Your Personal Data is Already Stolen

In an excellent blog post, Brian Krebs makes clear something I have been saying for a while: Likewise for individuals, it pays to accept two unfortunate and harsh realities: Reality 1: Bad guys already have access to personal data points that you may believe should be secret but which nevertheles...

Using Machine Learning to Create Fake Fingerprints

Researchers are able to create fake fingerprints that result in a 20% false-positive rate. The problem is that these sensors obtain only partial images of users' fingerprints -- at the points where they make contact with the scanner. The paper noted that since partial prints are not as distinctiv...

ID Systems Throughout the 50 States

Jim Harper at CATO has a good survey of state ID systems in the US...

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...

Algeria Shut Down the Internet to Prevent Students from Cheating on Exams

Algeria shut the Internet down nationwide to prevent high-school students from cheating on their exams. The solution in New South Wales, Australia was to ban smartphones. EDITED TO ADD 6/22: Slashdot thread...

The US Is Unprepared for Election-Related Hacking in 2018

This survey and report is not surprising: The survey of nearly forty Republican and Democratic campaign operatives, administered through November and December 2017, revealed that American political campaign staff -- primarily working at the state and congressional levels -- are not only unprepare...

Musical Ciphers

Interesting history...

Article from a Former Chinese PLA General on Cyber Sovereignty

Interesting article by Major General Hao Yeli, Chinese People's Liberation Army ret., a senior advisor at the China International Institute for Strategic Society, Vice President of China Institute for Innovation and Development Strategy, and the Chair of the Guanchao Cyber Forum. Against the...

Another iPhone Change to Frustrate the Police

I recently wrote about the new ability to disable the Touch ID login on iPhones. This is important because of a weirdness in current US law that protects people's passcodes from forced disclosure in ways it does not protect actions: being forced to place a thumb on a fingerprint reader. There's...

NSA Brute-Force Keysearch Machine

The Intercept published a story about a dedicated NSA brute-force keysearch machine being built with the help of New York University and IBM. It's based on a document that was accidentally shared on the Internet by NYU. The article is frustratingly short on details: The WindsorGreen documents are...

Who is Publishing NSA and CIA Secrets, and Why?

There's something going on inside the intelligence communities in at least two countries, and we have no idea what it is. Consider these three data points. One: someone, probably a country's intelligence organization, is dumping massive amounts of cyberattack tools belonging to the NSA onto the...

Factoring RSA Keys with Many Zeros

Interesting research on a new class of weak RSA keys: keys with lots of zeros. It turns out that these keys are out in the wild. The badkeys project is an open-source service that checks public keys for known vulnerabilities. While developing this tool, Hanno collected a massive number of...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m giving a keynote at Cybernation 2026 in Berlin, Germany, on June 24, 2026. I’m speaking at the Potsdam Conference on National Cybersecurity at the Hasso Plattner Institut in Potsdam, Germany. The event runs June 24–25, 2026, an...

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...

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...

AI and US Election Rules

If an AI breaks the rules for you, does that count as breaking the rules? This is the essential question being taken up by the Federal Election Commission this month, and public input is needed to curtail the potential for AI to take US campaigns even more off the rails. At issue is whether...

Friday Squid Blogging: Protecting Cephalopods in Medical Research

From Nature: Cephalopods such as octopuses and squid could soon receive the same legal protection as mice and monkeys do when they are used in research. On 7 September, the US National Institutes of Health NIH asked for feedback on proposed guidelines that, for the first time in the United States...

Obligatory ChatGPT Post

Seems like absolutely everyone everywhere is playing with Chat GPT. So I did, too…. Write an essay in the style of Bruce Schneier on how ChatGPT will affect cybersecurity. As with any new technology, the development and deployment of ChatGPT is likely to have a significant impact on the field of...

