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...

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...

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...

Securing Tiffany's Move

Story of how Tiffany & Company moved all of its inventory from one store to another. Short summary: careful auditing and a lot of police...

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...

Cracking Forgotten Passwords

Expandpass is a string expansion program. It's "useful for cracking passwords you kinda-remember." You tell the program what you remember about the password and it tries related passwords. I learned about it in this article about Phil Dougherty, who helps people recover lost cryptocurrency...

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...

Terahertz Millimeter-Wave Scanners

Interesting article on terahertz millimeter-wave scanners and their uses to detect terrorist bombers. The heart of the device is a block of electronics about the size of a 1990s tower personal computer. It comes housed in a musician's black case, akin to the one Spinal Tap might use on tour. At t...

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...

Are Free Societies at a Disadvantage in National Cybersecurity

Jack Goldsmith and Stuart Russell just published an interesting paper, making the case that free and democratic nations are at a structural disadvantage in nation-on-nation cyberattack and defense. From a blog post: It seeks to explain why the United States is struggling to deal with the "soft"...

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...

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...

American Being Prosecuted for Wiping His Phone Before Handing It Over to Border Officials

He's being prosecuted for giving border officials a code that wiped his phone: The case centers on a feature included in GrapheneOS, a custom Android operating system that runs in place of the software on most modern Google Pixel devices. Tunick's attorneys confirmed GrapheneOS was running on his...

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...

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...

FBI Extracts Deleted Signal Messages from iPhone Notification Database

404 Media reports alternate site: The FBI was able to forensically extract copies of incoming Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone, even after the app was deleted, because copies of the content were saved in the device’s push notification database…. The news shows how forensic...

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 Chrome Zero-Day

According to Microsoft researchers, North Korean hackers have been using a Chrome zero-day exploit to steal cryptocurrency...

Online Privacy and Overfishing

Microsoft recently caught state-backed hackers using its generative AI tools to help with their attacks. In the security community, the immediate questions werent about how hackers were using the tools that was utterly predictable, but about how Microsoft figured it out. The natural conclusion wa...

Detecting Malicious Trackers

From Slashdot: Apple and Google have launched a new industry standard called "Detecting Unwanted Location Trackers" to combat the misuse of Bluetooth trackers for stalking. Starting Monday, iPhone and Android users will receive alerts when an unknown Bluetooth device is detected moving with them...

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...

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...

Redacting Documents with a Black Sharpie Doesn’t Work

We have learned this lesson again: As part of the FTC v. Microsoft hearing, Sony supplied a document from PlayStation chief Jim Ryan that includes redacted details on the margins Sony shares with publishers, its Call of Duty revenues, and even the cost of developing some of its games. It looks li...

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...

Security Vulnerabilities in Eufy Cameras

Eufy cameras claim to be local only, but upload data to the cloud. The company is basically lying to reporters, despite being shown evidence to the contrary. The companys behavior is so egregious that ReviewGeek is no longer recommending them. This will be interesting to watch. If Eufy can ignore...

Hyundai Uses Example Keys for Encryption System

This is a dumb crypto mistake I had not previously encountered: A developer says it was possible to run their own software on the car infotainment hardware after discovering the vehicles manufacturer had secured its system using keys that were not only publicly known but had been lifted from...

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...

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...

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...

Ransomware Is Getting Ugly

Modern ransomware has two dimensions: pay to get your data back, and pay not to have your data dumped on the Internet. The DC police are the victims of this ransomware, and the criminals have just posted personnel records -- "including the results of psychological assessments and polygraph tests;...

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...

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...

A Cybersecurity Policy Agenda

The Aspen Institutes Aspen Cybersecurity Group -- Im a member -- has released its cybersecurity policy agenda for the next four years. The next administration and Congress cannot simultaneously address the wide array of cybersecurity risks confronting modern society. Policymakers in the White...

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...

Hacking Apple for Profit

Five researchers hacked Apple Computers networks -- not their products -- and found fifty-five vulnerabilities. So far, they have received $289K. One of the worst of all the bugs they found would have allowed criminals to create a worm that would automatically steal all the photos, videos, and...

Negotiating with Ransomware Gangs

Really interesting conversation with someone who negotiates with ransomware gangs: For now, it seems that paying ransomware, while obviously risky and empowering/encouraging ransomware attackers, can perhaps be comported so as not to break any laws like anti-terrorist laws, FCPA, conspiracy and...

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...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I'm giving a keynote address at the Cybersecurity and Data Privacy Law virtual conference on September 9, 2020. The list is maintained on this page...

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 ...

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...

ThiefQuest Ransomware for the Mac

There's a new ransomware for the Mac called ThiefQuest or EvilQuest. It's hard to get infected: For your Mac to become infected, you would need to torrent a compromised installer and then dismiss a series of warnings from Apple in order to run it. It's a good reminder to get your software from...

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...

Bluetooth Vulnerability: BIAS

This is new research on a Bluetooth vulnerability called BIAS that allows someone to impersonate a trusted device: Abstract: Bluetooth BR/EDR is a pervasive technology for wireless communication used by billions of devices. The Bluetooth standard includes a legacy authentication procedure and a...

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...