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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Underwater Robot Uses Squid-Like Propulsion

This is neat: By generating powerful streams of water, UCSDs squid-like robot can swim untethered. The "squidbot" carries its own power source, and has the room to hold more, including a sensor or camera for underwater exploration. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the...

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...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at the Cybersecurity Law & Policy Scholars Virtual Conference on September 17, 2020. I’m keynoting the Canadian Internet Registration Authority’s online symposium, Canadians Connected, on Wednesday, September 23, 2020...

Drovorub Malware

The NSA and FBI have jointly disclosed Drovorub, a Russian malware suite that targets Linux. Detailed advisory. Fact sheet. News articles. Reddit thread...

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...

Internet Voting in Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico is considered allowing for Internet voting. I have joined a group of security experts in a letter opposing the bill. Cybersecurity experts agree that under current technology, no practically proven method exists to securely, verifiably, or privately return voted materials over the...

Russia Is Trying to Tap Transatlantic Cables

The Times of London is reporting that Russian agents are in Ireland probing transatlantic communications cables. Ireland is the landing point for undersea cables which carry internet traffic between America, Britain and Europe. The cables enable millions of people to communicate and allow financi...

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...

Smartphone Election in Washington State

This year: King County voters will be able to use their name and birthdate to log in to a Web portal through the Internet browser on their phones, says Bryan Finney, the CEO of Democracy Live, the Seattle-based voting company providing the technology. Once voters have completed their ballots, the...

Facebook Plans on Backdooring WhatsApp

This article points out that Facebook's planned content moderation scheme will result in an encryption backdoor into WhatsApp: In Facebook's vision, the actual end-to-end encryption client itself such as WhatsApp will include embedded content moderation and blacklist filtering algorithms. These...

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...

Ghidra: NSA's Reverse-Engineering Tool

Last month, the NSA released Ghidra, a software reverse-engineering tool. Early reactions are uniformly positive. Three news articles...

Consumer Reports Reviews Wireless Home-Security Cameras

Consumer Reports is starting to evaluate the security of IoT devices. As part of that, it's reviewing wireless home-security cameras. It found significant security vulnerabilities in D-Link cameras: In contrast, D-Link doesn't store video from the DCS-2630L in the cloud. Instead, the camera has i...

AES Resulted in a $250-Billion Economic Benefit

NIST has released a new study concluding that the AES encryption standard has resulted in a $250-billion worldwide economic benefit over the past 20 years. I have no idea how to even begin to assess the quality of the study and its conclusions -- it's all in the 150-page report, though -- but I d...

NotPetya

Andy Greenberg wrote a fascinating account of the Russian NotPetya worm, with an emphasis on its effects on the company Maersk. BoingBoing post...

Hacking the McDonald's Monopoly Sweepstakes

Long and interesting story -- now two decades old -- of massive fraud perpetrated against the McDonald's Monopoly sweepstakes. The central fraudster was the person in charge of securing the winning tickets...

Gas Pump Hack

This is weird: Police in Detroit are looking for two suspects who allegedly managed to hack a gas pump and steal over 600 gallons of gasoline, valued at about $1,800. The theft took place in the middle of the day and went on for about 90 minutes, with the gas station attendant unable to thwart th...

Facial Recognition Is Coming to Retail

Summary article...

Detecting Adblocker Blockers

Interesting research on the prevalence of adblock blockers: "Measuring and Disrupting Anti-Adblockers Using Differential Execution Analysis": Abstract: Millions of people use adblockers to remove intrusive and malicious ads as well as protect themselves against tracking and pervasive surveillance...

Apple FaceID Hacked

It only took a week: On Friday, Vietnamese security firm Bkav released a blog post and video showing that -- by all appearances -- they'd cracked FaceID with a composite mask of 3-D-printed plastic, silicone, makeup, and simple paper cutouts, which in combination tricked an iPhone X into unlockin...

Me on Restaurant Surveillance Technology

I attended the National Restaurant Association exposition in Chicago earlier this year, and looked at all the ways modern restaurant IT is spying on people. But there's also a fundamentally creepy aspect to much of this. One of the prime ways to increase value for your brand is to use the Interne...

Tainted Leaks

Last year, I wrote about the potential for doxers to alter documents before they leaked them. It was a theoretical threat when I wrote it, but now Citizen Lab has documented this technique in the wild: This report describes an extensive Russia-linked phishing and disinformation campaign. It...

Did North Korea Write WannaCry?

The New York Times is reporting that evidence is pointing to North Korea as the author of the WannaCry ransomware. Note that there is no proof at this time, although it would not surprise me if the NSA knows the origins of this malware attack...

What Anthropic’s Mythos Means for the Future of Cybersecurity

Two weeks ago, Anthropic announced that its new model, Claude Mythos Preview, can autonomously find and weaponize software vulnerabilities, turning them into working exploits without expert guidance. These were vulnerabilities in key software like operating systems and internet infrastructure tha...

