"Two Stage" BMW Theft Attempt

Modern cars have alarm systems that automatically connect to a remote call center. This makes cars harder to steal, since tripping the alarm causes a quick response. This article describes a theft attempt that tried to neutralize that security system. In the first attack, the thieves just disable...

Manipulative Social Media Practices

The Norwegian Consumer Council just published an excellent report on the deceptive practices tech companies use to trick people into giving up their privacy. From the executive summary: Facebook and Google have privacy intrusive defaults, where users who want the privacy friendly option have to g...

Secure Speculative Execution

We're starting to see research into designing speculative execution systems that avoid Spectre- and Meltdown-like security problems. Here's one. I don't know if this particular design secure. My guess is that we're going to see several iterations of design and attack before we settle on something...

Perverse Vulnerability from Interaction between 2-Factor Authentication and iOS AutoFill

Apple is rolling out an iOS security usability feature called Security code AutoFill. The basic idea is that the OS scans incoming SMS messages for security codes and suggests them in AutoFill, so that people can use them without having to memorize or type them. Sounds like a really good idea, bu...

Tracing Stolen Bitcoin

Ross Anderson has a really interesting paper on tracing stolen bitcoin. From a blog post: Previous attempts to track tainted coins had used either the "poison" or the "haircut" method. Suppose I open a new address and pay into it three stolen bitcoin followed by seven freshly-mined ones. Then und...

Fingerprinting Digital Documents

In this era of electronic leakers, remember that zero-width spaces and homoglyph substitution can fingerprint individual instances of files...

NSA Abandons "About" Searches

Earlier this month, the NSA said that it would no longer conduct "about" searches of bulk communications data. This was the practice of collecting the communications of Americans based on keywords and phrases in the contents of the messages, not based on who they were from or to. The NSA's own...

Security of St. Jude Pacemakers

This is a good summary article about the horrible security of St. Jude pacemakers, and the history of the company not doing anything about it...

Security Vulnerability in a Voting System

It's a vulnerability that allows someone to recover the order of ballots cast, newly exploited with AI tools. Nearly four years since the original vulnerability was disclosed, I was still able to use it to analyze voter behavior in Georgia one of the 21 states that uses affected scanners in the...

AI Data Centers and the Concentration of Wealth

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared inThe Guardian. Opposition to AI data centers has emerged as a primary theme in US politics, one that--surprisingly--doesn't fall along party lines. We applaud people coming together for constructive debate on any issue, and...

France to Stop Certifying Non-Quantum-Safe Encryption

France is accelerating its transition to post-quantum encryption: France's cybersecurity agency ANSSI said on Tuesday it would stop certifying security products that lack quantum-resistant encryption, a move that will force government bodies and critical operators to shift away from older systems...

Rowhammer Attack Against NVIDIA Chips

A new rowhammer attack gives complete control of NVIDIA CPUs. On Thursday, two research teams, working independently of each other, demonstrated attacks against two cards from Nvidia’s Ampere generation that take GPU rowhammering into new--­and potentially much more consequential--­territory: GDD...

Perfectl Malware

Perfectl in an impressive piece of malware: The malware has been circulating since at least 2021. It gets installed by exploiting more than 20,000 common misconfigurations, a capability that may make millions of machines connected to the Internet potential targets, researchers from Aqua Security...

The UK Bans Default Passwords

The UK is the first country to ban default passwords on IoT devices. On Monday, the United Kingdom became the first country in the world to ban default guessable usernames and passwords from these IoT devices. Unique passwords installed by default are still permitted. The Product Security and...

Friday Squid Blogging: The Geopolitics of Eating Squid

New York Times op-ed on the Chinese dominance of the squid industry: Chinas domination in seafood has raised deep concerns among American fishermen, policymakers and human rights activists. They warn that China is expanding its maritime reach in ways that are putting domestic fishermen around the...

