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...

Becoming a Tech Policy Activist

Carolyn McCarthy gave an excellent TEDx talk about becoming a tech policy activist. It's a powerful call for public-interest technologists...

Apple to Store Encryption Keys in China

Apple is bowing to pressure from the Chinese government and storing encryption keys in China. While I would prefer it if it would take a stand against China, I really can't blame it for putting its business model ahead of its desires for customer privacy. Two more articles...

Dubai Deploying Autonomous Robotic Police Cars

It's hard to tell how much of this story is real and how much is aspirational, but it really is only a matter of time: About the size of a child's electric toy car, the driverless vehicles will patrol different areas of the city to boost security and hunt for unusual activity, all the while...

Leaked Russian Cyber-Operations Training Materials

This is interesting: The records describe a force-generation mechanism for several General Staff components, including the GRU, Main Operational Directorate, and 8th Directorate, which is associated with protected communications, cryptography, and information security. … The reporting also linked...

LastPass Breach

Last August, LastPass reported a security breach, saying that no customer information--or passwords--were compromised. Turns out the full story is worse: While no customer data was accessed during the August 2022 incident, some source code and technical information were stolen from our developmen...

Analysis of the FBI’s Anom Phone

Motherboard got its hands on one of those Anom phones that were really FBI honeypots. The details are interesting...

More Russian Hacking

Two reports this week. The first is from Microsoft, which wrote: As part of our investigation into this ongoing activity, we also detected information-stealing malware on a machine belonging to one of our customer support agents with access to basic account information for a small number of our...

Information Flows and Democracy

Henry Farrell and I published a paper on fixing American democracy: "Rechanneling Beliefs: How Information Flows Hinder or Help Democracy." Its much easier for democratic stability to break down than most people realize, but this doesnt mean we must despair over the future. Its possible, though...

Friday Squid Blogging: COVID Relief Funds

A town in Japan built a giant squid statue with its COVID relief grant. One local told the Chunichi Shimbun newspaper that while the statue may be effective in the long run, the money could have been used for "urgent support," such as for medical staff and long-term care facilities. But a...

Identifying People Through Lack of Cell Phone Use

In this entertaining story of French serial criminal Rédoine Faïd and his jailbreaking ways, theres this bit about cell phone surveillance: After Faïds helicopter breakout, 3,000 police officers took part in the manhunt. According to the 2019 documentary La Traque de Rédoine Faïd, detective units...

Friday Squid Blogging: On SQUIDS

A good tutorial: But we can go beyond the polarization of electrons and really leverage the electron waviness. By interleaving thin layers of superconducting and normal materials, we can make the quantum electronic equivalents of transistors and diodes such as Superconducting Tunnel Junctions SJT...

National Security Risks of Late-Stage Capitalism

Early in 2020, cyberspace attackers apparently working for the Russian government compromised a piece of widely used network management software made by a company called SolarWinds. The hack gave the attackers access to the computer networks of some 18,000 of SolarWinds’s customers, including US...

Deliberately Playing Copyrighted Music to Avoid Being Live-Streamed

Vice is reporting on a new police hack: playing copyrighted music when being filmed by citizens, trying to provoke social media sites into taking the videos down and maybe even banning the filmers: In a separate part of the video, which Devermont says was filmed later that same afternoon, Devermo...

Attack against Florida Water Treatment Facility

A water treatment plant in Oldsmar, Florida, was attacked last Friday. The attacker took control of one of the systems, and increased the amount of sodium hydroxide -- thats lye -- by a factor of 100. This could have been fatal to people living downstream, if an alert operator hadnt noticed the...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: Im speaking online as part of Western Washington Universitys Internet Studies Lecture Series on January 20, 2021. Im speaking online at ITU Denmark on February 2, 2021. Details to come. Im being interviewed by Keith Cronin as part ...

The US Military Buys Commercial Location Data

Vice has a long article about how the US military buys commercial location data worldwide. The U.S. military is buying the granular movement data of people around the world, harvested from innocuous-seeming apps, Motherboard has learned. The most popular app among a group Motherboard analyzed...

Friday Squid Blogging: COVID-19 Found on Chinese Squid Packaging

I thought the virus doesnt survive well on food packaging: Authorities in China’s northeastern Jilin province have found the novel coronavirus on the packaging of imported squid, health authorities in the city of Fuyu said on Sunday, urging anyone who may have bought it to get themselves tested. ...

COVID-19 Risks of Flying

I fly a lot. Over the past five years, my average speed has been 32 miles an hour. That all changed mid-March. It's been 105 days since I've been on an airplane -- longer than any other time in my adult life -- and I have no future flights scheduled. This is all a prelude to saying that I have be...

Friday Squid Blogging: Humboldt Squid Communication

Humboldt Squid communicate by changing their skin patterns and glowing. 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...

Facebook Announces Messenger Security Features that Don't Compromise Privacy

Note that this is "announced," so we don't know when it's actually going to be implemented. Facebook today announced new features for Messenger that will alert you when messages appear to come from financial scammers or potential child abusers, displaying warnings in the Messenger app that provid...

Lousy IoT Security

DTEN makes smart screens and whiteboards for videoconferencing systems. Forescout found that their security is terrible: In total, our researchers discovered five vulnerabilities of four different kinds: Data exposure: PDF files of shared whiteboards e.g. meeting notes and other sensitive files...

Regulating International Trade in Commercial Spyware

Siena Anstis, Ronald J. Deibert, and John Scott-Railton of Citizen Lab published an editorial calling for regulating the international trade in commercial surveillance systems until we can figure out how to curb human rights abuses. Any regime of rigorous human rights safeguards that would make a...

Government Perspective on Supply Chain Security

This is an interesting interview with a former NSA employee about supply chain security. I consider this to be an insurmountable problem right now...

