"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...

Ridiculously Insecure Smart Lock

Tapplock sells an "unbreakable" Internet-connected lock that you can open with your fingerprint. It turns out that: 1. The lock broadcasts its Bluetooth MAC address in the clear, and you can calculate the unlock key from it. 2. Any Tapplock account an unlock every lock. 3. You can open the lock...

New iPhone OS May Include Device-Unlocking Security

iOS 12, the next release of Apple's iPhone operating system, may include features to prevent someone from unlocking your phone without your permission: The feature essentially forces users to unlock the iPhone with the passcode when connecting it to a USB accessory everytime the phone has not bee...

Another Branch Prediction Attack

When Spectre and Meltdown were first announced earlier this year, pretty much everyone predicted that there would be many more attacks targeting branch prediction in microprocessors. Here's another one: In the new attack, an attacker primes the PHT and running branch instructions so that the PHT...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Pin

There's a squid pin on Kickstarter. 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...

Water Utility Infected by Cryptocurrency Mining Software

A water utility in Europe has been infected by cryptocurrency mining software. This is a relatively new attack: hackers compromise computers and force them to mine cryptocurrency for them. This is the first time I've seen it infect SCADA systems, though. It seems that this mining software is...

The FAA Is Arguing for Security by Obscurity

In a proposed rule by the FAA, it argues that software in an Embraer S.A. Model ERJ 190-300 airplane is secure because it's proprietary: In addition, the operating systems for current airplane systems are usually and historically proprietary. Therefore, they are not as susceptible to corruption...

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...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Bigfin Squid

Article about the bigfin squid. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Blog moderation policy...

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...

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...

Rare Interviews with Enigma Cryptanalyst Marian Rejewski

The Polish Embassy has posted a series of short interview segments with Marian Rejewski, the first person to crack the Enigma. Details from his biography...

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...

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...

High-School Graduation Prank Hack

This is a fun story, detailing the hack a group of high school students perpetrated against an Illinois school district, hacking 500 screens across a bunch of schools. During the process, the group broke into the school’s IT systems; repurposed software used to monitor students’ computers;...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: New Squid Species

Seems like they are being discovered all the time: In the past, the DEEPEND crew has discovered three new species of Bathyteuthids, a type of squid that lives in depths between 700 and 2,000 meters. The findings were validated and published in 2020. Another new squid species description is...

Designing Contact-Tracing Apps

Susan Landau wrote an essay on the privacy, efficacy, and equity of contract-tracing smartphone apps. Also see her excellent book on the topic...

History of the HX-63 Rotor Machine

Jon D. Paul has written the fascinating story of the HX-63, a super-complicated electromechanical rotor cipher machine made by Crypto AG...

Zero-Click iPhone Exploits

Citizen Lab is reporting on two zero-click iMessage exploits, in spyware sold by the cyberweapons arms manufacturer NSO Group to the Bahraini government. These are particularly scary exploits, since they dont require to victim to do anything, like click on a link or open a file. The victim receiv...

Andrew Appel on New Hampshire’s Election Audit

Really interesting two part analysis of the audit conducted after the 2020 election in Windham, New Hampshire. Based on preliminary reports published by the team of experts that New Hampshire engaged to examine an election discrepancy, it appears that a buildup of dust in the read heads of...

Phone Cloning Scam

A newspaper in Malaysia is reporting on a cell phone cloning scam. The scammer convinces the victim to lend them their cell phone, and the scammer quickly clones it. Whats clever about this scam is that the victim is an Uber driver and the scammer is the passenger, so the driver is naturally busy...

Friday Squid Blogging: Flying Squid

How squid fly. 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...

Web Credit Card Skimmer Steals Data from Another Credit Card Skimmer

MalwareBytes is reporting a weird software credit card skimmer. It harvests credit card data stolen by another, different skimmer: Even though spotting multiple card skimmer scripts on the same online shop is not unheard of, this one stood out due to its highly specialized nature. "The threat...

Investigating the Navalny Poisoning

Bellingcat has investigated the near-fatal poisoning of Alexey Navalny by the Russian FSB back in August. The details display some impressive traffic analysis. Navalny got a confession out of one of the poisoners, displaying some masterful social engineering. Lots of interesting opsec details in...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid-like Nebula

Pretty astronomical photo. 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...

Split-Second Phantom Images Fool Autopilots

Researchers are tricking autopilots by inserting split-second images into roadside billboards. Researchers at Israels Ben Gurion University of the Negev … previously revealed that they could use split-second light projections on roads to successfully trick Teslas driver-assistance systems into...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: Ill be speaking at Cyber Week Online, October 19-21, 2020. Ill be speaking at the IEEE Symposium on Technology and Society virtual conference, November 12-15, 2020. Ill be keynoting the 2020 Conference on Cyber Norms on November 12...

