How Attorneys Are Harming Cybersecurity Incident Response

New paper: "Lessons Lost: Incident Response in the Age of Cyber Insurance and Breach Attorneys": Abstract: Incident Response IR allows victim firms to detect, contain, and recover from security incidents. It should also help the wider community avoid similar attacks in the future. In pursuit of...

Google Is Not Deleting Old YouTube Videos

Google has backtracked on its plan to delete inactive YouTube videos--at least for now. Of course, it could change its mind anytime it wants. It would be nice if this would get people to think about the vulnerabilities inherent in letting a for-profit monopoly decide what of human creativity is...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Colossal Squid

Interesting article on the colossal squid, which is larger than the giant squid. The article answers a vexing question: So why do we always hear about the giant squid and not the colossal squid? Well, part of it has to do with the fact that the giant squid was discovered and studied long before t...

FBI Advising People to Avoid Public Charging Stations

The FBI is warning people against using public phone-charging stations, worrying that the combination power-data port can be used to inject malware onto the devices: Avoid using free charging stations in airports, hotels, or shopping centers. Bad actors have figured out ways to use public USB por...

North Korea Hacking Cryptocurrency Sites with 3CX Exploit

News: Researchers at Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky today revealed that they identified a small number of cryptocurrency-focused firms as at least some of the victims of the 3CX software supply-chain attack thats unfolded over the past week. Kaspersky declined to name any of those victim...

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...

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...

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...

Cold War Bugging of Soviet Facilities

Found documents in Poland detail US spying operations against the former Soviet Union. The file details a number of bugs found at Soviet diplomatic facilities in Washington, D.C., New York, and San Francisco, as well as in a Russian government-owned vacation compound, apartments used by Russia...

Automatic Cheating Detection in Human Racing

This is a fascinating glimpse of the future of automatic cheating detection in sports: Maybe you heard about the truly insane false-start controversy in track and field? Devon Allen--a wide receiver for the Philadelphia Eagles--was disqualified from the 110-meter hurdles at the World Athletics...

Drone Deliveries into Prisons

Seems its now common to sneak contraband into prisons with a drone...

NSO Group’s Pegasus Spyware Used against Thailand Pro-Democracy Activists and Leaders

Yet another basic human rights violation, courtesy of NSO Group: Citizen Lab has the details: Key Findings We discovered an extensive espionage campaign targeting Thai pro-democracy protesters, and activists calling for reforms to the monarchy. We forensically confirmed that at least 30 individua...

Nigerian Prison Break

There was a massive prison break in Abuja, Nigeria: Armed with bombs, Rocket Propelled Grenade RPGs and General Purpose Machine Guns GPMG, the attackers, who arrived at about 10:05 p.m. local time, gained access through the back of the prison, using dynamites to destroy the heavily fortified...

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...

Me on Public-Interest Tech

Back in November 2020, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, I gave a virtual talk at the International Symposium on Technology and Society: "The Story of the Internet and How it Broke Bad: A Call for Public-Interest Technologists." It was something I was really proud of, and its finally up on...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squidmobile

The Squidmobile. 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...

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...

Linux Improves Its Random Number Generator

In kernel version 5.17, both /dev/random and /dev/urandom have been replaced with a new -- identical -- algorithm based on the BLAKE2 hash function, which is an excellent security improvement...

Stealing Bicycles by Swapping QR Codes

This is a clever hack against those bike-rental kiosks: Theyre stealing Citi Bikes by switching the QR scan codes on two bicycles near each other at a docking station, then waiting for an unsuspecting cyclist to try to unlock a bike with his or her smartphone app. The app doesnt work for the ride...

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...

China’s Olympics App Is Horribly Insecure

China is mandating that athletes download and use a health and travel app when they attend the Winter Olympics next month. Citizen Lab examined the app and found it riddled with security holes. Key Findings: MY2022, an app mandated for use by all attendees of the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing, ha...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Prices Are Rising

The price of squid in Korea is rising due to limited supply. 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 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...

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...

A Death Due to Ransomware

The Wall Street Journal is reporting on a babys death at an Alabama hospital in 2019, which they argue was a direct result of the ransomware attack the hospital was undergoing. Amid the hack, fewer eyes were on the heart monitors -- normally tracked on a large screen at the nurses station, in...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Yet Another IoT Cybersecurity Document

This one is from NIST: "Considerations for Managing Internet of Things IoT Cybersecurity and Privacy Risks." It's still in draft. Remember, there are many others...

E-Mailing Private HTTPS Keys

I don't know what to make of this story: The email was sent on Tuesday by the CEO of Trustico, a UK-based reseller of TLS certificates issued by the browser-trusted certificate authorities Comodo and, until recently, Symantec. It was sent to Jeremy Rowley, an executive vice president at DigiCert,...

Friday Squid Blogging: Kraken Pie

Pretty, but contains no actual squid ingredients. 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: Squids from Space Video Game

An early preview. 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...

Interview with Ross Anderson

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

Friday Squid Blogging: Truckload of Squid Spills in Rhode Island

Ugh: A tractor-trailer rollover sent a truckload of squid spilling into a Rhode Island roadway, leaving a stench as they sat in the road for hours in the summer heat. Local authorities have dubbed it the "Squidpocalypse of '26." That would be twenty tons of squid. As usual, you can also use this...

Friday Squid Blogging: Searching for the Colossal Squid

Fascinating video about searching for life undersea. The video basically makes the point that our bright white searchlights are scaring everything away, and that red light is more neutral. That, plus bait to attract sea creatures, is teaching us a lot about what's going on down there. Lots of...

AI Genie in the Wild

When I give talks about AI genies, I use this sort of example as a hypothetical. It's happened. The story is from Australia. Someone named Andrew tasked OpenClaw to book gym classes for him. And…. Minutes later, his AI agent reported it had discovered a way to book Andrew into classes several wee...

Iran Cyberattacks Against Minnesota Water Systems

Attribution is preliminary, and so far it seems no real damage. And it seems like this is a campaign that has targeted at least seven states. And, because this is where the US is right now, Trump doesn't believe it's Iran and thinks Minnesota…I guess…hacked itself. "I think I blame it on Minnesot...

More on the OpenAI Agent’s Attack on Hugging Face

Hugging Face has published a detailed timeline of the attack. From the summary: The agent was running an internal OpenAI cyber-capability evaluation based on the ExploitGym benchmark, which tasks an AI agent with finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities. OpenAI ran this on its own...

Google Is Suing Chinese Scammers Who Are Using Gemini

Not sure this will have any effect, but I support the effort: According to Google's legal filing, Outsider Enterprise operates through Telegram. The group offers phishing-as-a-service to individuals who may not be technically savvy enough to set up fraudulent websites and text campaigns on their...

Flock Cameras Can Surveil Cars Without License Plates

This is from a 2024 company presentation: Officers can also tap into data showing a car's decals, bumper stickers, back and top racks--along with temporary and unique state tags. Flock calls it a "Vehicle Fingerprint" and it's touted as a way for law enforcement officials to get more information...

The Realities of AI Video Surveillance

The Financial Times has a good article on how AI is changing the capabilities of video surveillance, with information from both Israel/Iran and Russia. I wrote about this sort of thing a few years ago, how AI enables mass spying in the way that computers and networks enabled mass surveillance. Th...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid-Inspired Fluid Pump

This fluid pump was inspired by the way squids propel themselves through the water. 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...