Mysterious Macintosh Malware

This is weird: Once an hour, infected Macs check a control server to see if there are any new commands the malware should run or binaries to execute. So far, however, researchers have yet to observe delivery of any payload on any of the infected 30,000 machines, leaving the malwares ultimate goal...

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...

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...

The 2020 Workshop on Economics and Information Security (WEIS)

The workshop on Economics and Information Security is always an interesting conference. This year, it will be online. Heres the program. Registration is free...

New Report on Police Decryption Capabilities

There is a new report on police decryption capabilities: specifically, mobile device forensic tools MDFTs. Short summary: its not just the FBI that can do it. This report documents the widespread adoption of MDFTs by law enforcement in the United States. Based on 110 public records requests to...

Friday Squid Blogging: New SQUID

There's a new SQUID: A new device that relies on flowing clouds of ultracold atoms promises potential tests of the intersection between the weirdness of the quantum world and the familiarity of the macroscopic world we experience every day. The atomtronic Superconducting QUantum Interference Devi...

Ramsey Malware

A new malware, called Ramsey, can jump air gaps: ESET said they've been able to track down three different versions of the Ramsay malware, one compiled in September 2019 Ramsay v1, and two others in early and late March 2020 Ramsay v2.a and v2.b. Each version was different and infected victims...

On Marcus Hutchins

Long and nuanced story about Marcus Hutchins, the British hacker who wrote most of the Kronos malware and also stopped WannaCry in real time. Well worth reading...

Bug Bounty Programs Are Being Used to Buy Silence

Investigative report on how commercial bug-bounty programs like HackerOne, Bugcrowd, and SynAck are being used to silence researchers: Used properly, bug bounty platforms connect security researchers with organizations wanting extra scrutiny. In exchange for reporting a security flaw, the...

Work-from-Home Security Advice

SANS has made freely available its "Work-from-Home Awareness Kit." When I think about how COVID-19's security measures are affecting organizational networks, I see several interrelated problems: One, employees are working from their home networks and sometimes from their home computers. These...

TSA Admits Liquid Ban Is Security Theater

The TSA is allowing people to bring larger bottles of hand sanitizer with them on airplanes: Passengers will now be allowed to travel with containers of liquid hand sanitizer up to 12 ounces. However, the agency cautioned that the shift could mean slightly longer waits at checkpoint because the...

The Whisper Secret-Sharing App Exposed Locations

This is a big deal: Whisper, the secret-sharing app that called itself the "safest place on the Internet," left years of users' most intimate confessions exposed on the Web tied to their age, location and other details, raising alarm among cybersecurity researchers that users could have been...

Crypto AG Was Owned by the CIA

The Swiss cryptography firm Crypto AG sold equipment to governments and militaries around the world for decades after World War II. They were owned by the CIA: But what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West...

Modern Mass Surveillance: Identify, Correlate, Discriminate

Communities across the United States are starting to ban facial recognition technologies. In May of last year, San Francisco banned facial recognition; the neighboring city of Oakland soon followed, as did Somerville and Brookline in Massachusetts a statewide ban may follow. In December, San Dieg...

Technical Report of the Bezos Phone Hack

Motherboard obtained and published the technical report on the hack of Jeff Bezos's phone, which is being attributed to Saudi Arabia, specifically to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. ...investigators set up a secure lab to examine the phone and its artifacts and spent two days poring over the...

RSA-240 Factored

This just in: We are pleased to announce the factorization of RSA-240, from RSA's challenge list, and the computation of a discrete logarithm of the same size 795 bits: RSA-240 = 12462036678171878406583504460810659043482037465167880575481878888328...

Locked Computers

This short video explains why computers regularly came with physical locks in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The one thing the video doesn't talk about is RAM theft. When RAM was expensive, stealing it was a problem...

Towards an Information Operations Kill Chain

Cyberattacks don't magically happen; they involve a series of steps. And far from being helpless, defenders can disrupt the attack at any of those steps. This framing has led to something called the "cybersecurity kill chain": a way of thinking about cyber defense in terms of disrupting the...

Oracle and "Responsible Disclosure"

I've been writing about "responsible disclosure" for over a decade; here's an essay from 2007. Basically, it's a tacit agreement between researchers and software vendors. Researchers agree to withhold their work until software companies fix the vulnerabilities, and software vendors agree not to...

New IoT Security Regulations

Due to ever-evolving technological advances, manufacturers are connecting consumer goods­ -- from toys to light bulbs to major appliances­ -- to the Internet at breakneck speeds. This is the Internet of Things, and it's a security nightmare. The Internet of Things fuses products with communicatio...

Security of Solid-State-Drive Encryption

Interesting research: "Self-encrypting deception: weaknesses in the encryption of solid state drives SSDs": Abstract: We have analyzed the hardware full-disk encryption of several SSDs by reverse engineering their firmware. In theory, the security guarantees offered by hardware encryption are...

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...

