New Malware Hijacks Cryptocurrency Mining

This is a clever attack. After gaining control of the coin-mining software, the malware replaces the wallet address the computer owner uses to collect newly minted currency with an address controlled by the attacker. From then on, the attacker receives all coins generated, and owners are none the...

Hacking Back

Hacking back is a terrible idea that just will not die. Josephine Wolff takes apart the new hacking back bill that was introduced in the House recently...

Police Are Hiding Their Use of Flock Surveillance Cameras

A usage policy for Flock license plate reader cameras tells police not to talk about the cameras: When cops use Flock to arrest someone in Wapello County, Iowa, they don't want them to know. A usage policy for the automated license plate reader cameras in the county tells police, in no uncertain...

Insurance and Ransomware

As ransomware becomes more common, Im seeing more discussions about the ethics of paying the ransom. Heres one more contribution to that issue: a research paper that the insurance industry is hurting more than its helping. However, the most pressing challenge currently facing the industry is...

Security Vulnerability in Apple’s Silicon “M1” Chip

The website for the M1racles security vulnerability is an excellent demonstration that not all vulnerabilities are exploitable. Be sure to read the FAQ through to the end. EDITED TO ADD: Wired article...

Tesla Remotely Hacked from a Drone

This is an impressive hack: Security researchers Ralf-Philipp Weinmann of Kunnamon, Inc. and Benedikt Schmotzle of Comsecuris GmbH have found remote zero-click security vulnerabilities in an open-source software component ConnMan used in Tesla automobiles that allowed them to compromise parked ca...

Easy SMS Hijacking

Vice is reporting on a cell phone vulnerability caused by commercial SMS services. One of the things these services permit is text message forwarding. It turns out that with a little bit of anonymous money -- in this case, $16 off an anonymous prepaid credit card -- and a few lies, you can forwar...

Four Microsoft Exchange Zero-Days Exploited by China

Microsoft has issued an emergency Microsoft Exchange patch to fix four zero-day vulnerabilities currently being exploited by China. EDITED TO ADD 3/12: Exchange Online is not affected...

Friday Squid Blogging: Linguine allo Scoglio Recipe

Delicious seafood pasta dish -- includes squid -- from Americas Test Kitchen. 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...

NSA on Authentication Hacks (Related to SolarWinds Breach)

The NSA has published an advisory outlining how "malicious cyber actors" are "are manipulating trust in federated authentication environments to access protected data in the cloud." This is related to the SolarWinds hack I have previously written about, and represents one of the techniques the SV...

Friday Squid Blogging: Newly Identified Ichthyosaur Species Probably Ate Squid

This is a deep-diving species that "fed on small prey items such as squid." Academic paper. 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 That Dusseldorf Hospital Ransomware Attack and the Resultant Death

Wired has a detailed story about the ransomware attack on a Dusseldorf hospital, the one that resulted in an ambulance being redirected to a more distant hospital and the patient dying. The police wanted to prosecute the ransomware attackers for negligent homicide, but the details were more...

Websites Conducting Port Scans

Security researcher Charlie Belmer is reporting that commercial websites such as eBay are conducting port scans of their visitors. Looking at the list of ports they are scanning, they are looking for VNC services being run on the host, which is the same thing that was reported for bank sites. I...

Privacy vs. Surveillance in the Age of COVID-19

The trade-offs are changing: As countries around the world race to contain the pandemic, many are deploying digital surveillance tools as a means to exert social control, even turning security agency technologies on their own civilians. Health and law enforcement authorities are understandably...

A Broken Random Number Generator in AMD Microcode

Interesting story. I always recommend using a random number generator like Fortuna, even if you're using a hardware random source. It's just safer...

A Feminist Take on Information Privacy

Maria Farrell has a really interesting framing of information/device privacy: What our smartphones and relationship abusers share is that they both exert power over us in a world shaped to tip the balance in their favour, and they both work really, really hard to obscure this fact and keep us...

Protecting Yourself from Identity Theft

I don't have a lot of good news for you. The truth is there's nothing we can do to protect our data from being stolen by cybercriminals and others. Ten years ago, I could have given you all sorts of advice about using encryption, not sending information over email, securing your web connections,...

More on the Triton Malware

FireEye is releasing much more information about the Triton malware that attacks critical infrastructure. It has been discovered in more places. This is also a good -- but older -- article on Triton. We don't know who wrote it. Initial speculation was Iran; more recent speculation is Russia. Both...

