Israeli firm Cellebrite, widely believed to be the company that helped the FBI gain access to the iPhone of a terrorist in 2016 after Apple refused to bow to the crime agency's demands, has advertised its latest wares as being able to break into systems running iOS 12.3 and also recent Android phones.

In what appears to be an escalation of the row between the US and China, the telecommunications equipment vendor Huawei Technologies has written to American wireless provider Verizon asking it to pay more than US$1 billion to license more than 230 patents that the Chinese company owns.

Three years after it was first reported by Russian security firm Kaspersky ((formerly Kaspersky Lab), Google has suddenly decided to confirm a report that the firmware updates of some Android devices were compromised through their supply chain so that they could be infected with malware.