Ransomware Gang Files SEC Complaint

A ransomware gang, annoyed at not being paid, filed an SEC complaint against its victim for not disclosing its security breach within the required four days. This is over the top, but is just another example of the extreme pressure ransomware gangs put on companies after seizing their data. Gangs...

Hacking Trespass Law

This article talks about public land in the US that is completely surrounded by private land, which in some cases makes it inaccessible to the public. But theres a hack: Some hunters have long believed, however, that the publicly owned parcels on Elk Mountain can be legally reached using a practi...

Bypassing Two-Factor Authentication

These techniques are not new, but theyre increasingly popular: …some forms of MFA are stronger than others, and recent events show that these weaker forms arent much of a hurdle for some hackers to clear. In the past few months, suspected script kiddies like the Lapsus$ data extortion gang and...

More Military Cryptanalytics, Part III

Late last year, the NSA declassified and released a redacted version of Lambros D. Callimahoss Military Cryptanalytics, Part III. We just got most of the index. Its hard to believe that there are any real secrets left in this 44-year-old volume...

Surveillance of the Internet Backbone

Vice has an article about how data brokers sell access to the Internet backbone. This is netflow data. Its useful for cybersecurity forensics, but can also be used for things like tracing VPN activity. At a high level, netflow data creates a picture of traffic flow and volume across a network. It...

The European Space Agency Launches Hackable Satellite

Of course this is hackable: A sophisticated telecommunications satellite that can be completely repurposed while in space has launched. … Because the satellite can be reprogrammed in orbit, it can respond to changing demands during its lifetime. … The satellite can detect and characterise any rog...

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...

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...

Ransomware Profitability

Analyzing cryptocurrency data, a research group has estimated a lower-bound on 2020 ransomware revenue: $350 million, four times more than in 2019. Based on the companys data, among last years top earners, there were groups like Ryuk, Maze now-defunct, Doppelpaymer, Netwalker disrupted by...

Dutch Insider Attack on COVID-19 Data

Insider data theft: Dutch police have arrested two individuals on Friday for allegedly selling data from the Dutch health ministrys COVID-19 systems on the criminal underground. … According to Verlaan, the two suspects worked in DDG call centers, where they had access to official Dutch government...

On US Capitol Security — By Someone Who Manages Arena-Rock-Concert Security

Smart commentary: …I was floored on Wednesday when, glued to my television, I saw police in some areas of the U.S. Capitol using little more than those same mobile gates I had ­ the ones that look like bike racks that can hook together ­ to try to keep the crowds away from sensitive areas and,...

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...

Check Washing

I cant believe that check washing is still a thing: "Check washing" is a practice where thieves break into mailboxes or otherwise steal mail, find envelopes with checks, then use special solvents to remove the information on that check except for the signature and then change the payee and the...

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...

NSA Advisory on Chinese Government Hacking

The NSA released an advisory listing the top twenty-five known vulnerabilities currently being exploited by Chinese nation-state attackers. This advisory provides Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures CVEs known to be recently leveraged, or scanned-for, by Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors to...

Interesting Attack on the EMV Smartcard Payment Standard

Its complicated, but its basically a man-in-the-middle attack that involves two smartphones. The first phone reads the actual smartcard, and then forwards the required information to a second phone. That second phone actually conducts the transaction on the POS terminal. That second phone is able...

Friday Squid Blogging: Rhode Island's State Appetizer Is Calamari

Rhode Island has an official state appetizer, and it's calamari. Who knew? 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...

Copying a Key by Listening to It in Action

Researchers are using recordings of keys being used in locks to create copies. Once they have a key-insertion audio file, SpiKey's inference software gets to work filtering the signal to reveal the strong, metallic clicks as key ridges hit the lock's pins and you can hear those filtered clicks...

Fake Stories in Real News Sites

Fireeye is reporting that a hacking group called Ghostwriter broke into the content management systems of Eastern European news sites to plant fake stories. From a Wired story: The propagandists have created and disseminated disinformation since at least March 2017, with a focus on undermining NA...