Airline Ticket Fraud

New research: "Leaving on a jet plane: the trade in fraudulently obtained airline tickets:" Abstract: Every day, hundreds of people fly on airline tickets that have been obtained fraudulently. This crime script analysis provides an overview of the trade in these tickets, drawing on interviews wit...

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...

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...

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,...

Profile of Reality Winner

New York Magazine published an excellent profile of the single-document leaker Reality Winner...

Amazon Creates Classified US Cloud

Amazon has a cloud for US classified data. The physical and computer requirements for handling classified information are considerable, both in terms of technology and procedure. I am surprised that a company with no experience dealing with classified data was able to do it...

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...

The Women of Bletchley Park

Really good article about the women who worked at Bletchley Park during World War II, breaking German Enigma-encrypted messages...

Lattice-Based Cryptosystems and Quantum Cryptanalysis

Quantum computers are probably coming, though we dont know when--and when they arrive, they will, most likely, be able to break our standard public-key cryptography algorithms. In anticipation of this possibility, cryptographers have been working on quantum-resistant public-key algorithms. The...

VPNs and Trust

TorrentFreak surveyed nineteen VPN providers, asking them questions about their privacy practices: what data they keep, how they respond to court order, what country they are incorporated in, and so on. Most interesting to me is the home countries of these companies. Express VPN is incorporated i...

New Disk Wiping Malware Targets Israel

Apostle seems to be a new strain of malware that destroys data. In a post published Tuesday, SentinelOne researchers said they assessed with high confidence that based on the code and the servers Apostle reported to, the malware was being used by a newly discovered group with ties to the Iranian...

Apple Censorship and Surveillance in China

Good investigative reporting on how Apple is participating in and assisting with Chinese censorship and surveillance...

Ransomware Shuts Down US Pipeline

This is a major story: a probably Russian cybercrime group called DarkSide shut down the Colonial Pipeline in a ransomware attack. The pipeline supplies much of the East Coast. This is the new and improved ransomware attack: the hackers stole nearly 100 gig of data, and are threatening to publish...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m keynoting the all-virtual RSA Conference 2021, May 17-20, 2021. I’m keynoting the 5th International Symposium on Cyber Security Cryptology and Machine Learning via Zoom, July 8-9, 2021. I’ll be speaking at an Informa event on...

On Not Fixing Old Vulnerabilities

How is this even possible? …26% of companies Positive Technologies tested were vulnerable to WannaCry, which was a threat years ago, and some even vulnerable to Heartbleed. "The most frequent vulnerabilities detected during automated assessment date back to 2013-­2017, which indicates a lack of...

Friday Squid Blogging: Live Giant Squid Found in Japan

A giant squid was found alive in the port of Izumo, Japan. Not a lot of news, just this Twitter thread with a couple of videos. If confirmed, I believe this will be the THIRD time EVER a giant squid was filmed alive! As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in...

Zodiac Killer Cipher Solved

The SF Chronicle is reporting more details here, and the FBI is confirming, that a Melbourne mathematician and team has decrypted the 1969 message sent by the Zodiac Killer to the newspaper. Theres no paper yet, but there are a bunch of details in the news articles. Heres an interview with one of...

Indistinguishability Obfuscation

Quanta magazine recently published a breathless article on indistinguishability obfuscation -- calling it the "crown jewel of cryptography" -- and saying that it had finally been achieved, based on a recently published paper. I want to add some caveats to the discussion. Basically, obfuscation...

“Privacy Nutrition Labels” in Apple’s App Store

Apple will start requiring standardized privacy labels for apps in its app store, starting in December: Apple allows data disclosure to be optional if all of the following conditions apply: if its not used for tracking, advertising or marketing; if its not shared with a data broker; if collection...

Friday Squid Blogging: Saving the Humboldt Squid

Genetic research finds the Humboldt squid is vulnerable to overfishing. 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...

Documented Death from a Ransomware Attack

A Dusseldorf woman died when a ransomware attack against a hospital forced her to be taken to a different hospital in another city. I think this is the first documented case of a cyberattack causing a fatality. UK hospitals had to redirect patients during the 2017 WannaCry ransomware attack, but...

Friday Squid Blogging: Morning Squid

Asa ika means "morning squid" in Japanese. 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...

Attack Against PC Thunderbolt Port

The attack requires physical access to the computer, but it's pretty devastating: On Thunderbolt-enabled Windows or Linux PCs manufactured before 2019, his technique can bypass the login screen of a sleeping or locked computer -- and even its hard disk encryption -- to gain full access to the...

Contact Tracing COVID-19 Infections via Smartphone Apps

Google and Apple have announced a joint project to create a privacy-preserving COVID-19 contact tracing app. Details, such as we have them, are here. It's similar to the app being developed at MIT, and similar to others being described and developed elsewhere. It's nice seeing the privacy...

Voatz Internet Voting App Is Insecure

This paper describes the flaws in the Voatz Internet voting app: "The Ballot is Busted Before the Blockchain: A Security Analysis of Voatz, the First Internet Voting Application Used in U.S. Federal Elections." Abstract: In the 2018 midterm elections, West Virginia became the first state in the...