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...

Former NSA Director Keith Alexander Joins Amazon’s Board of Directors

This sounds like a bad idea...

Cybercrime in the Age of COVID-19

The Cambridge Cybercrime Centre has a series of papers on cybercrime during the coronavirus pandemic. EDITED TO ADD 8/12: Interpol report...

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...

Zoom Will Be End-to-End Encrypted for All Users

Zoom is doing the right thing: it's making end-to-end encryption available to all users, paid and unpaid. This is a change; I wrote about the initial decision here. ...we have identified a path forward that balances the legitimate right of all users to privacy and the safety of users on our...

The DoD Isn't Fixing Its Security Problems

It has produced several reports outlining what's wrong and what needs to be fixed. It's not fixing them: GAO looked at three DoD-designed initiatives to see whether the Pentagon is following through on its own goals. In a majority of cases, DoD has not completed the cybersecurity training and...

Why Isn't GDPR Being Enforced?

Politico has a long article making the case that the lead GDPR regulator, Ireland, has too cozy a relationship with Silicon Valley tech companies to effectively regulate their privacy practices. Despite its vows to beef up its threadbare regulatory apparatus, Ireland has a long history of caterin...

Facebook Is Using Your Two-Factor Authentication Phone Number to Target Advertising

From Kashmir Hill: Facebook is not content to use the contact information you willingly put into your Facebook profile for advertising. It is also using contact information you handed over for security purposes and contact information you didn't hand over at all, but that was collected from other...

Future Cyberwar

A report for the Center for Strategic and International Studies looks at surprise and war. One of the report's cyberwar scenarios is particularly compelling. It doesn't just map cyber onto today's tactics, but completely reimagines future tactics that include a cyber component quote starts on pag...

How the US Military Can Better Keep Hackers

Interesting commentary: The military is an impossible place for hackers thanks to antiquated career management, forced time away from technical positions, lack of mission, non-technical mid- and senior-level leadership, and staggering pay gaps, among other issues. It is possible the military need...

WPA3

Everyone is writing about the new WPA3 Wi-Fi security standard, and how it improves security over the current WPA2 standard. This summary is as good as any other: The first big new feature in WPA3 is protection against offline, password-guessing attacks. This is where an attacker captures data fr...

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"...

Regulating Bitcoin

Ross Anderson has a new paper on cryptocurrency exchanges. From his blog: Bitcoin Redux explains what's going wrong in the world of cryptocurrencies. The bitcoin exchanges are developing into a shadow banking system, which do not give their customers actual bitcoin but rather display a "balance"...

Hijacking Emergency Sirens

Turns out it's easy to hijack emergency sirens with a radio transmitter...

Obscure E-Mail Vulnerability

This vulnerability is a result of an interaction between two different ways of handling e-mail addresses. Gmail ignores dots in addresses, so [email protected] is the same as [email protected] is the same as [email protected]. Note: I do not own any of those email addresse...

Artificial Intelligence and the Attack/Defense Balance

Artificial intelligence technologies have the potential to upend the longstanding advantage that attack has over defense on the Internet. This has to do with the relative strengths and weaknesses of people and computers, how those all interplay in Internet security, and where AI technologies migh...

Daniel Miessler on My Writings about IoT Security

Daniel Miessler criticizes my writings about IoT security: I know it's super cool to scream about how IoT is insecure, how it's dumb to hook up everyday objects like houses and cars and locks to the internet, how bad things can get, and I know it's fun to be invited to talk about how everything i...

Denuvo DRM Cracked within a Day of Release

Denuvo is probably the best digital-rights management system, used to protect computer games. It's regularly cracked within a day. If Denuvo can no longer provide even a single full day of protection from cracks, though, that protection is going to look a lot less valuable to publishers. But that...

Hacking Robots

Researchers have demonstrated hacks against robots, taking over and controlling their camera, speakers, and movements. News article...

Is Continuing to Patch Windows XP a Mistake?

Last week, Microsoft issued a security patch for Windows XP, a 16-year-old operating system that Microsoft officially no longer supports. Last month, Microsoft issued a Windows XP patch for the vulnerability used in WannaCry. Is this a good idea? This 2014 essay argues that it's not: The zero-day...

Inmates Secretly Build and Network Computers while in Prison

This is kind of amazing: Inmates at a medium-security Ohio prison secretly assembled two functioning computers, hid them in the ceiling, and connected them to the Marion Correctional Institution's network. The hard drives were loaded with pornography, a Windows proxy server, VPN, VOIP and...