HP Shared ArcSight Source Code with Russians

Reuters is reporting that HP Enterprise gave the Russians a copy of the ArcSight source code. The article highlights that ArcSight is used by the Pentagon to protect classified networks, but the security risks are much broader. Any weaknesses the Russians discover could be used against any ArcSig...

Remote Malware Attacks on ATMs

This report discusses the new trend of remote malware attacks against ATMs...

Now It's Easier than Ever to Steal Someone's Keys

The website key.me will make a duplicate key from a digital photo. If a friend or coworker leaves their keys unattended for a few seconds, you know what to do...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squids in Space

NASA is sending baby bobtail squid into space. 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: Blobs of Squid Eggs Found Near Norway

Divers find three-foot "blobs" -- egg sacs of the squid Illex coindetii -- off the coast of Norway. 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: Squid Potato Masher

A squid potato masher for only $11.50. 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...

Malicious Barcode Scanner App

Interesting story about a barcode scanner app that has been pushing malware on to Android phones. The app is called Barcode Scanner. Its been around since 2017 and is owned by the Ukrainian company Lavabird Ldt. But a December 2020 update included some new features: However, a rash of malicious...

SonicWall Zero-Day

Hackers are exploiting a zero-day in SonicWall: In an email, an NCC Group spokeswoman wrote: "Our team has observed signs of an attempted exploitation of a vulnerabilitythat affects the SonicWall SMA 100 series devices. We are working closely with SonicWall to investigate this in more depth." In...

Humble Bundle's 2020 Cybersecurity Books

For years, Humble Bundle has been selling great books at a "pay what you can afford" model. This month, they're featuring as many as nineteen cybersecurity books for as little as $1, including four of mine. These are digital copies, all DRM-free. Part of the money goes to support the EFF or Let's...

Details of the Olympic Destroyer APT

Interesting details on Olympic Destroyer, the nation-state cyberattack against the 2018 Winter Olympic Games in South Korea. Wired's Andy Greenberg presents evidence that the perpetrator was Russia, and not North Korea or China...

How Privacy Laws Hurt Defendants

Rebecca Wexler has an interesting op-ed about an inadvertent harm that privacy laws can cause: while law enforcement can often access third-party data to aid in prosecution, the accused don't have the same level of access to aid in their defense: The proposed privacy laws would make this situatio...

On Surveillance in the Workplace

Data & Society just published a report entitled "Workplace Monitoring & Surveillance": This explainer highlights four broad trends in employee monitoring and surveillance technologies: Prediction and flagging tools that aim to predict characteristics or behaviors of employees or that are designed...

Blockchain and Trust

In his 2008 white paper that first proposed bitcoin, the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto concluded with: "We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust." He was referring to blockchain, the system behind bitcoin cryptocurrency. The circumvention of trust is a great...

Information Attacks against Democracies

Democracy is an information system. That's the starting place of our new paper: "Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy." In it, we look at democracy through the lens of information security, trying to understand the current waves of Internet disinformation attacks. Specifically, we wanted to...

Friday Squid Blogging: Fried Squid with Turmeric

Good-looking recipe. 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...

Japan's Directorate for Signals Intelligence

The Intercept has a long article on Japan's equivalent of the NSA: the Directorate for Signals Intelligence. Interesting, but nothing really surprising. The directorate has a history that dates back to the 1950s; its role is to eavesdrop on communications. But its operations remain so highly...

Supply-Chain Security

Earlier this month, the Pentagon stopped selling phones made by the Chinese companies ZTE and Huawei on military bases because they might be used to spy on their users. It's a legitimate fear, and perhaps a prudent action. But it's just one instance of the much larger issue of securing our supply...

Friday Squid Blogging: Eating Firefly Squid

In Tokama, Japan, you can watch the firefly squid catch and eat them in various ways: "It's great to eat hotaruika around when the seasons change, which is when people tend to get sick," said Ryoji Tanaka, an executive at the Toyama prefectural federation of fishing cooperatives. "In addition to...