New Mexico’s Meta Ruling and Encryption

Mike Masnick points out that the recent New Mexico court ruling against Meta has some bad implications for end-to-end encryption, and security in general: If the "design choices create liability" framework seems worrying in the abstract, the New Mexico case provides a concrete example of where it...

New Way to Covertly Track Android Users

Researchers have discovered a new way to covertly track Android users. Both Meta and Yandex were using it, but have suddenly stopped now that they have been caught. The details are interesting, and worth reading in detail: Tracking code that Meta and Russia-based Yandex embed into millions of...

LLMs’ Data-Control Path Insecurity

Back in the 1960s, if you played a 2,600Hz tone into an AT&T pay phone, you could make calls without paying. A phone hacker named John Draper noticed that the plastic whistle that came free in a box of Captain Crunch cereal worked to make the right sound. That became his hacker name, and everyone...

Friday Squid Blogging: On the Ugliness of Squid Fishing

And seafood in general: A squid ship is a bustling, bright, messy place. The scene on deck looks like a mechanics garage where an oil change has gone terribly wrong. Scores of fishing lines extend into the water, each bearing specialized hooks operated by automated reels. When they pull a squid o...

New NSA Information from (and About) Snowden

Interesting article about the Snowden documents, including comments from former Guardian editor Ewen MacAskill MacAskill, who shared the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras for their journalistic work on the Snowden files, retired from The Guardian in 2018. He...

ROT8000

ROT8000 is the Unicode equivalent of ROT13. Whats clever about it is that normal English looks like Chinese, and not like ciphertext to a typical Westerner, that is...

Vulnerabilities in Weapons Systems

"If you think any of these systems are going to work as expected in wartime, youre fooling yourself." That was Bruces response at a conference hosted by US Transportation Command in 2017, after learning that their computerized logistical systems were mostly unclassified and on the Internet. That...

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...

System Update: New Android Malware

Researchers have discovered a new Android app called "System Update" that is a sophisticated Remote-Access Trojan RAT. From a news article: The broad range of data that this sneaky little bastard is capable of stealing is pretty horrifying. It includes: instant messenger messages and database...

Security Analysis of Apple’s “Find My…” Protocol

Interesting research: "Who Can Find My Devices? Security and Privacy of Apples Crowd-Sourced Bluetooth Location Tracking System": Abstract: Overnight, Apple has turned its hundreds-of-million-device ecosystem into the worlds largest crowd-sourced location tracking network called offline finding O...

Oblivious DNS-over-HTTPS

This new protocol, called Oblivious DNS-over-HTTPS ODoH, hides the websites you visit from your ISP. Heres how it works: ODoH wraps a layer of encryption around the DNS query and passes it through a proxy server, which acts as a go-between the internet user and the website they want to visit...

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...

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...

Another Story of Bad 1970s Encryption

This one is from the Netherlands. It seems to be clever cryptanalysis rather than a backdoor. The Dutch intelligence service has been able to read encrypted communications from dozens of countries since the late 1970s thanks to a microchip, according to research by de Volkskrant on Thursday. The...

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...

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...

Companies that Scrape Your Email

Motherboard has a long article on apps -- Edison, Slice, and Cleanfox -- that spy on your email by scraping your screen, and then sell that information to others: Some of the companies listed in the J.P. Morgan document sell data sourced from "personal inboxes," the document adds. A spokesperson...

U.S. Department of Interior Grounding All Drones

The Department of Interior is grounding all non-emergency drones due to security concerns: The order comes amid a spate of warnings and bans at multiple government agencies, including the Department of Defense, about possible vulnerabilities in Chinese-made drone systems that could be allowing...

GPS Manipulation

Long article on the manipulation of GPS in Shanghai. It seems not to be some Chinese military program, but ships who are stealing sand. The Shanghai "crop circles," which somehow spoof each vessel to a different false location, are something new. "I'm still puzzled by this," says Humphreys. "I...

Cybersecurity for the Public Interest

The Crypto Wars have been waging off-and-on for a quarter-century. On one side is law enforcement, which wants to be able to break encryption, to access devices and communications of terrorists and criminals. On the other are almost every cryptographer and computer security expert, repeatedly...

Bad Consumer Security Advice

There are lots of articles about there telling people how to better secure their computers and online accounts. While I agree with some of it, this article contains some particularly bad advice: 1. Never, ever, ever use public unsecured Wi-Fi such as the Wi-Fi in a café, hotel or airport. To...

More on the Five Eyes Statement on Encryption and Backdoors

Earlier this month, I wrote about a statement by the Five Eyes countries about encryption and back doors. Short summary: they like them. One of the weird things about the statement is that it was clearly written from a law-enforcement perspective, though we normally think of the Five Eyes as a...