Friday Squid Blogging: How the Optic Lobe Controls Squid Camouflage

Experiments on the oval squid. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here...

Changes in Password Best Practices

NIST recently published its four-volume SP800-63b Digital Identity Guidelines. Among other things, it makes three important suggestions when it comes to passwords: 1. Stop it with the annoying password complexity rules. They make passwords harder to remember. They increase errors because...

GPS Spoofing Attacks

Wired has a story about a possible GPS spoofing attack by Russia: After trawling through AIS data from recent years, evidence of spoofing becomes clear. Goward says GPS data has placed ships at three different airports and there have been other interesting anomalies. "We would find very large oil...

A Framework for Cyber Security Insurance

New paper: "Policy measures and cyber insurance: a framework," by Daniel Woods and Andrew Simpson, Journal of Cyber Policy, 2017. Abstract: The role of the insurance industry in driving improvements in cyber security has been identified as mutually beneficial for both insurers and policy-makers. ...

Massive Government Data Leak in Sweden

Seems to be incompetence rather than malice, but a good example of the dangers of blindly trusting the cloud...

New Open SSH Vulnerability

Its a serious one: The vulnerability, which is a signal handler race condition in OpenSSHs server sshd, allows unauthenticated remote code execution RCE as root on glibc-based Linux systems; that presents a significant security risk. This race condition affects sshd in its default configuration. ...

New Bluetooth Attack

New attack breaks forward secrecy in Bluetooth. Three news articles: BLUFFS is a series of exploits targeting Bluetooth, aiming to break Bluetooth sessions forward and future secrecy, compromising the confidentiality of past and future communications between devices. This is achieved by exploitin...

Friday Squid Blogging: Best Squid-Related Headline

From the New York Times: "When an Eel Climbs a Ramp to Eat Squid From a Clamp, Thats a Moray." The article is about the eel; the squid is just eel food. But still…. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog posti...

Identifying the Person Behind Bitcoin Fog

The person behind the Bitcoin Fog was identified and arrested. Bitcoin Fog was an anonymization service: for a fee, it mixed a bunch of peoples bitcoins up so that it was hard to figure out where any individual coins came from. It ran for ten years. Identifying the person behind Bitcoin Fog serve...

DNI’s Annual Threat Assessment

The office of the Director of National Intelligence released its "Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community." Cybersecurity is covered on pages 20-21. Nothing surprising: Cyber threats from nation states and their surrogates will remain acute. States increasing use of cyber...

Friday Squid Blogging: Jurassic Squid and Prey

A 180-million-year-old Vampire squid ancestor was fossilized along with its prey. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here...

Google’s Project Zero Finds a Nation-State Zero-Day Operation

Googles Project Zero discovered, and caused to be patched, eleven zero-day exploits against Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Windows, and iOS. This seems to have been exploited by "Western government operatives actively conducting a counterterrorism operation": The exploits, which went back to early 202...

Georgia’s Ballot-Marking Devices

Andrew Appel discusses Georgias voting machines, how the paper ballots facilitated a recount, and the problem with automatic ballot-marking devices: Suppose the polling-place optical scanners had been hacked enough to change the outcome. Then this would have been detected in the audit, and in...

Massive Brazilian Data Breach

I think this is the largest data breach of all time: 220 million people. Lots more stories are in Portuguese...

Friday Squid Blogging: On Squid Communication

They can communicate using bioluminescent flashes: New research published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences presents evidence for a previously unknown semantic-like ability in Humboldt squid. What's more, these squid can enhance the visibility of their skin patterns by...

Friday Squid Blogging: New Report on Squid Markets

This report costs $2,000. Please don't buy it for me. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I'll be at RSA Conference 2020 in San Francisco. On Wednesday, February 26, at 2:50 PM, I'll be part of a panel on "How to Reduce Supply Chain Risk: Lessons from Efforts to Block Huawei." On Thursday, February 27, at 9:20 AM, I'm...

License Plate "NULL"

There was a DefCon talk by someone with the vanity plate "NULL." The California system assigned him every ticket with no license plate: $12,000. Although the initial $12,000-worth of fines were removed, the private company that administers the database didn't fix the issue and new NULL tickets ar...

Details on Recent DNS Hijacking

At the end of January, the US Department of Homeland Security issued a warning regarding serious DNS hijacking attempts against US government domains. Brian Krebs wrote an excellent article detailing the attacks and their implications. Strongly recommended...

Estonia's Volunteer Cyber Militia

Interesting -- although short and not very detailed -- article about Estonia's volunteer cyber-defense militia. Padar's militia of amateur IT workers, economists, lawyers, and other white-hat types are grouped in the city of Tartu, about 65 miles from the Russian border, and in the capital,...

Hiding Secret Messages in Fingerprints

This is a fun steganographic application: hiding a message in a fingerprint image. Can't see any real use for it, but that's okay...

Chinese Supply Chain Hardware Attack

Bloomberg is reporting about a Chinese espionage operating involving inserting a tiny chip into computer products made in China. I've written about alternate link this threat more generally. Supply-chain security is an insurmountably hard problem. Our IT industry is inexorably international, and...

Thomas Dullien on Complexity and Security

For many years, I have said that complexity is the worst enemy of security. At CyCon earlier this month, Thomas Dullien gave an excellent talk on the subject with far more detail than I've ever provided. Video. Slides...

Bank Robbery Tactic

This video purports to be a bank robbery in Kiev. He first threatens a teller, who basically ignores him because she's behind bullet-proof glass. But then the robber threatens one of her co-workers, who is on his side of the glass. Interesting example of a security system failing for an unexpecte...

Penetrating a Casino's Network through an Internet-Connected Fish Tank

Attackers used a vulnerability in an Internet-connected fish tank to successfully penetrate a casino's network. BoingBoing post...

