Bank Card "Master Key" Stolen

South Africa's Postbank experienced a catastrophic security failure. The bank's master PIN key was stolen, forcing it to cancel and replace 12 million bank cards. The breach resulted from the printing of the bank's encrypted master key in plain, unencrypted digital language at the Postbank's old...

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...

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...

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...

Ransomware Now Leaking Stolen Documents

Originally, ransomware didn't involve any data theft. Malware would encrypt the data on your computer, and demand a ransom for the encryption key. Now ransomware is increasingly involving both encryption and exfiltration. Brian Krebs wrote about this in December. It's a further incentive for the...

Dark Web Hosting Provider Hacked

Daniel's Hosting, which hosts about 7,600 dark web portals for free, has been hacked and is down. It's unclear when, or if, it will be back up...

Cybersecurity Law Casebook

Robert Chesney teaches cybersecurity at the University of Texas School of Law. He recently published a fantastic casebook, which is a good source for anyone studying this...

A New Clue for the Kryptos Sculpture

Jim Sanborn, who designed the Kryptos sculpture in a CIA courtyard, has released another clue to the still-unsolved part 4. I think he's getting tired of waiting. Did we mention Mr. Sanborn is 74? Holding on to one of the world's most enticing secrets can be stressful. Some would-be codebreakers...

Another Side Channel in Intel Chips

Not that serious, but interesting: In late 2011, Intel introduced a performance enhancement to its line of server processors that allowed network cards and other peripherals to connect directly to a CPU's last-level cache, rather than following the standard and significantly longer path through t...

Exploiting GDPR to Get Private Information

A researcher abused the GDPR to get information on his fiancee: It is one of the first tests of its kind to exploit the EU's General Data Protection Regulation GDPR, which came into force in May 2018. The law shortened the time organisations had to respond to data requests, added new types of...

Fooling Automated Surveillance Cameras with Patchwork Color Printout

Nice bit of adversarial machine learning. The image from this news article is most of what you need to know, but here's the research paper...

Excellent Analysis of the Boeing 737 Max Software Problems

This is the best analysis of the software causes of the Boeing 737 MAX disasters that I have read. Technically this is safety and not security; there was no attacker. But the fields are closely related and there are a lot of lessons for IoT security -- and the security of complex socio-technical...

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...

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...

Recovering Keyboard Inputs through Thermal Imaging

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, are able to recover user passwords by way of thermal imaging. The tech is pretty straightforward, but it's interesting to think about the types of scenarios in which it might be pulled off. Abstract: As a warm-blooded mammalian species, we huma...

Domain Name Stealing at Gunpoint

I missed this story when it came around last year: someone tried to steal a domain name at gunpoint. He was just sentenced to 20 years in jail...

The Habituation of Security Warnings

We all know that it happens: when we see a security warning too often -- and without effect -- we start tuning it out. A new paper uses fMRI, eye tracking, and field studies to prove it. EDITED TO ADD 6/6: This blog post summarizes the findings...

Friday Squid Blogging: Do Cephalopods Contain Alien DNA?

Maybe not DNA, but biological somethings. "Cause of Cambrian explosion -- Terrestrial or Cosmic?": Abstract: We review the salient evidence consistent with or predicted by the Hoyle-Wickramasinghe H-W thesis of Cometary Cosmic Biology. Much of this physical and biological evidence is...

Supermarket Shoplifting

The rise of self-checkout has caused a corresponding rise in shoplifting...

Sending Inaudible Commands to Voice Assistants

Researchers have demonstrated the ability to send inaudible commands to voice assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant. Over the last two years, researchers in China and the United States have begun demonstrating that they can send hidden commands that are undetectable to the human ear t...

Computer Alarm that Triggers When Lid Is Opened

"Do Not Disturb" is a Macintosh app that send an alert when the lid is opened. The idea is to detect computer tampering. Wired article: Do Not Disturb goes a step further than just the push notification. Using the Do Not Disturb iOS app, a notified user can send themselves a picture snapped with...

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...

Hijacking Computers for Cryptocurrency Mining

Interesting paper "A first look at browser-based cryptojacking": Abstract: In this paper, we examine the recent trend towards in-browser mining of cryptocurrencies; in particular, the mining of Monero through Coinhive and similar code-bases. In this model, a user visiting a website will download ...

New DDoS Reflection-Attack Variant

This is worrisome: DDoS vandals have long intensified their attacks by sending a small number of specially designed data packets to publicly available services. The services then unwittingly respond by sending a much larger number of unwanted packets to a target. The best known vectors for these...

Fingerprinting Digital Documents

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

Mozilla's Guide to Privacy-Aware Christmas Shopping

Mozilla reviews the privacy practices of Internet-connected toys, home accessories, exercise equipment, and more...

