3073 matches found
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...
Chip Cards Fail to Reduce Credit Card Fraud in the US
A new study finds that credit card fraud has not declined since the introduction of chip cards in the US. The majority of stolen card information comes from hacked point-of-sale terminals. The reasons seem to be twofold. One, the US uses chip-and-signature instead of chip-and-PIN, obviating the...
Friday Squid Blogging: British Columbia "Squid Run" Is a Tourist Attraction
On James Island. 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...
Good Primer on Two-Factor Authentication Security
Stuart Schechter published a good primer on the security issues surrounding two-factor authentication. While it's often an important security measure, it's not a panacea. Stuart discusses the usability and security issues that you have to think about before deploying the system...
Friday Squid Blogging: Do Cephalopods Contain Alien DNA?
Maybe not DNA, but biological somethings. "Cause of Cambrian explosion -- Terrestrial or Cosmic?": Abstract: We review the salient evidence consistent with or predicted by the Hoyle-Wickramasinghe H-W thesis of Cometary Cosmic Biology. Much of this physical and biological evidence is...
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...
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...
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...
Mythos and Cybersecurity
Last week, Anthropic pulled back the curtain on Claude Mythos Preview, an AI model so capable at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities that the company decided it was too dangerous to release to the public. Instead, access has been restricted to roughly 50 organizations--Microsoft, Appl...
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...
Defeating Microsoft’s Trusted Platform Module
This is a really interesting story explaining how to defeat Microsofts TPM in 30 minutes -- without having to solder anything to the motherboard. Researchers at the security consultancy Dolos Group, hired to test the security of one clients network, received a new Lenovo computer preconfigured to...
Zoom Lied about End-to-End Encryption
The facts arent news, but Zoom will pay $85M -- to the class-action attorneys, and to users -- for lying to users about end-to-end encryption, and for giving user data to Facebook and Google without consent. The proposed settlement would generally give Zoom users $15 or $25 each and was filed...
Disrupting Ransomware by Disrupting Bitcoin
Ransomware isnt new; the idea dates back to 1986 with the "Brain" computer virus. Now, its become the criminal business model of the internet for two reasons. The first is the realization that no one values data more than its original owner, and it makes more sense to ransom it back to them --...
Apple Will Offer Onion Routing for iCloud/Safari Users
At this years Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, Apple announced something called "iCloud Private Relay." Thats basically its private version of onion routing, which is what Tor does. Privacy Relay is built into both the forthcoming iOS and MacOS versions, but it will only work if youre an...
Security and Human Behavior (SHB) 2021
Today is the second day of the fourteenth Workshop on Security and Human Behavior. The University of Cambridge is the host, but were all on Zoom. SHB is a small, annual, invitational workshop of people studying various aspects of the human side of security, organized each year by Alessandro...
The Misaligned Incentives for Cloud Security
Russias Sunburst cyberespionage campaign, discovered late last year, impacted more than 100 large companies and US federal agencies, including the Treasury, Energy, Justice, and Homeland Security departments. A crucial part of the Russians success was their ability to move through these...
WEIS 2021 Call for Papers
The 20th Annual Workshop on the Economics of Information Security WEIS 2021 will be held online in June. We just published the call for papers...
Virginia Data Privacy Law
Virginia is about to get a data privacy law, modeled on Californias law...
Military Cryptanalytics, Part III
The NSA has just declassified and released a redacted version of Military Cryptanalytics, Part III, by Lambros D. Callimahos, October 1977. Parts I and II, by Lambros D. Callimahos and William F. Friedman, were released decades ago -- I believe repeatedly, in increasingly unredacted form -- and...
Microsoft Buys Corp.com
A few months ago, Brian Krebs told the story of the domain corp.com, and how it is basically a security nightmare: At issue is a problem known as "namespace collision," a situation where domain names intended to be used exclusively on an internal company network end up overlapping with domains th...
NSA Security Awareness Posters
From a FOIA request, over a hundred old NSA security awareness posters. Here are the BBC's favorites. Here are Motherboard's favorites. I have a related personal story. Back in 1993, during the first Crypto Wars, I and a handful of other academic cryptographers visited the NSA for some meeting or...
Police Surveillance Tools from Special Services Group
Special Services Group, a company that sells surveillance tools to the FBI, DEA, ICE, and other US government agencies, has had its secret sales brochure published. Motherboard received the brochure as part of a FOIA request to the Irvine Police Department in California. "The Tombstone Cam is our...
Failure Modes in Machine Learning
Interesting taxonomy of machine-learning failures pdf that encompasses both mistakes and attacks, or -- in their words -- intentional and unintentional failure modes. It's a good basis for threat modeling...
Phone Pharming for Ad Fraud
Interesting article on people using banks of smartphones to commit ad fraud for profit. No one knows how prevalent ad fraud is on the Internet. I believe it is surprisingly high -- here's an article that places losses between $6.5 and $19 billion annually -- and something companies like Google an...