DNI Wants Research into Secure Multiparty Computation

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity IARPA is soliciting proposals for research projects in secure multiparty computation: Specifically of interest is computing on data belonging to different -- potentially mutually distrusting -- parties, which are unwilling or unable e.g., due t...

XZ Utils Backdoor

The cybersecurity world got really lucky last week. An intentionally placed backdoor in XZ Utils, an open-source compression utility, was pretty much accidentally discovered by a Microsoft engineer--weeks before it would have been incorporated into both Debian and Red Hat Linux. From ArsTehnica:...

Hiding Malware in ML Models

Interesting research: "EvilModel: Hiding Malware Inside of Neural Network Models". Abstract: Delivering malware covertly and detection-evadingly is critical to advanced malware campaigns. In this paper, we present a method that delivers malware covertly and detection-evadingly through neural...

Friday Squid Blogging: Video of Giant Squid Hunting Prey

Fantastic video of a giant squid hunting at depths between 1,827 and 3,117 feet. This is a follow-on from this post. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here...

Friday Squid Blogging: On Squid Coloration

Nice excerpt from Martin Wallins book Squid. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here...

Cybersecurity Experts to Follow on Twitter

Security Boulevard recently listed the "Top-21 Cybersecurity Experts You Must Follow on Twitter in 2021." I came in at 7. I thought that was pretty good, especially since I never tweet. My Twitter feed just mirrors my blog. If you are one of the 134K people who read me from Twitter, "hi."...

Friday Squid Blogging: T-Shirt

"Squid Pro Quo" T-shirt. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here...

Brazilian Cell Phone Hack

I know there's a lot of politics associated with this story, but concentrate on the cybersecurity aspect for a moment. The cell phones of a thousand Brazilians, including senior government officials, were hacked -- seemingly by actors much less sophisticated than rival governments. Brazil's...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Skin "Inspires" New Thermal Sheeting

Researchers are making space blankets using technology based on squid skin. Honestly, it's hard to tell how much squid is actually involved in this invention. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read my blog posting...

Programmers Who Don't Understand Security Are Poor at Security

A university study confirmed the obvious: if you pay a random bunch of freelance programmers a small amount of money to write security software, they're not going to do a very good job at it. In an experiment that involved 43 programmers hired via the Freelancer.com platform, University of Bonn...

"Insider Threat" Detection Software

Notice this bit from an article on the arrest of Christopher Hasson: It was only after Hasson's arrest last Friday at his workplace that the chilling plans prosecutors assert he was crafting became apparent, detected by an internal Coast Guard program that watches for any "insider threat." The...

Friday Squid Blogging: Problems with the Squid Emoji

The Monterey Bay Aquarium has some problems with the squid emoji. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here...

Friday Squid Blogging: Watch Squid Change Colors

This is an amazing short video of a squid -- I don't know the species -- changing its color instantly. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here...

Detecting Phishing Sites with Machine Learning

Really interesting article: A trained eye or even a not-so-trained one can discern when something phishy is going on with a domain or subdomain name. There are search tools, such as Censys.io, that allow humans to specifically search through the massive pile of certificate log entries for sites...

Friday Squid Blogging: Antifungal Squid-Egg Coating

The Hawaiian bobtail squid coats its eggs with antifungal bacteria. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here...

The NSA's Domestic Surveillance Centers

The Intercept has a long story about the NSA's domestic interception points. Includes some new Snowden documents...

History of the US Army Security Agency

Interesting history.pdf of the US Army Security Agency in the early years of Cold War Germany...

New National Academies Report on Crypto Policy

The National Academies has just published "Decrypting the Encryption Debate: A Framework for Decision Makers." It looks really good, although I have not read it yet. Not much news or analysis yet. Please post any links you find in the comments, and I will summarize them here...

Israeli Scientists Accidentally Reveal Classified Information

According to this story non-paywall English version here, Israeli scientists released some information to the public they shouldn't have. Defense establishment officials are now trying to erase any trace of the secret information from the web, but they have run into difficulties because the...

Detecting Drone Surveillance with Traffic Analysis

This is clever: Researchers at Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva, Israel have built a proof-of-concept system for counter-surveillance against spy drones that demonstrates a clever, if not exactly simple, way to determine whether a certain person or object is under aerial surveillance. They fir...

Spectre and Meltdown Attacks

After a week or so of rumors, everyone is now reporting about the Spectre and Meltdown attacks against pretty much every modern processor out there. These are side-channel attacks where one process can spy on other processes. They affect computers where an untrusted browser window can execute cod...

Cybercriminals Infiltrating E-Mail Networks to Divert Large Customer Payments

There's a new criminal tactic involving hacking an e-mail account of a company that handles high-value transactions and diverting payments. Here it is in real estate: The scam generally works like this: Hackers find an opening into a title company's or realty agent's email account, track upcoming...

ISO Rejects NSA Encryption Algorithms

The ISO has decided not to approve two NSA-designed block encryption algorithms: Speck and Simon. It's because the NSA is not trusted to put security ahead of surveillance: A number of them voiced their distrust in emails to one another, seen by Reuters, and in written comments that are part of t...

Insider Attack on Lottery Software

Eddie Tipton, a programmer for the Multi-State Lottery Association, secretly installed software that allowed him to predict jackpots. What's surprising to me is how many lotteries don't use real random number generators. What happened to picking golf balls out of wind-blown steel cages on...

Using “Master Faces” to Bypass Face-Recognition Authenticating Systems

Fascinating research: "Generating Master Faces for Dictionary Attacks with a Network-Assisted Latent Space Evolution." Abstract: A master face is a face image that passes face-based identity-authentication for a large portion of the population. These faces can be used to impersonate, with a high...