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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Unpatched Vulnerabilities in the Squid Caching Proxy

In a rare squid/security post, heres an article about unpatched vulnerabilities in the Squid caching proxy. 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...

On Technologies for Automatic Facial Recognition

Interesting article on technologies that will automatically identify people: With technology like that on Mr. Leyvands head, Facebook could prevent users from ever forgetting a colleagues name, give a reminder at a cocktail party that an acquaintance had kids to ask about or help find someone at ...

Friday Squid Blogging: Glass Squid Video

Heres a fantastic video of Taonius Borealis, a glass squid, from NOAA. 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: We’re Genetically Engineering Squid Now

Is this a good idea? The transparent squid is a genetically altered version of the hummingbird bobtail squid, a species usually found in the tropical waters from Indonesia to China and Japan. Its typically smaller than a thumb and shaped like a dumpling. And like other cephalopods, it has a...

Parmesan Anti-Forgery Protection

The Guardian is reporting about microchips in wheels of Parmesan cheese as an anti-forgery measure...

UK Electoral Commission Hacked

The UK Electoral Commission discovered last year that it was hacked the year before. Thats fourteen months between the hack and the discovery. It doesnt know who was behind the hack. We worked with external security experts and the National Cyber Security Centre to investigate and secure our...

Ethical Problems in Computer Security

Tadayoshi Kohno, Yasemin Acar, and Wulf Loh wrote excellent paper on ethical thinking within the computer security community: "Ethical Frameworks and Computer Security Trolley Problems: Foundations for Conversation": Abstract: The computer security research community regularly tackles ethical...

New Zero-Click Exploits against iOS

Citizen Lab has identified three zero-click exploits against iOS 15 and 16. These were used by NSO Groups Pegasus spyware in 2022, and deployed by Mexico against human rights defenders. These vulnerabilities have all been patched. One interesting bit is that Apples Lockdown Mode part of iOS 16...

Mass Ransomware Attack

A vulnerability in a popular data transfer tool has resulted in a mass ransomware attack: TechCrunch has learned of dozens of organizations that used the affected GoAnywhere file transfer software at the time of the ransomware attack, suggesting more victims are likely to come forward. However,...

US Citizen Hacked by Spyware

The New York Times is reporting that a US citizens phone was hacked by the Predator spyware. A U.S. and Greek national who worked on Meta’s security and trust team while based in Greece was placed under a yearlong wiretap by the Greek national intelligence service and hacked with a powerful...

Friday Squid Blogging: Chinese Squid Fishing in the Southeast Pacific

Chinese squid fishing boats are overwhelming Ecuador and Peru. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I havent covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here...

Cyberwar Lessons from the War in Ukraine

The Aspen Institute has published a good analysis of the successes, failures, and absences of cyberattacks as part of the current war in Ukraine: "The Cyber Defense Assistance Imperative ­ Lessons from Ukraine." Its conclusion: Cyber defense assistance in Ukraine is working. The Ukrainian...

A Device to Turn Traffic Lights Green

Heres a story about a hacker who reprogrammed a device called "Flipper Zero" to mimic Opticom transmitters--to turn traffic lights in his path green. As mentioned earlier, the Flipper Zero has a built-in sub-GHz radio that lets the device receive data or transmit it, with the right firmware in...

A Hacker’s Mind News

A Hackers Mind will be published on Tuesday. I have done a written interview and a podcast interview about the book. Its been chosen as a "February 2023 Must-Read Book" by the Next Big Idea Club. And an "Editors Pick"--whatever that means--on Amazon. There have been three reviews so far. I am...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid-Inspired Hydrogel

Scientists have created a hydrogel "using squid mantle and creative chemistry." As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I havent covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here...

QR Code Scam

An enterprising individual made fake parking tickets with a QR code for easy payment...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Images

iStock has over 13,000 royalty-free images of squid. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I havent covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here...

Facebook Is Now Encrypting Links to Prevent URL Stripping

Some sites, including Facebook, add parameters to the web address for tracking purposes. These parameters have no functionality that is relevant to the user, but sites rely on them to track users across pages and properties. Mozilla introduced support for URL stripping in Firefox 102, which it...

Apple’s Lockdown Mode

Apple has introduced lockdown mode for high-risk users who are concerned about nation-state attacks. It trades reduced functionality for increased security in a very interesting way...

Cryptanalysis of ENCSecurity’s Encryption Implementation

ENCSecurity markets a file encryption system, and its used by SanDisk, Sony, Lexar, and probably others. Despite it using AES as its algorithm, its implementation is flawed in multiple ways--and breakable. The moral is, as it always is, that implementing cryptography securely is hard. Dont roll...