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...

Forbes Names Beyond Fear as One of the "13 Books Technology Executives Should Have On Their Shelves"

It's a weird list...

Human Rights Watch Needs an Information Security Director

I'm sure it pays less than the industry average, and the stakes are much higher than the average. But if you want to be a Director of Information Security that makes a difference, Human Rights Watch is hiring...

Mythos and Cybersecurity

Last week, Anthropic pulled back the curtain on Claude Mythos Preview, an AI model so capable at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities that the company decided it was too dangerous to release to the public. Instead, access has been restricted to roughly 50 organizations--Microsoft, Appl...

LLMs and Tool Use

Last March, just two weeks after GPT-4 was released, researchers at Microsoft quietly announced a plan to compile millions of APIs--tools that can do everything from ordering a pizza to solving physics equations to controlling the TV in your living room--into a compendium that would be made...

You Can’t Rush Post-Quantum-Computing Cryptography Standards

I just read an article complaining that NIST is taking too long in finalizing its post-quantum-computing cryptography standards. This process has been going on since 2016, and since that time there has been a huge increase in quantum technology and an equally large increase in quantum understandi...

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...

A New Cybersecurity “Social Contract”

The US National Cyber Director Chris Inglis wrote an essay outlining a new social contract for the cyber age: The United States needs a new social contract for the digital age -- one that meaningfully alters the relationship between public and private sectors and proposes a new set of obligations...

Nation-State Attacker of Telecommunications Networks

Someone has been hacking telecommunications networks around the world: LightBasin aka UNC1945 is an activity cluster that has been consistently targeting the telecommunications sector at a global scale since at least 2016, leveraging custom tools and an in-depth knowledge of telecommunications...

Friday Squid Blogging: Ram’s Horn Squid Shells

You can find rams horn squid shells on beaches in Texas and presumably elsewhere. 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...

New Spectre-Like Attacks

Theres new research that demonstrates security vulnerabilities in all of the AMD and Intel chips with micro-op caches, including the ones that were specifically engineered to be resistant to the Spectre/Meltdown attacks of three years ago. Details: The new line of attacks exploits the micro-op...

Biden Administration Imposes Sanctions on Russia for SolarWinds

On April 15, the Biden administration both formally attributed the SolarWinds espionage campaign to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service SVR, and imposed a series of sanctions designed to punish the country for the attack and deter future attacks. I will leave it to those with experience in...

Fugitive Identified on YouTube By His Distinctive Tattoos

A mafia fugitive hiding out in the Dominican Republic was arrested when investigators found his YouTube cooking channel and identified him by his distinctive arm tattoos...

Friday Squid Blogging: Far Side Cartoon

The Far Side on squid. 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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Vegan Chili Squid

The restaurant chain Wagamama is selling a vegan version of its Chilli Squid side dish made from king oyster mushrooms. 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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Christmas Squid Memories

Stuffed squid for Christmas Eve. 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...

Hacking a Coffee Maker

As expected, IoT devices are filled with vulnerabilities: As a thought experiment, Martin Hron, a researcher at security company Avast, reverse engineered one of the older coffee makers to see what kinds of hacks he could do with it. After just a week of effort, the unqualified answer was: quite ...

Nihilistic Password Security Questions

Posted three years ago, but definitely appropriate for the times...

Friday Squid Blogging: Introducing the Seattle Kraken

The Kraken is the name of Seattle's new NFL franchise. I have always really liked collective nouns as sports team names like the Utah Jazz or the Minnesota Wild, mostly because it's hard to describe individual players. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories ...

Another California Data Privacy Law

The California Consumer Privacy Act is a lesson in missed opportunities. It was passed in haste, to stop a ballot initiative that would have been even more restrictive: In September 2017, Alastair Mactaggart and Mary Ross proposed a statewide ballot initiative entitled the "California Consumer...

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...

LA Covers Up Bad Cybersecurity

This is bad in several dimensions. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has been accused of deliberately keeping widespread gaps in its cybersecurity a secret from regulators in a large-scale coverup involving the city's mayor...

Firefox Enables DNS over HTTPS

This is good news: Whenever you visit a website -- even if it's HTTPS enabled -- the DNS query that converts the web address into an IP address that computers can read is usually unencrypted. DNS-over-HTTPS, or DoH, encrypts the request so that it can't be intercepted or hijacked in order to send...

Apple's Tracking-Prevention Feature in Safari has a Privacy Bug

Last month, engineers at Google published a very curious privacy bug in Apple's Safari web browser. Apple's Intelligent Tracking Prevention, a feature designed to reduce user tracking, has vulnerabilities that themselves allow user tracking. Some details: ITP detects and blocks tracking on the we...