That Time Tom Lehrer Pranked the NSA

Bluesky thread. Here's the paper, from 1957. Note reference 3...

“Encryption Backdoors and the Fourth Amendment”

Law journal article that looks at the DualECPRNG backdoor from a US constitutional perspective: Abstract : The National Security Agency NSA reportedly paid and pressured technology companies to trick their customers into using vulnerable encryption products. This Article examines whether any of...

The Person in Charge of Testing Tech for US Spies Has Resigned

IARPA director Rick Muller is departing after just over a year at the R&D unit that invests in emerging technologies of potential interest to agencies like the NSA and the CIA, WIRED has learned...

CVE-2021-32094

U.S. National Security Agency NSA Emissary 5.9.0 allows an authenticated user to upload arbitrary files...

CVE-2021-32092

A Cross-site scripting XSS vulnerability in the DocumentAction component of U.S. National Security Agency NSA Emissary 5.9.0 allows remote attackers to inject arbitrary web script or HTML via the uuid parameter...

CVE-2021-32096

The ConsoleAction component of U.S. National Security Agency NSA Emissary 5.9.0 allows a CSRF attack that results in injecting arbitrary Ruby code for an eval call via the CONSOLECOMMANDSTRING parameter...

CVE-2021-32093

The ConfigFileAction component of U.S. National Security Agency NSA Emissary 5.9.0 allows an authenticated user to read arbitrary files via the ConfigName parameter...

CVE-2021-32095

U.S. National Security Agency NSA Emissary 5.9.0 allows an authenticated user to delete arbitrary files...

CVE-2019-13625

NSA Ghidra before 9.0.1 allows XXE when a project is opened or restored, or a tool is imported, as demonstrated by a project.prp file...

CVE-2019-13623

In NSA Ghidra before 9.1, path traversal can occur in RestoreTask.java from the package ghidra.app.plugin.core.archive via an archive with an executable file that has an initial ../ in its filename. This allows attackers to overwrite arbitrary files in scenarios where an intermediate analysis...

CVE-2019-17665

NSA Ghidra before 9.0.2 is vulnerable to DLL hijacking because it loads jansi.dll from the current working directory...

Florida Man Enters the Encryption Wars

Plus: A US judge rules against police cell phone “tower dumps,” China names alleged NSA agents it says were involved in cyberattacks, and Customs and Border Protection reveals its social media spying tools...

DIRNSA Fired

In "Secrets and Lies" 2000, I wrote: It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state. It's something a bunch of us were saying at the time, in reference to the vast NSA's surveillance capabilities. I have been thinking of that quote a lot as I read ne...

NSA Chief Ousted Amid Trump Loyalty Firing Spree

Plus: Another DOGE operative allegedly has a history in the hacking world, and Donald Trump’s national security adviser apparently had way more Signal chats than previously known...

End-to-End Encrypted Texts Between Android and iPhone Are Coming

Plus: A nominee to lead CISA emerges, Elon Musk visits the NSA, a renowned crypto cracking firm’s secret and problematic cofounder is revealed, and more...

CVE-2022-22067

Potential memory leak in modem during the processing of NSA RRC Reconfiguration with invalid Radio Bearer Config in Snapdragon Auto, Snapdragon Compute, Snapdragon Connectivity, Snapdragon Mobile...

Hacker in Snowflake Extortions May Be a U.S. Soldier

Two men have been arrested for allegedly stealing data from and extorting dozens of companies that used the cloud data storage company Snowflake , but a third suspect -- a prolific hacker known as Kiberphant0m -- remains at large and continues to publicly extort victims. However, this person's...

The NSA Has a Podcast—Here's How to Decode It

The spy agency that dared not speak its name is now the Joe Rogan of the SIGINT set. And the pod's actually worth a listen...

Russian Military Cyber Actors Target US and Global Critical Infrastructure

Summary The Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA, and National Security Agency NSA assess that cyber actors affiliated with the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate GRU 161st Specialist Training Center Unit 29155 are responsible...

List of Old NSA Training Videos

The NSAs "National Cryptographic School Television Catalogue" from 1991 lists about 600 COMSEC and SIGINT training videos. There are a bunch explaining the operations of various cryptographic equipment, and a few code words I have never heard of before...