Friday Squid Blogging: Firefly Squid Museum

The Hotaruika Museum is a museum devoted to firefly squid in Toyama, Japan. 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...

On Financial Fraud

There are some good lessons in this article on financial fraud: That's how we got it so wrong. We were looking for incidental breaches of technical regulations, not systematic crime. And the thing is, that's normal. The nature of fraud is that it works outside your field of vision, subverting the...

Russian Censorship of Telegram

Internet censors have a new strategy in their bid to block applications and websites: pressuring the large cloud providers that host them. These providers have concerns that are much broader than the targets of censorship efforts, so they have the choice of either standing up to the censors or...

Greyshift Sells Phone Unlocking Services

Here's another company that claims to unlock phones for a price...

Intimate Partner Threat

Princeton's Karen Levy has a good article computer security and the intimate partner threat: When you learn that your privacy has been compromised, the common advice is to prevent additional access -- delete your insecure account, open a new one, change your password. This advice is such standard...

WhatsApp Vulnerability

A new vulnerability in WhatsApp has been discovered: ...the researchers unearthed far more significant gaps in WhatsApp's security: They say that anyone who controls WhatsApp's servers could effortlessly insert new people into an otherwise private group, even without the permission of the...

Fighting Ransomware

No More Ransom is a central repository of keys and applications for ransomware, so people can recover their data without paying. It's not complete, of course, but is pretty good against older strains of ransomware. The site is a joint effort by Europol, the Dutch police, Kaspersky, and McAfee...

"Santa Claus is Coming to Town" Parody

Funny...

Cobalt Strike Vulnerability Affects Botnet Servers

Cobalt Strike is a security tool, used by penetration testers to simulate network attackers. But its also used by attackers -- from criminals to governments -- to automate their own attacks. Researchers have found a vulnerability in the product. The main components of the security tool are the...

Paragon: Yet Another Cyberweapons Arms Manufacturer

Forbes has the story: Paragons product will also likely get spyware critics and surveillance experts alike rubbernecking: It claims to give police the power to remotely break into encrypted instant messaging communications, whether thats WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook Messenger or Gmail, the industry...

Mollitiam Industries is the Newest Cyberweapons Arms Manufacturer

Wired is reporting on a company called Mollitiam Industries: Marketing materials left exposed online by a third-party claim Mollitiams interception products, dubbed "Invisible Man" and "Night Crawler," are capable of remotely accessing a targets files, location, and covertly turning on a devices...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: Ill be part of a European Internet Forum virtual debate on June 17, 2021. The topic is "Decrypting the encryption debate: How to ensure public safety with a privacy-preserving and secure Internet?" I’m speaking at the all-online...

AI Security Risk Assessment Tool

Microsoft researchers just released an open-source automation tool for security testing AI systems: "Counterfit." Details on their blog...

Security Vulnerabilities in Cellebrite

Moxie Marlinspike has an intriguing blog post about Cellebrite, a tool used by police and others to break into smartphones. Moxie got his hands on one of the devices, which seems to be a pair of Windows software packages and a whole lot of connecting cables. According to Moxie, the software is...

NSA Discloses Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange

Amongst the 100+ vulnerabilities patch in this months Patch Tuesday, there are four in Microsoft Exchange that were disclosed by the NSA...

Accellion Supply Chain Hack

A vulnerability in the Accellion file-transfer program is being used by criminal groups to hack networks worldwide. Theres much in the article about when Accellion knew about the vulnerability, when it alerted its customers, and when it patched its software. The governor of New Zealands central...

On the Insecurity of ES&S Voting Machines’ Hash Code

Andrew Appel and Susan Greenhalgh have a blog post on the insecurity of ES&Ss software authentication system: It turns out that ES&S has bugs in their hash-code checker: if the "reference hashcode" is completely missing, then itll say "yes, boss, everything is fine" instead of reporting an error...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at the Australian Cyber Conference 2021 on March 17 and 18, 2021. I’m keynoting the all-virtual RSA Conference 2021, May 17-20, 2021. I’ll be speaking at an Informa event on September 14, 2021. Details to come. The lis...

Cell Phone Location Privacy

We all know that our cell phones constantly give our location away to our mobile network operators; that’s how they work. A group of researchers has figured out a way to fix that. “Pretty Good Phone Privacy” PGPP protects both user identity and user location using the existing cellular networks. ...

Cloning Google Titan 2FA keys

This is a clever side-channel attack: The cloning works by using a hot air gun and a scalpel to remove the plastic key casing and expose the NXP A700X chip, which acts as a secure element that stores the cryptographic secrets. Next, an attacker connects the chip to hardware and software that take...

Extracting Personal Information from Large Language Models Like GPT-2

Researchers have been able to find all sorts of personal information within GPT-2. This information was part of the training data, and can be extracted with the right sorts of queries. Paper: "Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models." Abstract: It has become common to publish large...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at the ISC² Security Congress 2020, November 16, 2020. I’ll be on a panel at the OECD Global Blockchain Policy Forum 2020 on November 17, 2020. The panel is called "Deep Dive: Digital Security and Distributed Ledger...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Found on Provincetown Sandbar

Headline: "Dozens of squid found on Provincetown sandbar." Slow news day. 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...

Phishing Attacks against Trump and Biden Campaigns

Google's threat analysts have identified state-level attacks from China. I hope both campaigns are working under the assumption that everything they say and do will be dumped on the Internet before the election. That feels like the most likely outcome...

Chinese COVID-19 Disinformation Campaign

The New York Times is reporting on state-sponsored disinformation campaigns coming out of China: Since that wave of panic, United States intelligence agencies have assessed that Chinese operatives helped push the messages across platforms, according to six American officials, who spoke on the...