Fraud on Zelle

Zelle is rife with fraud: Zelle’s immediacy has also made it a favorite of fraudsters. Other types of bank transfers or transactions involving payment cards typically take at least a day to clear. But once crooks scare or trick victims into handing over money via Zelle, they can siphon away...

New DeadBolt Ransomware Targets NAT Devices

Theres a new ransomware that targets NAT devices made by QNAP: The attacks started today, January 25th, with QNAP devices suddenly finding their files encrypted and file names appended with a .deadbolt file extension. Instead of creating ransom notes in each folder on the device, the QNAP devices...

Apple AirTags Are Being Used to Track People and Cars

This development suprises no one who has been paying attention: Researchers now believe AirTags, which are equipped with Bluetooth technology, could be revealing a more widespread problem of tech-enabled tracking. They emit a digital signal that can be detected by devices running Apples mobile...

More Log4j News

Log4j is being exploited by all sorts of attackers, all over the Internet: At that point it was reported that there were over 100 attempts to exploit the vulnerability every minute. "Since we started to implement our protection we prevented over 1,272,000 attempts to allocate the vulnerability,...

Smart Contract Bug Results in $31 Million Loss

A hacker stole $31 million from the blockchain company MonoX Finance , by exploiting a bug in software the service uses to draft smart contracts. Specifically, the hack used the same token as both the tokenIn and tokenOut, which are methods for exchanging the value of one token for another. MonoX...

Apple Sues NSO Group

Piling more on NSO Groups legal troubles, Apple is suing it: The complaint provides new information on how NSO Group infected victims’ devices with its Pegasus spyware. To prevent further abuse and harm to its users, Apple is also seeking a permanent injunction to ban NSO Group from using any App...

New Rowhammer Technique

Rowhammer is an attack technique involving accessing -- thats "hammering" -- rows of bits in memory, millions of times per second, with the intent of causing bits in neighboring rows to flip. This is a side-channel attack, and the result can be all sorts of mayhem. Well, there is a new enhancemen...

Wire Fraud Scam Upgraded with Bitcoin

The FBI has issued a bulletin describing a bitcoin variant of a wire fraud scam: As the agency describes it, the scammer will contact their victim and somehow convince them that they need to send money, either with promises of love, further riches, or by impersonating an actual institution like a...

Why I Hate Password Rules

The other day, I was creating a new account on the web. It was financial in nature, which means it gets one of my most secure passwords. I used Password Safe to generate this 16-character alphanumeric password: :s^Twd.J;3hzg=Q Which was rejected by the site, because it didnt meet its password...

Book Sale: Click Here to Kill Everybody and Data and Goliath

For a limited time, I am selling signed copies of Click Here to Kill Everybody and Data and Goliath, both in paperback, for just $6 each plus shipping. I have 500 copies of each book available. When theyre gone, the sale is over and the price will revert to normal. Order here and here. Please be...

New York Times Journalist Hacked with NSO Spyware

Citizen Lab is reporting that a New York Times journalist was hacked with the NSO Groups spyware Pegasus, probably by the Saudis. The world needs to do something about these cyberweapons arms manufacturers. This kind of thing isnt enough; NSO Group is an Israeli company...

Using Machine Learning to Guess PINs from Video

Researchers trained a machine-learning system on videos of people typing their PINs into ATMs: By using three tries, which is typically the maximum allowed number of attempts before the card is withheld, the researchers reconstructed the correct sequence for 5-digit PINs 30% of the time, and...

Backdoor in Zyxel Firewalls and Gateways

This is bad: More than 100,000 Zyxel firewalls, VPN gateways, and access point controllers contain a hardcoded admin-level backdoor account that can grant attackers root access to devices via either the SSH interface or the web administration panel. … Installing patches removes the backdoor...

The NSA is Refusing to Disclose its Policy on Backdooring Commercial Products

Senator Ron Wyden asked, and the NSA didnt answer: The NSA has long sought agreements with technology companies under which they would build special access for the spy agency into their products, according to disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and reporting by Reuters and others...