New Hacking-for-Hire Company in India

Citizen Lab has a new report on Dark Basin, a large hacking-for-hire company in India. Key Findings: Dark Basin is a hack-for-hire group that has targeted thousands of individuals and hundreds of institutions on six continents. Targets include advocacy groups and journalists, elected and senior...

Password Changing After a Breach

This study shows that most people don't change their passwords after a breach, and if they do they change it to a weaker password. Abstract: To protect against misuse of passwords compromised in a breach, consumers should promptly change affected passwords and any similar passwords on other...

Securing Internet Videoconferencing Apps: Zoom and Others

The NSA just published a survey of video conferencing apps. So did Mozilla. Zoom is on the good list, with some caveats. The company has done a lot of work addressing previous security concerns. It still has a bit to go on end-to-end encryption. Matthew Green looked at this. Zoom does offer...

Automatic Instacart Bots

Instacart is taking legal action against bots that automatically place orders: Before it closed, to use Cartdash users first selected what items they want from Instacart as normal. Once that was done, they had to provide Cartdash with their Instacart email address, password, mobile number, tip...

Global Surveillance in the Wake of COVID-19

OneZero is tracking thirty countries around the world who are implementing surveillance programs in the wake of COVID-19: The most common form of surveillance implemented to battle the pandemic is the use of smartphone location data, which can track population-level movement down to enforcing...

Hacking Voice Assistants with Ultrasonic Waves

I previously wrote about hacking voice assistants with lasers. Turns you can do much the same thing with ultrasonic waves: Voice assistants -- the demo targeted Siri, Google Assistant, and Bixby -- are designed to respond when they detect the owner's voice after noticing a trigger phrase such as...

More on Crypto AG

One follow-on to the story of Crypto AG being owned by the CIA: this interview with a Washington Post reporter. The whole thing is worth reading or listening to, but I was struck by these two quotes at the end: ...in South America, for instance, many of the governments that were using Crypto...

Hacking School Surveillance Systems

Lance Vick suggesting that students hack their schools' surveillance systems. "This is an ethical minefield that I feel students would be well within their rights to challenge, and if needed, undermine," he said. Of course, there are a lot more laws in place against this sort of thing than there...

Disabling Security Cameras with Lasers

There's a really interesting video of protesters in Hong Kong using some sort of laser to disable security cameras. I know nothing more about the technologies involved...

Three-Rotor Enigma Machine Up for Auction Today

Sotheby's is auctioning off a working, I think three-rotor Enigma machine today. They're expecting it to sell for about $200K. I have an Enigma, but it's missing the rotors...

Cell Phone Security and Heads of State

Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that the Russians and the Chinese were eavesdropping on President Donald Trump's personal cell phone and using the information gleaned to better influence his behavior. This should surprise no one. Security experts have been talking about the potenti...

Security Vulnerability in Internet-Connected Construction Cranes

This seems bad: The F25 software was found to contain a capture replay vulnerability -- basically an attacker would be able to eavesdrop on radio transmissions between the crane and the controller, and then send their own spoofed commands over the air to seize control of the crane. "These devices...

Security Vulnerabilities in US Weapons Systems

The US Government Accounting Office just published a new report: "Weapons Systems Cyber Security: DOD Just Beginning to Grapple with Scale of Vulnerabilities" summary here. The upshot won't be a surprise to any of my regular readers: they're vulnerable. From the summary: Automation and connectivi...

Helen Nissenbaum on Data Privacy and Consent

This is a fantastic Q with Cornell Tech Professor Helen Nissenbaum on data privacy and why it's wrong to focus on consent. I'm not going to pull a quote, because you should read the whole thing...

Hacking Police Bodycams

Suprising no one, the security of police bodycams is terrible. Mitchell even realized that because he can remotely access device storage on models like the Fire Cam OnCall, an attacker could potentially plant malware on some of the cameras. Then, when the camera connects to a PC for syncing, it...