PROPagate Code Injection Seen in the Wild

Last year, researchers wrote about a new Windows code injection technique called PROPagate. Last week, it was first seen in malware: This technique abuses the SetWindowsSubclass function -- a process used to install or update subclass windows running on the system -- and can be used to modify the...

Numbers Stations

On numbers stations...

Critical PGP Vulnerability

EFF is reporting that a critical vulnerability has been discovered in PGP and S/MIME. No details have been published yet, but one of the researchers wrote: We'll publish critical vulnerabilities in PGP/GPG and S/MIME email encryption on 2018-05-15 07:00 UTC. They might reveal the plaintext of...

Subway Elevators and Movie-Plot Threats

Local residents are opposing adding an elevator to a subway station because terrorists might use it to detonate a bomb. No, really. There's no actual threat analysis, only fear: "The idea that people can then ride in on the subway with a bomb or whatever and come straight up in an elevator is awf...

Estimating the Cost of Internet Insecurity

It's really hard to estimate the cost of an insecure Internet. Studies are all over the map. A methodical study by RAND is the best work I've seen at trying to put a number on this. The results are, well, all over the map: "Estimating the Global Cost of Cyber Risk: Methodology and Examples":...

New Research in Invisible Inks

It's a lot more chemistry than I understand: Invisible inks based on "smart" fluorescent materials have been shining brightly if only you could see them in the data-encryption/decryption arena lately.... But some of the materials are costly or difficult to prepare, and many of these inks remain...

Facebook Fingerprinting Photos to Prevent Revenge Porn

This is a pilot project in Australia: Individuals who have shared intimate, nude or sexual images with partners and are worried that the partner or ex-partner might distribute them without their consent can use Messenger to send the images to be "hashed." This means that the company converts the...

Daphne Caruana Galizia's Murder and the Security of WhatsApp

Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese journalist whose anti-corruption investigations exposed powerful people. She was murdered in October by a car bomb. Galizia used WhatsApp to communicate securely with her sources. Now that she is dead, the Maltese police want to break into her phone or the app...

Reaper Botnet

It's based on the Mirai code, but much more virulent: While Mirai caused widespread outages, it impacted IP cameras and internet routers by simply exploiting their weak or default passwords. The latest botnet threat, known as alternately as IoT Troop or Reaper, has evolved that strategy, using...

The Future of Forgeries

This article argues that AI technologies will make image, audio, and video forgeries much easier in the future. Combined, the trajectory of cheap, high-quality media forgeries is worrying. At the current pace of progress, it may be as little as two or three years before realistic audio forgeries...

More Incidents of AIs Going Rogue in Cybersecurity Challenges

The AI Security Institute has a new report of AI systems engaging in "unsanctioned behavior"--what I have been calling "genie behavior--while being tested on their cybersecurity capabilities. The incident stemmed from a single evaluation where agents were given a task of solving a cyber security...

Adversarial Clothing Designed to Fool Facial Recognition Systems

There are many companies manufacturing adversarial clothing designed to confuse facial recognition systems. It's a cool idea, but I worry that it's mostly security theater: "Our patterns play with that chaos, confuse algorithms and make it way harder to pin you down," he said. Bell, however, said...

Facial Recognition at Madison Square Garden

Last month, the story broke alternate link that Madison Square Garden uses facial recognition software on everyone entering the facility, and--among other groups--flags activists that oppose using facial recognition. Turns out that the system was shut off for Taylor Swift's wedding. Evan Greer--o...

Snowden Ten Years Later

In 2013 and 2014, I wrote extensively about new revelations regarding NSA surveillance based on the documents provided by Edward Snowden. But I had a more personal involvement as well. I wrote the essay below in September 2013. The New Yorker agreed to publish it, but the Guardian asked me not to...

Apple’s NeuralHash Algorithm Has Been Reverse-Engineered

Apples NeuralHash algorithm -- the one its using for client-side scanning on the iPhone -- has been reverse-engineered. Turns out it was already in iOS 14.3, and someone noticed: Early tests show that it can tolerate image resizing and compression, but not cropping or rotations. We also have the...