Forging Australian Driver’s Licenses

The New South Wales digital drivers license has multiple implementation flaws that allow for easy forgeries. This file is encrypted using AES-256-CBC encryption combined with Base64 encoding. A 4-digit application PIN which gets set during the initial onboarding when a user first instals the...

iPhone Malware that Operates Even When the Phone Is Turned Off

Researchers have demonstrated iPhone malware that works even when the phone is fully shut down. t turns out that the iPhone’s Bluetooth chip­--which is key to making features like Find My work­--has no mechanism for digitally signing or even encrypting the firmware it runs. Academics at Germany’s...

Microsoft Issues Report of Russian Cyberattacks against Ukraine

Microsoft has a comprehensive report on the dozens of cyberattacks -- and even more espionage operations -- Russia has conducted against Ukraine as part of this war: At least six Russian Advanced Persistent Threat APT actors and other unattributed threats, have conducted destructive attacks,...

Gus Simmons’s Memoir

Gus Simmons is an early pioneer in cryptography and computer security. I know him best for his work on authentication and covert channels, specifically as related to nuclear treaty verification. His work is cited extensively in Applied Cryptography. He has written a memoir of growing up dirt-poor...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: South American Squid Stocks Threatened by Chinese Fishing

Theres a lot of fishing going on: The number of Chinese-flagged vessels in the south Pacific has surged 13-fold from 54 active vessels in 2009 to 707 in 2020, according to the SPRFMO. Meanwhile, the size of Chinas squid catch has grown from 70,000 tons in 2009 to 358,000. As usual, you can also u...

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...

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...

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...

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...

FBI Had the REvil Decryption Key

The Washington Post reports that the FBI had a decryption key for the REvil ransomware, but didnt pass it along to victims because it would have disrupted an ongoing operation. The key was obtained through access to the servers of the Russia-based criminal gang behind the July attack. Deploying i...

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...

Tracking Users on Waze

A security researcher discovered a wulnerability in Waze that breaks the anonymity of users: I found out that I can visit Waze from any web browser at waze.com/livemap so I decided to check how are those driver icons implemented. What I found is that I can ask Waze API for data on a location by...

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...

Using Disinformation to Cause a Blackout

Interesting paper: "How weaponizing disinformation can bring down a city's power grid": Abstract: Social media has made it possible to manipulate the masses via disinformation and fake news at an unprecedented scale. This is particularly alarming from a security perspective, as humans have proven...

UAE Hack and Leak Operations

Interesting paper on recent hack-and-leak operations attributed to the UAE: Abstract: Four hack-and-leak operations in U.S. politics between 2016 and 2019, publicly attributed to the United Arab Emirates UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, should be seen as the "simulation of scandal" ­-- deliberate...

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...

Twitter Hackers May Have Bribed an Insider

Motherboard is reporting that this week's Twitter hack involved a bribed insider. Twitter has denied it. I have been taking press calls all day about this. And while I know everyone wants to speculate about the details of the hack, we just don't know -- and probably won't for a couple of weeks...

Securing the International IoT Supply Chain

Together with Nate Kim former student and Trey Herr Atlantic Council Cyber Statecraft Initiative, I have written a paper on IoT supply chain security. The basic problem we try to solve is: how to you enforce IoT security regulations when most of the stuff is made in other countries? And our...

The Unintended Harms of Cybersecurity

Interesting research: "Identifying Unintended Harms of Cybersecurity Countermeasures": Abstract: Well-meaning cybersecurity risk owners will deploy countermeasures technologies or procedures to manage risks to their services or systems. In some cases, those countermeasures will produce unintended...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I'm speaking at Indiana University Bloomington on January 30, 2020. I'll be at RSA Conference 2020 in San Francisco. On Wednesday, February 26, at 2:50 PM, I'll be part of a panel on "How to Reduce Supply Chain Risk: Lessons from...

What Happened to Cyber 9/11?

A recent article in the Atlantic asks why we haven't seen a"cyber 9/11" in the past fifteen or so years. I, too, remember the increasingly frantic and fearful warnings of a "cyber Peal Harbor," "cyber Katrina" -- when that was a thing -- or "cyber 9/11." I made fun of those warnings back then. Th...

Security and Human Behavior (SHB 2018)

I'm at Carnegie Mellon University, at the eleventh Workshop on Security and Human Behavior. SHB is a small invitational gathering of people studying various aspects of the human side of security, organized each year by Alessandro Acquisti, Ross Anderson, and myself. The 50 or so people in the roo...