Privacy Analysis of Ambient Light Sensors

Interesting privacy analysis of the Ambient Light Sensor API. And a blog post. Especially note the "Lessons Learned" section...

Insider Attack on the Carnegie Library

Greg Priore, the person in charge of the rare book room at the Carnegie Library, stole from it for almost two decades before getting caught. It's a perennial problem: trusted insiders have to be trusted...

North Korea ATM Hack

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA published a long and technical alert describing a North Korea hacking scheme against ATMs in a bunch of countries worldwide: This joint advisory is the result of analytic efforts among the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agenc...

Vaccine for Emotet Malware

Interesting story of a vaccine for the Emotet malware: Through trial and error and thanks to subsequent Emotet updates that refined how the new persistence mechanism worked, Quinn was able to put together a tiny PowerShell script that exploited the registry key mechanism to crash Emotet itself. T...

Collecting and Selling Mobile Phone Location Data

The Wall Street Journal has an article about a company called Anomaly Six LLC that has an SDK that's used by "more than 500 mobile applications." Through that SDK, the company collects location data from users, which it then sells. Anomaly Six is a federal contractor that provides...

Using In-Game Purchases to Launder Money

Evidence that stolen credit cards are being used to purchase items in games like Clash of Clans, which are then resold for cash...

New Report on Chinese Intelligence Cyber-Operations

The company ProtectWise just published a long report linking a bunch of Chinese cyber-operations over the past few years. The always interesting gruqq has some interesting commentary on the group and its tactics. Lots of detailed information in the report, but I admit that I have never heard of...

Signed Malware

Stuxnet famously used legitimate digital certificates to sign its malware. A research paper from last year found that the practice is much more common than previously thought. Now, researchers have presented proof that digitally signed malware is much more common than previously believed. What's...

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...

Security Flaws in Children's Smart Watches

The Norwegian Consumer Council has published a report detailing a series of security and privacy flaws in smart watches marketed to children. Press release. News article. This is the same group that found all those security and privacy vulnerabilities in smart dolls. EDITED TO ADD 10/21: Slashdot...

Girl Scouts to Offer Merit Badges in Cybersecurity

The Girl Scouts are going to be offering 18 merit badges in cybersecurity, to scouts as young as five years old...

The Dangers of Secret Law

Last week, the Department of Justice released 18 new FISC opinions related to Section 702 as part of an EFF FOIA lawsuit. Of course, they don't mention EFF or the lawsuit. They make it sound as if it was their idea. There's probably a lot in these opinions. In one Kafkaesque ruling, a defendant w...

Chelsea Manning Profiled in New York Times Magazine

Interesting reading...

Interview with Ross Anderson

Cybersecurity researcher Ross Anderson has a good interview on edge.org...

MIT to Become Hotbed of AI Video Surveillance

It's a lot: According to information obtained by The Tech , MIT is spending over $3 million on more than 500 AI surveillance cameras in academic buildings, residence halls, and outdoor areas along Memorial Drive. Installation of the new cameras, along with the wiring and infrastructure that will...

Details of Alan Turing’s Voice Encryption System

Really interesting piece of cryptographic history: In November 2023, a large cache of his wartime papers--nicknamed the "Bayley papers"--was auctioned in London for almost half a million U.S. dollars. The previously unknown cache contains many sheets in Turing's own handwriting, telling of his...

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...

One Million Passports Leaked Online

A database of almost a million passports from around the world was leaked online. Note what happened. A high-value credential--a passport--was used in an ancillary low-value authentication system: ID verification for cannabis dispensaries. And it's the low-value system that got hacked, putting th...

Vulnerability Disclosure in the Age of AI

New article: "Responsible Disclosure in the Age of AI: A Call for Urgent Action," by Melissa Hathaway. Abstract: Artificial intelligence is fundamentally reshaping the balance between vulnerability discovery and remediation. Frontier AI models are now capable of autonomously identifying exploitab...

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...