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 on NSO Group and Cytrox: Two Cyberweapons Arms Manufacturers

Citizen Lab published another report on the spyware used against two Egyptian nationals. One was hacked by NSO Groups Pegasus spyware. The other was hacked both by Pegasus and by the spyware from another cyberweapons arms manufacturer: Cytrox. We havent heard a lot about Cytrox and its Predator...

Friday Squid Blogging: Strawberry Squid

Pretty pictures of a strawberry squid Histioteuthis heteropsis. 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...

I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto

This isnt the first time Ive received an e-mail like this: Hey! Ive done my research and looked at a lot of facts and old forgotten archives. I know that you are Satoshi, I do not want to tell anyone about this. I just wanted to say that you created weapons of mass destruction where niches remain...

Interesting Privilege Escalation Vulnerability

If you plug a Razer peripheral mouse or keyboard, I think into a Windows 10 or 11 machine, you can use a vulnerability in the Razer Synapse software -- which automatically downloads -- to gain SYSTEM privileges. It should be noted that this is a local privilege escalation LPE vulnerability, which...

Friday Squid Blogging: On Squid Brains

Interesting National Geographic article. 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...

Apple Adds a Backdoor to iMessage and iCloud Storage

Apples announcement that its going to start scanning photos for child abuse material is a big deal. Here are five news stories. I have been following the details, and discussing it in several different email lists. I dont have time right now to delve into the details, but wanted to post something...

Newly Declassified NSA Document on Cryptography in the 1970s

This is a newly unclassified NSA history of its reaction to academic cryptography in the 1970s: "NSA Comes Out of the Closet: The Debate over Public Cryptography in the Inman Era," Cryptographic Quarterly, Spring 1996, author still classified...

New iMessage Security Features

Apple has added added security features to mitigate the risk of zero-click iMessage attacks. Apple did not document the changes but Groß said he fiddled around with the newest iOS 14 and found that Apple shipped a "significant refactoring of iMessage processing" that severely cripples the usual...

More on the SolarWinds Breach

The New York Times has more details. About 18,000 private and government users downloaded a Russian tainted software update -­ a Trojan horse of sorts ­- that gave its hackers a foothold into victims systems, according to SolarWinds, the company whose software was compromised. Among those who use...

Another Massive Russian Hack of US Government Networks

The press is reporting a massive hack of US government networks by sophisticated Russian hackers. Officials said a hunt was on to determine if other parts of the government had been affected by what looked to be one of the most sophisticated, and perhaps among the largest, attacks on federal...

FireEye Hacked

FireEye was hacked by -- they believe -- "a nation with top-tier offensive capabilities": During our investigation to date, we have found that the attacker targeted and accessed certain Red Team assessment tools that we use to test our customers’ security. These tools mimic the behavior of many...

Open Source Does Not Equal Secure

Way back in 1999, I wrote about open-source software: First, simply publishing the code does not automatically mean that people will examine it for security flaws. Security researchers are fickle and busy people. They do not have the time to examine every piece of source code that is published. S...

More on the Security of the 2020 US Election

Last week I signed on to two joint letters about the security of the 2020 election. The first was as one of 59 election security experts, basically saying that while the election seems to have been both secure and accurate voter suppression notwithstanding, we still need to work to secure our...

On Blockchain Voting

Blockchain voting is a spectacularly dumb idea for a whole bunch of reasons. I have generally quoted Matt Blaze: Why is blockchain voting a dumb idea? Glad you asked. For starters: It doesnt solve any problems civil elections actually have. Its basically incompatible with "software independence",...

New Zealand Election Fraud

It seems that this election season has not gone without fraud. In New Zealand, a vote for "Bird of the Year" has been marred by fraudulent votes: More than 1,500 fraudulent votes were cast in the early hours of Monday in the countrys annual bird election, briefly pushing the Little-Spotted Kiwi t...

The Security Failures of Online Exam Proctoring

Proctoring an online exam is hard. Its hard to be sure that the student isnt cheating, maybe by having reference materials at hand, or maybe by substituting someone else to take the exam for them. There are a variety of companies that provide online proctoring services, but theyre uniformly...