First Physical Retaliation for a Cyberattack
Israel has acknowledged that its recent airstrikes against Hamas were a real-time response to an ongoing cyberattack. From Twitter: CLEARED FOR RELEASE: We thwarted an attempted Hamas cyber offensive against Israeli targets. Following our successful cyber defensive operation, we targeted a buildi...
Hey Secret Service: Don't Plug Suspect USB Sticks into Random Computers
I just noticed this bit from the incredibly weird story of the Chinese woman arrested at Mar-a-Lago: Secret Service agent Samuel Ivanovich, who interviewed Zhang on the day of her arrest, testified at the hearing. He stated that when another agent put Zhang's thumb drive into his computer, it...
First Look Media Shutting Down Access to Snowden NSA Archives
The Daily Beast is reporting that First Look Media -- home of The Intercept and Glenn Greenwald -- is shutting down access to the Snowden archives. The Intercept was the home for Greenwald's subset of Snowden's NSA documents since 2014, after he parted ways with the Guardian the year before. I...
Damaging Hard Drives with an Ultrasonic Attack
Playing a sound over the speakers can cause computers to crash and possibly even physically damage the hard drive. Academic paper...
Security Vulnerabilities in VingCard Electronic Locks
Researchers have disclosed a massive vulnerability in the VingCard eletronic lock system, used in hotel rooms around the world: With a $300 Proxmark RFID card reading and writing tool, any expired keycard pulled from the trash of a target hotel, and a set of cryptographic tricks developed over...
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...
Cellebrite Unlocks iPhones for the US Government
Forbes reports that the Israeli company Cellebrite can probably unlock all iPhone models: Cellebrite, a Petah Tikva, Israel-based vendor that's become the U.S. government's company of choice when it comes to unlocking mobile devices, is this month telling customers its engineers currently have th...
Jackpotting Attacks Against US ATMs
Brian Krebs is reporting sophisticated jackpotting attacks against US ATMs. The attacker gains physical access to the ATM, plants malware using specialized electronics, and then later returns and forces the machine to dispense all the cash it has inside. The Secret Service alert explains that the...
Tourist Scams
A comprehensive list. Most are old and obvious, but there are some clever variants...
Google's Data on Login Thefts
This is interesting research and data: With Google accounts as a case-study, we teamed up with the University of California, Berkeley to better understand how hijackers attempt to take over accounts in the wild. From March 2016 to March 2017, we analyzed several black markets to see how hijackers...
Heart Size: Yet Another Biometric
Turns out that heart size doesn't change throughout your adult life, and you can use low-level Doppler radar to scan the size -- even at a distance -- as a biometric. Research paper to be available soon...
The Science of Interrogation
Fascinating article about two psychologists who are studying interrogation techniques. Now, two British researchers are quietly revolutionising the study and practice of interrogation. Earlier this year, in a meeting room at the University of Liverpool, I watched a video of the Diola interview...
Bluetooth Vulnerabilities
A bunch of Bluetooth vulnerabilities are being reported, some pretty nasty. BlueBorne concerns us because of the medium by which it operates. Unlike the majority of attacks today, which rely on the internet, a BlueBorne attack spreads through the air. This works similarly to the two less extensiv...
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...
Ross Anderson on the History of the Crypto Wars in the UK
Ross Anderson gave a talk on the history of the Crypto Wars in the UK. I am intimately familiar with the US story, but didn't know as much about Britain's verson. Hour-long video. Summary...
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...
More on the Vulnerabilities Equities Process
Richard Ledgett -- a former Deputy Director of the NSA -- argues against the US government disclosing all vulnerabilities: Proponents argue that this would allow patches to be developed, which in turn would help ensure that networks are secure. On its face, this argument might seem to make sense ...
Forged Documents and Microsoft Fonts
A set of documents in Pakistan were detected as forgeries because their fonts were not in circulation at the time the documents were dated...
Using AI to Scale Spear Phishing
The problem with spear phishing is that it takes time and creativity to create individualized enticing phishing emails. Researchers are using GPT-3 to attempt to solve that problem: The researchers used OpenAIs GPT-3 platform in conjunction with other AI-as-a-service products focused on personali...
Hacking Digitally Signed PDF Files
Interesting paper: "Shadow Attacks: Hiding and Replacing Content in Signed PDFs": Abstract: Digitally signed PDFs are used in contracts and invoices to guarantee the authenticity and integrity of their content. A user opening a signed PDF expects to see a warning in case of any modification. In...
Friday Squid Blogging: Bigfin Squid Found in Australian Waters
A bigfin squid has been found -- and filmed -- in Australian waters for the first time. 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...
IMSI-Catchers from Canada
Gizmodo is reporting that Harris Corp. is no longer selling Stingray IMSI-catchers and, presumably, its follow-on models Hailstorm and Crossbow to local governments: L3Harris Technologies, formerly known as the Harris Corporation, notified police agencies last year that it planned to discontinue...