E-Mail Leaves an Evidence Trail

If you're going to commit an illegal act, it's best not to discuss it in e-mail. It's also best to Google tech instructions rather than asking someone else to do it: One new detail from the indictment, however, points to just how unsophisticated Manafort seems to have been. Here's the relevant...

Post-Quantum Algorithms

NIST has organized a competition for public-key algorithms secure against a quantum computer. It recently published all of its Round 1 submissions. Details of the NIST efforts are here. A timeline for the new algorithms is here...

The grugq on Reality Winner, the Intercept, and OPSEC

Good commentary...

Bypassing Apple’s AirTag Security

A Berlin-based company has developed an AirTag clone that bypasses Apples anti-stalker security systems. Source code for these AirTag clones is available online. So now we have several problems with the system. Apples anti-stalker security only works with iPhones. Apple wrote an Android app that...

Colorado Passes Consumer Privacy Law

First California. Then Virginia. Now Colorado. Heres a good comparison of the three states laws...

The Future of Machine Learning and Cybersecurity

The Center for Security and Emerging Technology has a new report: "Machine Learning and Cybersecurity: Hype and Reality." Heres the bottom line: The report offers four conclusions: Machine learning can help defenders more accurately detect and triage potential attacks. However, in many cases thes...

Malware Hidden in Call of Duty Cheating Software

News article: Most troublingly, Activision says that the "cheat" tool has been advertised multiple times on a popular cheating forum under the title "new COD hack." Gamers looking to flout the rules will typically go to such forums to find new ways to do so. While the report doesnt mention which...

Exploiting Spectre Over the Internet

Google has demonstrated exploiting the Spectre CPU attack remotely over the web: Today, were sharing proof-of-concept PoC code that confirms the practicality of Spectre exploits against JavaScript engines. We use Google Chrome to demonstrate our attack, but these issues are not specific to Chrome...

US Government Exposes North Korean Malware

US Cyber Command has uploaded North Korean malware samples to the VirusTotal aggregation repository, adding to the malware samples it uploaded in February. The first of the new malware variants, COPPERHEDGE, is described as a Remote Access Tool RAT "used by advanced persistent threat APT cyber...

EFF on the Mechanics of Corporate Surveillance

EFF has published a comprehensible and very readable "deep dive" into the technologies of corporate surveillance, both on the Internet and off. Well worth reading and sharing. Boing Boing post...

The Story of Tiversa

The New Yorker has published the long and interesting story of the cybersecurity firm Tiversa. Watching "60 Minutes," Boback saw a remarkable new business angle. Here was a multibillion-dollar industry with a near-existential problem and no clear solution. He did not know it then, but, as he turn...

Obfuscation as a Privacy Tool

This essay discusses the futility of opting out of surveillance, and suggests data obfuscation as an alternative. We can apply obfuscation in our own lives by using practices and technologies that make use of it, including: The secure browser Tor, which among other anti-surveillance technologies...

Speakers Censored at AISA Conference in Melbourne

Two speakers were censored at the Australian Information Security Association's annual conference this week in Melbourne. Thomas Drake, former NSA employee and whistleblower, was scheduled to give a talk on the golden age of surveillance, both government and corporate. Suelette Dreyfus, lecturer ...

New Biometrics

This article discusses new types of biometrics under development, including gait, scent, heartbeat, microbiome, and butt shape no, really...

Cryptanalysis of SIMON-32/64

A weird paper was posted on the Cryptology ePrint Archive working link is via the Wayback Machine, claiming an attack against the NSA-designed cipher SIMON. You can read some commentary about it here. Basically, the authors claimed an attack so devastating that they would only publish a...

New Shamoon Variant

A new variant of the Shamoon malware has destroyed significant amounts of data at a UAE "heavy engineering company" and the Italian oil and gas contractor Saipem. Shamoon is the Iranian malware that was targeted against the Saudi Arabian oil company, Saudi Aramco, in 2012 and 2016. We have no ide...