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...

On Risk-Based Authentication

Interesting usability study: "More Than Just Good Passwords? A Study on Usability and Security Perceptions of Risk-based Authentication": Abstract: Risk-based Authentication RBA is an adaptive security measure to strengthen password-based authentication. RBA monitors additional features during...

CEO of NS8 Charged with Securities Fraud

The founder and CEO of the Internet security company NS8 has been arrested and "charged in a Complaint in Manhattan federal court with securities fraud, fraud in the offer and sale of securities, and wire fraud." I admit that Ive never even heard of the company before...

DiceKeys

DiceKeys is a physical mechanism for creating and storing a 192-bit key. The idea is that you roll a special set of twenty-five dice, put them into a plastic jig, and then use an app to convert those dice into a key. You can then use that key for a variety of purposes, and regenerate it from the...

A Peek into the Fake Review Marketplace

A personal account of someone who was paid to buy products on Amazon and leave fake reviews. Fake reviews are one of the problems that everyone knows about, and no one knows what to do about -- so we all try to pretend doesn't exist...

Half a Million IoT Passwords Leaked

It is amazing that this sort of thing can still happen: ...the list was compiled by scanning the entire internet for devices that were exposing their Telnet port. The hacker then tried using 1 factory-set default usernames and passwords, or 2 custom, but easy-to-guess password combinations. Telne...

IoT Security Principles

The BSA -- also known as the Software Alliance, formerly the Business Software Alliance which explains the acronym -- is an industry lobbying group. They just published "Policy Principles for Building a Secure and Trustworthy Internet of Things." They call for: Distinguishing between consumer and...

Cryptocurrency Pump and Dump Scams

Really interesting research: "An examination of the cryptocurrency pump and dump ecosystem": Abstract: The surge of interest in cryptocurrencies has been accompanied by a proliferation of fraud. This paper examines pump and dump schemes. The recent explosion of nearly 2,000 cryptocurrencies in an...

New Research: "Privacy Threats in Intimate Relationships"

I just published a new paper with Karen Levy of Cornell: "Privacy Threats in Intimate Relationships." Abstract: This article provides an overview of intimate threats: a class of privacy threats that can arise within our families, romantic partnerships, close friendships, and caregiving...

On Cyber Warranties

Interesting article discussing cyber-warranties, and whether they are an effective way to transfer risk as envisioned by Ackerlof's "market for lemons" or a marketing trick. The conclusion: Warranties must transfer non-negligible amounts of liability to vendors in order to meaningfully overcome t...

Internet of Things Candle

There's a Kickstarter for an actual candle, with real fire, that you can control over the Internet. What could possibly go wrong?...

Massive Ad Fraud Scheme Relied on BGP Hijacking

This is a really interesting story of an ad fraud scheme that relied on hijacking the Border Gateway Protocol: Members of 3ve pronounced "eve" used their large reservoir of trusted IP addresses to conceal a fraud that otherwise would have been easy for advertisers to detect. The scheme employed a...

Another Bloomberg Story about Supply-Chain Hardware Attacks from China

Bloomberg has another story about hardware surveillance implants in equipment made in China. This implant is different from the one Bloomberg reported on last week. That story has been denied by pretty much everyone else, but Bloomberg is sticking by its story and its sources. I linked to other...

Counting People Through a Wall with WiFi

Interesting research: In the team's experiments, one WiFi transmitter and one WiFi receiver are behind walls, outside a room in which a number of people are present. The room can get very crowded with as many as 20 people zigzagging each other. The transmitter sends a wireless signal whose receiv...

New Variants of Cold-Boot Attack

If someone has physical access to your locked -- but still running -- computer, they can probably break the hard drive's encryption. This is a "cold boot" attack, and one we thought solved. We have not: To carry out the attack, the F-Secure researchers first sought a way to defeat the the...