China Taking Control of Zero-Day Exploits

China is making sure that all newly discovered zero-day exploits are disclosed to the government. Under the new rules, anyone in China who finds a vulnerability must tell the government, which will decide what repairs to make. No information can be given to "overseas organizations or individuals"...

NFC Flaws in POS Devices and ATMs

Its a series of vulnerabilities: Josep Rodriguez, a researcher and consultant at security firm IOActive, has spent the last year digging up and reporting vulnerabilities in the so-called near-field communications reader chips used in millions of ATMs and point-of-sale systems worldwide. NFC syste...

Bizarro Banking Trojan

Bizarro is a new banking trojan that is stealing financial information and crypto wallets. …the program can be delivered in a couple of ways­ -- either via malicious links contained within spam emails, or through a trojanized app. Using these sneaky methods, trojan operators will implant the...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid-Shaped Bike Rack

Theres a new squid-shaped bike rack in Ballard, WA. 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...

Details of a Computer Banking Scam

This is a longish video that describes a profitable computer banking scam thats run out of call centers in places like India. Theres a lot of fluff about glitterbombs and the like, but the details are interesting. The scammers convince the victims to give them remote access to their computers, an...

On the Evolution of Ransomware

Good article on the evolution of ransomware: Though some researchers say that the scale and severity of ransomware attacks crossed a bright line in 2020, others describe this year as simply the next step in a gradual and, unfortunately, predictable devolution. After years spent honing their...

Impressive iPhone Exploit

This is a scarily impressive vulnerability: Earlier this year, Apple patched one of the most breathtaking iPhone vulnerabilities ever: a memory corruption bug in the iOS kernel that gave attackers remote access to the entire device­ -- over Wi-Fi, with no user interaction required at all. Oh, and...

US Cyber Command and Microsoft Are Both Disrupting TrickBot

Earlier this month, we learned that someone is disrupting the TrickBot botnet network. Over the past 10 days, someone has been launching a series of coordinated attacks designed to disrupt Trickbot, an enormous collection of more than two million malware-infected Windows PCs that are constantly...

New Bluetooth Vulnerability

Theres a new unpatched Bluetooth vulnerability: The issue is with a protocol called Cross-Transport Key Derivation or CTKD, for short. When, say, an iPhone is getting ready to pair up with Bluetooth-powered device, CTKDs role is to set up two separate authentication keys for that phone: one for a...

Ann Mitchell, Bletchley Park Cryptanalyst, Dies

Obituary...

New iPhone Zero-Day Discovered

Last year, ZecOps discovered two iPhone zero-day exploits. They will be patched in the next iOS release: Avraham declined to disclose many details about who the targets were, and did not say whether they lost any data as a result of the attacks, but said "we were a bit surprised about who was...

Vulnerability Finding Using Machine Learning

Microsoft is training a machine-learning system to find software bugs: At Microsoft, 47,000 developers generate nearly 30 thousand bugs a month. These items get stored across over 100 AzureDevOps and GitHub repositories. To better label and prioritize bugs at that scale, we couldn't just apply mo...

Facial Recognition for People Wearing Masks

The Chinese facial recognition company Hanwang claims it can recognize people wearing masks: The company now says its masked facial recognition program has reached 95 percent accuracy in lab tests, and even claims that it is more accurate in real life, where its cameras take multiple photos of a...

Emergency Surveillance During COVID-19 Crisis

Israel is using emergency surveillance powers to track people who may have COVID-19, joining China and Iran in using mass surveillance in this way. I believe pressure will increase to leverage existing corporate surveillance infrastructure for these purposes in the US and other countries. With th...

Google Receives Geofence Warrants

Sometimes it's hard to tell the corporate surveillance operations from the government ones: Google reportedly has a database called Sensorvault in which it stores location data for millions of devices going back almost a decade. The article is about geofence warrants, where the police go to...

Half a Million IoT Device Passwords Published

It's a list of easy-to-guess passwords for IoT devices on the Internet as recently as last October and November. Useful for anyone putting together a bot network: A hacker has published this week a massive list of Telnet credentials for more than 515,000 servers, home routers, and IoT Internet of...

More on Backdooring (or Not) WhatsApp

Yesterday, I blogged about a Facebook plan to backdoor WhatsApp by adding client-side scanning and filtering. It seems that I was wrong, and there are no such plans. The only source for that post was a Forbes essay by Kalev Leetaru, which links to a previous Forbes essay by him, which links to a...