from other design trends. Bright’s first started gaining popularity with flat design, morphed into even more vibrant colors with Material Design, and now some of these hues even have a hint of neon in them.

The nice thing about this design trend is that color – once you have a palette – is pretty simple to deploy. You don’t have to completely redesign your website to add this trending element to the design.

Serifs On Screen

There’s a good reason why serifs were designed to be decorative, making them perfect for emphasis. While sans, with its clean readability, is still the go-to for longer bouts of website copy, more and more brands are turning towards bold serifs in other aspects of their designs such as headers and callouts.

And even though serifs are often associated with the past, they have lots of character and are more adaptable than you might think. Take for example the rounded serifs that play into Mailchimp’s cheerful branding. Or the wedge serifs and bold strokes that create a modern look for Medium.

Flat Design Emulates 3D

It’s like a touch of virtual reality in designs that don’t require anything special to look at. Three-dimensional renderings are providing an update to flat design. The result is a mash-up of 3D realistic and flat interfaces that are complex, visually interesting and showing up everywhere.

When you look deeper into the trend, a lot of what makes it work are depth in layers plus animation. (See how multiple design trends impact one another?)

Some people are starting to call this concept “deep flat.” But we just think it is a natural evolution of flat design.

Emotional Design

Every visual element in the design provides a cue to users about how they should react. You have to create a connection with users. That’s what emotional design is all about.

Emotional connections fall into four basic categories — joy and sadness, trust and disgust, fear and anger, and surprise and anticipation. Think about how your content falls into ones of these grouping and use color, imagery and the user interface to further connect on that level with users.

The movement in the bike app, above, for example, shows motion; that makes the user want to ride along. The same is true of the example from Sprout – a smiling face creates a positive first interaction with users. The woman in the image is happy and users can feel and want to emul+ate that emotion.

Chatbot’s evolve

Chatbots have finally moved into the spotlight in 2019. This is mostly due to the advancements in AI and machine learning, making them more intelligent and efficient.

The new chatbots will be showing up more and more on web pages with higher levels of customization than we’ve seen in past iterations. Bright colors will make them not only more prominent on the page but more inviting. We can also predict an influx of friendly mascots to represent brands and give these bots a personable face.

Video content

Video is one of the most powerful means of distributing your message. Video not only diversifies the page but caters to an on-the-go audience who don’t have the time to scan through a lot of text.

What is new is the move Google has made toward mixed search page results, featuring video content above standard web pages. This has led websites to prioritize video production in order to make them easily searchable and offer content in the most efficient, shareable way.

Thumb-friendly navigation

Designing mobile navigation means designing for small screen size. With limited real estate available, there’s no room for clutter. Get right to the point then cut the fat. One of the most important studies in this area was that of Josh Clark with his book Designing for Touch, in which he investigates how users hold their mobile phones and how their movements, particularly those of the thumb, should be processed in the web design process. More and more now, users will encounter navigation tailored to the thumb, such as the hamburger menu moved to the bottom of mobile screens.

   Diversity

It means understanding that each individual is unique, and recognizing our individual differences. Too often, people forget that the web has always been accompanied by a pair of other important W’s: ’World Wide.’ The internet connects billions of people all around the world from various different cultures, abilities, ages, gender identities—people who want to see themselves reflected in their content rather than grinning stock photo models.

Even small considerations of the past (like Apple’s varying skin tones for emojis) have gone a long way in making people of all walks of life feel a little more welcome in a brand’s digital space. The world still has a long way to go in this arena, but these designers can use their craft to demonstrate that the web is supposed to be about real people making real connections.