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...

Privacy for Tigers

Ross Anderson has some new work: As mobile phone masts went up across the world's jungles, savannas and mountains, so did poaching. Wildlife crime syndicates can not only coordinate better but can mine growing public data sets, often of geotagged images. Privacy matters for tigers, for snow...

Friday Squid Blogging: US Army Developing 3D-Printable Battlefield Robot Squid

The next major war will be super weird. 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...

Public Hearing on IoT Risks

The US Consumer Product Safety Commission is holding hearings on IoT risks: The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission CPSC, Commission, or we will conduct a public hearing to receive information from all interested parties about potential safety issues and hazards associated with...

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...

Attack on Old ANSI Random Number Generator

Almost 20 years ago, I wrote a paper that pointed to a potential flaw in the ANSI X9.17 RNG standard. Now, new research has found that the flaw exists in some implementations of the RNG standard. Here's the research paper, the website -- complete with cute logo -- for the attack, and Matthew...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Dark Web Site Taken Down without Breaking Encryption

The US Department of Justice unraveled a dark web child-porn website, leading to the arrest of 337 people in at least 18 countries. This was all accomplished not through any backdoors in communications systems, but by analyzing the bitcoin transactions and following the money: Welcome to Video ma...

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...

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...

International Spy Museum Reopens

The International Spy Museum has reopened in Washington, DC...

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,...

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...

The 600+ Companies PayPal Shares Your Data With

One of the effects of GDPR -- the new EU General Data Protection Regulation -- is that we're all going to be learning a lot more about who collects our data and what they do with it. Consider PayPal, that just released a list of over 600 companies they share customer data with. Here's a good...

Tamper-Detection App for Android

Edward Snowden and Nathan Freitas have created an Android app that detects when it's being tampered with. The basic idea is to put the app on a second phone and put the app on or near something important, like your laptop. The app can then text you -- and also record audio and video -- when...

Fake Santa Surveillance Camera

Reka makes a "decorative Santa cam," meaning that it's not a real camera. Instead, it just gets children used to being under constant surveillance. Our Santa Cam has a cute Father Christmas and mistletoe design, and a red, flashing LED light which will make the most logical kids suspend their...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Populations Are Exploding

New research: "Global proliferation of cephalopods" Summary: Human activities have substantially changed the world's oceans in recent decades, altering marine food webs, habitats and biogeochemical processes. Cephalopods squid, cuttlefish and octopuses have a unique set of biological traits,...

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...

Security Flaw in Infineon Smart Cards and TPMs

A security flaw in Infineon smart cards and TPMs allows an attacker to recover private keys from the public keys. Basically, the key generation algorithm sometimes creates public keys that are vulnerable to Coppersmith's attack: While all keys generated with the library are much weaker than they...

Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squids Have Small Brains

New research: In this study, the optic lobe of a giant squid Architeuthis dux, male, mantle length 89 cm, which was caught by local fishermen off the northeastern coast of Taiwan, was scanned using high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging in order to examine its internal structure. It was evide...

Ethereum Hacks

The press is reporting a $32M theft of the cryptocurrency Ethereum. Like all such thefts, they're not a result of a cryptographic failure in the currencies, but instead a software vulnerability in the software surrounding the currency -- in this case, digital wallets. This is the second Ethereum...

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...

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...

Peloton Vulnerability Found and Fixed

Researchers have discovered a vulnerability in Peloton stationary bicycles, one that would give the attacker complete control over the device. The attack requires physical access to the Peloton, so its not really a practical attack. President Bidens Peloton was not in danger...

Is 85% of US Critical Infrastructure in Private Hands?

Most US critical infrastructure is run by private corporations. This has major security implications, because its putting a random power company in -- say -- Ohio -- up against the Russian cybercommand, which isnt a fair fight. When this problem is discussed, people regularly quote the statistic...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Cartoon

Squid ink. 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...

More SolarWinds News

Microsoft analyzed details of the SolarWinds attack: Microsoft and FireEye only detected the Sunburst or Solorigate malware in December, but Crowdstrike reported this month that another related piece of malware, Sunspot, was deployed in September 2019, at the time hackers breached SolarWinds...

Changes in WhatsApp’s Privacy Policy

If youre a WhatsApp user, pay attention to the changes in the privacy policy that youre being forced to agree with. In 2016, WhatsApp gave users a one-time ability to opt out of having account data turned over to Facebook. Now, an updated privacy policy is changing that. Come next month, users wi...