Generative AI as a Cybercrime Assistant

Anthropic reports on a Claude user: We recently disrupted a sophisticated cybercriminal that used Claude Code to commit large-scale theft and extortion of personal data. The actor targeted at least 17 distinct organizations, including in healthcare, the emergency services, and government and...

Windscribe Acquitted on Charges of Not Collecting Users’ Data

The company doesn't keep logs, so couldn't turn over data: Windscribe, a globally used privacy-first VPN service, announced today that its founder, Yegor Sak, has been fully acquitted by a court in Athens, Greece, following a two-year legal battle in which Sak was personally charged in connection...

AI and the 2024 US Elections

For years now, AI has undermined the public's ability to trust what it sees, hears, and reads. The Republican National Committee released a provocative ad offering an "AI-generated look into the country's possible future if Joe Biden is re-elected," showing apocalyptic, machine-made images of...

New Chrome Zero-Day

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

Rethinking Democracy for the Age of AI

There is a lot written about technologys threats to democracy. Polarization. Artificial intelligence. The concentration of wealth and power. I have a more general story: The political and economic systems of governance that were created in the mid-18th century are poorly suited for the 21st...

Privacy Implications of Tracking Wireless Access Points

Brian Krebs reports on research into geolocating routers: Apple and the satellite-based broadband service Starlink each recently took steps to address new research into the potential security and privacy implications of how their services geolocate devices. Researchers from the University of...

The Rise of Large-Language-Model Optimization

The web has become so interwoven with everyday life that it is easy to forget what an extraordinary accomplishment and treasure it is. In just a few decades, much of human knowledge has been collectively written up and made available to anyone with an internet connection. But all of this is comin...

AI and the Evolution of Social Media

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. A decade ago, social media was celebrated for sparking democratic uprisings in the Arab world and beyond. Now front pages are splashed with stories of social platforms’ role in misinformation, business conspiracy, malfeasance, and risks to mental health. In a 2022...

A Cyber Insurance Backstop

In the first week of January, the pharmaceutical giant Merck quietly settled its years-long lawsuit over whether or not its property and casualty insurers would cover a $700 million claim filed after the devastating NotPetya cyberattack in 2017. The malware ultimately infected more than 40,000 of...

Improving the Cryptanalysis of Lattice-Based Public-Key Algorithms

The winner of the Best Paper Award at Crypto this year was a significant improvement to lattice-based cryptanalysis. This is important, because a bunch of NISTs post-quantum options base their security on lattice problems. I worry about standardizing on post-quantum algorithms too quickly. We are...

AI Bots on X (Twitter)

You can find them by searching for OpenAI chatbot warning messages, like: "Im sorry, I cannot provide a response as it goes against OpenAIs use case policy." I hadnt thought about this before: identifying bots by searching for distinctive bot phrases...

Second Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy

Last month, I convened the Second Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy IWORD 2023 at the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center. As with IWORD 2022, the goal was to bring together a diverse set of thinkers and practitioners to talk about how democracy might be reimagined for the...

AI and Lossy Bottlenecks

Artificial intelligence is poised to upend much of society, removing human limitations inherent in many systems. One such limitation is information and logistical bottlenecks in decision-making. Traditionally, people have been forced to reduce complex choices to a small handful of options that do...

Cyberattack on Ukraine’s Kyivstar Seems to Be Russian Hacktivists

The Solntsepek group has taken credit for the attack. Theyre linked to the Russian military, so its unclear whether the attack was government directed or freelance. This is one of the most significant cyberattacks since Russia invaded in February 2022...

LitterDrifter USB Worm

A new worm that spreads via USB sticks is infecting computers in Ukraine and beyond. The group­--known by many names, including Gamaredon, Primitive Bear, ACTINIUM, Armageddon, and Shuckworm--has been active since at least 2014 and has been attributed to Russia’s Federal Security Service by the...

Using Generative AI for Surveillance

Generative AI is going to be a powerful tool for data analysis and summarization. Heres an example of it being used for sentiment analysis. My guess is that it isnt very good yet, but that it will get better...