Great responsibility, without great power

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. As I'm writing this, today April 28 is International Superhero Day. If you don't know the origin story behind this, perhaps you would assume that this day was dreamed up by Marvel. And… you would be correct. However, it's not a pure...

Warnings Mount in Congress Over Expanded US Wiretap Powers

Experts tell US lawmakers that a crucial spy program’s safeguards are failing, allowing intel agencies deeper, unconstrained access to Americans’ data...

U.K. Arrests Two Teen Scattered Spider Hackers Linked to August 2024 TfL Cyber Attack

Law enforcement authorities in the U.K. have arrested two teen members of the Scattered Spider hacking group in connection with their alleged participation in an August 2024 cyber attack targeting Transport for London TfL, the city's public transportation agency. Thalha Jubair aka EarthtoStar,...

U.K. Government Drops Apple Encryption Backdoor Order After U.S. Civil Liberties Pushback

The U.K. government has apparently abandoned its plans to force Apple to weaken encryption protections and include a backdoor that would have enabled access to the protected data of U.S. citizens. U.S. Director of National Intelligence DNI Tulsi Gabbard, in a statement posted on X, said the U.S...

Symbolic Generation and Modular Embedding of High-Quality Abc-Triples

We present a symbolic identity for generating integer triples $a, b, c$ satisfying $a + b = c$, inspired by structural features of the \emphabc conjecture. The construction uses powers of $2$ and $3$ in combination with modular inversion in $\mathbbZ/3^p\mathbbZ$, leading to a parametric identity...

Congress Again Fails to Limit Scope of Spy Powers in New Defense Bill

The National Defense Authorization Act passed today, but lawmakers stripped language that would keep the Trump administration from wielding unprecedented authority to surveil Americans...

On November 13, NIST NVD finally admitted the obvious: they had failed to process the CVE analysis backlog before the end of the fiscal year (September 30)

On November 13, NIST NVD finallyadmittedthe obvious: they had failed to process the CVE analysis backlog before the end of the fiscal year September 30. This is actually visible in their own statistics. At the moment, there are 19860 identifiers in the backlog. This week, 1136 new CVEs were...

The Next US President Will Have Troubling New Surveillance Powers

Over the weekend, President Joe Biden signed legislation not only reauthorizing a major FISA spy program but expanding it in ways that could have major implications for privacy rights in the US...

Researchers Uncover Windows Flaws Granting Hackers Rootkit-Like Powers

New research has found that the DOS-to-NT path conversion process could be exploited by threat actors to achieve rootkit-like capabilities to conceal and impersonate files, directories, and processes. "When a user executes a function that has a path argument in Windows, the DOS path at which the...

CVE-2024-30545

Cross-Site Request Forgery CSRF vulnerability in Nick Powers Social Author Bio allows Stored XSS.This issue affects Social Author Bio: from n/a through 2.4...

CVE-2024-30545

Technical details about CVE-2024-30545 are not provided in the connected documents; public information in the initial description indicates a CSRF-enabled Stored XSS vulnerability in Social Author Bio up to version 2.4. Monitor for authoritative fixes and advisories.

PT-2024-23475 · Unknown · Nick Powers Social Author Bio

Name of the Vulnerable Software and Affected Versions: Nick Powers Social Author Bio versions n/a through 2.4 Description: The issue is a Cross-Site Request Forgery CSRF vulnerability that allows Stored XSS in Nick Powers Social Author Bio. Recommendations: For versions n/a through 2.4, update to...

Trump Loyalists Kill Vote on US Wiretap Program

An attempt to reauthorize Section 702, the so-called crown jewel of US spy powers, failed for a third time in the House of Representatives after former president Donald Trump criticized the law...

The ‘Emergency Powers’ Risk of a Second Trump Presidency

Every US president has the ability to invoke “emergency powers” that could give an authoritarian leader the ability to censor the internet, restrict travel, and more...

Apple Threatens to Pull iMessage and FaceTime from U.K. Amid Surveillance Demands

Apple has warned that it would rather stop offering iMessage and FaceTime services in the U.K. than bowing down to government pressure in response to new proposals that seek to expand digital surveillance powers available to state intelligence agencies. The development, first reported by BBC News...

WordPress WP Dev Powers – Display Screen Dimensions to Admin Plugin Plugin <= 1.0.1 is vulnerable to Cross Site Scripting (XSS)

Software WP Dev Powers – Display Screen Dimensions to Admin Plugin Type Plugin Vulnerable versions = 1.0.1 Fixed in N/A OWASP Top 10 A3: Injection Classification Cross Site Scripting XSS CVE CVE-2023-33999 Patch priority Medium CVSS severity Medium 7.1 Developer Claim ownership PSID f38bbbbde0ec...

French Police Will Be Able to Spy on People through Their Cell Phones

The French police are getting new surveillance powers: French police should be able to spy on suspects by remotely activating the camera, microphone and GPS of their phones and other devices, lawmakers agreed late on Wednesday, July 5. … Covering laptops, cars and other connected objects as well ...

EFF on the UN Cybercrime Treaty

EFF has a good explainer on the problems with the new UN Cybercrime Treaty, currently being negotiated in Vienna. The draft treaty has the potential to rewrite criminal laws around the world, possibly adding over 30 criminal offenses and new expansive police powers for both domestic and...

Harsher penalties for data breaches in new Australian privacy bill

High-profile breaches mean high-profile action In the aftermath of another crop of high-profile data breaches, the Australian Government also known as the Commonwealth Government has introduced amendments to Australian privacy law which give the regulator new powers and the ability to impose...

Open Source Intelligence May Be Changing Old-School War

Intelligence collected from public information online could be impacting traditional warfare and altering the calculus between large and small powers...