E-Mail Vulnerabilities and Disclosure

Last week, researchers disclosed vulnerabilities in a large number of encrypted e-mail clients: specifically, those that use OpenPGP and S/MIME, including Thunderbird and AppleMail. These are serious vulnerabilities: An attacker who can alter mail sent to a vulnerable client can trick that client...

Friday Squid Blogging: Sake Decanters Made of Dried Squid

This is interesting. 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: Market Squid in Alaskan Waters

Rising sea temperatures is causing market squid to move north into Alaskan waters. 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...

Jim Risen Writes about Reporting Government Secrets

Jim Risen writes a long and interesting article about his battles with the US government and the New York Times to report government secrets...

New White House Announcement on the Vulnerability Equities Process

The White House has released a new version of the Vulnerabilities Equities Process VEP. This is the inter-agency process by which the US government decides whether to inform the software vendor of a vulnerability it finds, or keep it secret and use it to eavesdrop on or attack other systems. You...

More on Kaspersky and the Stolen NSA Attack Tools

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post are reporting that Israel has penetrated Kaspersky's network and detected the Russian operation. From the New York Times: Israeli intelligence officers informed the NSA that, in the course of their Kaspersky hack, they uncovered evidence that Russia...

E-Mail Tracking

Interesting survey paper: on the privacy implications of e-mail tracking: Abstract: We show that the simple act of viewing emails contains privacy pitfalls for the unwary. We assembled a corpus of commercial mailing-list emails, and find a network of hundreds of third parties that track email...

Journalists Generally Do Not Use Secure Communication

This should come as no surprise: Alas, our findings suggest that secure communications haven't yet attracted mass adoption among journalists. We looked at 2,515 Washington journalists with permanent credentials to cover Congress, and we found only 2.5 percent of them solicit end-to-end encrypted...

The NSA's 2014 Media Engagement and Outreach Plan

Interesting post-Snowden reading, just declassified. U External Communication will address at least one of "fresh look" narratives: 1. U NSA does not access everything. 2. U NSA does not collect indiscriminately on U.S. Persons and foreign nationals. 3. U NSA does not weaken encryption. 4. U NSA...

Hacking a Phone Through a Replacement Touchscreen

Researchers demonstrated a really clever hack: they hid malware in a replacement smart phone screen. The idea is that you would naively bring your smart phone in for repair, and the repair shop would install this malicious screen without your knowledge. The malware is hidden in touchscreen...

Do the Police Need a Search Warrant to Access Cell Phone Location Data?

The US Supreme Court is deciding a case that will establish whether the police need a warrant to access cell phone location data. This week I signed on to an amicus brief from a wide array of security technologists outlining the technical arguments as why the answer should be yes. Susan Landau...

Good Article About Google's Project Zero

Fortune magazine just published a good article about Google's Project Zero, which finds and publishes exploits in other companies' software products. I have mixed feeling about it. The project does great work, and the Internet has benefited enormously from these efforts. But as long as it is...

Post-Quantum RSA

Interesting research on a version of RSA that is secure against a quantum computer: Post-quantum RSA Daniel J. Bernstein, Nadia Heninger, Paul Lou, and Luke Valenta Abstract: This paper proposes RSA parameters for which 1 key generation, encryption, decryption, signing, and verification are...

Who Are the Shadow Brokers?

In 2013, a mysterious group of hackers that calls itself the Shadow Brokers stole a few disks full of NSA secrets. Since last summer, they've been dumping these secrets on the Internet. They have publicly embarrassed the NSA and damaged its intelligence-gathering capabilities, while at the same...

NSA AI Security Center

The NSA is starting a new artificial intelligence security center: The AI security centers establishment follows an NSA study that identified securing AI models from theft and sabotage as a major national security challenge, especially as generative AI technologies emerge with immense...

What Will It Take?

What will it take for policy makers to take cybersecurity seriously? Not minimal-change seriously. Not here-and-there seriously. But really seriously. What will it take for policy makers to take cybersecurity seriously enough to enact substantive legislative changes that would address the problem...