Chinese Hacking of US Critical Infrastructure

Everyone is writing about an interagency and international report on Chinese hacking of US critical infrastructure. Lots of interesting details about how the group, called Volt Typhoon, accesses target networks and evades detection...

Hacking Suicide

Heres a religious hack: You want to commit suicide, but its a mortal sin: your soul goes straight to hell, forever. So what you do is murder someone. That will get you executed, but if you confess your sins to a priest beforehand you avoid hell. Problem solved. This was actually a problem in the...

UK Runs Fake DDoS-for-Hire Sites

Brian Krebs is reporting that the UKs National Crime Agency is setting up fake DDoS-for-hire sites as part of a sting operation: The NCA says all of its fake so-called "booter" or "stresser" sites -­ which have so far been accessed by several thousand people--have been created to look like they...

Security Vulnerabilities in Snipping Tools

Both Googles Pixels Markup Tool and the Windows Snipping Tool have vulnerabilities that allow people to partially recover content that was edited out of images...

Elephant Hackers

An elephant uses its right-of-way privileges to stop sugar-cane trucks and grab food...

Nick Weaver on Regulating Cryptocurrency

Nicholas Weaver wrote an excellent paper on the problems of cryptocurrencies and the need to regulate the space--with all existing regulations. His conclusion: Regulators, especially regulators in the United States, often fear accusations of stifling innovation. As such, the cryptocurrency space...

Friday Squid Blogging: Thermal Batteries from Squid Proteins

Researchers are making thermal batteries from "a synthetic material thats derived from squid ring teeth protein." 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...

SolarWinds and Market Incentives

In early 2021, IEEE Security and Privacy asked a number of board members for brief perspectives on the SolarWinds incident while it was still breaking news. This was my response. The penetration of government and corporate networks worldwide is the result of inadequate cyberdefenses across the...

Attacking Machine Learning Systems

The field of machine learning ML security--and corresponding adversarial ML--is rapidly advancing as researchers develop sophisticated techniques to perturb, disrupt, or steal the ML model or data. It’s a heady time; because we know so little about the security of these systems, there are many...

Ransomware Payments Are Down

Chainalysis reports that worldwide ransomware payments were down in 2022. Ransomware attackers extorted at least $456.8 million from victims in 2022, down from $765.6 million the year before. As always, we have to caveat these findings by noting that the true totals are much higher, as there are...

Threats of Machine-Generated Text

With the release of ChatGPT, Ive read many random articles about this or that threat from the technology. This paper is a good survey of the field: what the threats are, how we might detect machine-generated text, directions for future research. Its a solid grounding amongst all of the hype...

Sirius XM Software Vulnerability

This is new: Newly revealed research shows that a number of major car brands, including Honda, Nissan, Infiniti, and Acura, were affected by a previously undisclosed security bug that would have allowed a savvy hacker to hijack vehicles and steal user data. According to researchers, the bug was i...

Prompt Injection/Extraction Attacks against AI Systems

This is an interesting attack I had not previously considered. The variants are interesting, and I think were just starting to understand their implications...

Montenegro Is the Victim of a Cyberattack

Details are few, but Montenegro has suffered a cyberattack: A combination of ransomware and distributed denial-of-service attacks, the onslaught disrupted government services and prompted the country’s electrical utility to switch to manual control. … But the attack against Montenegro’s...

Clever Phishing Scam Uses Legitimate PayPal Messages

Brian Krebs is reporting on a clever PayPal phishing scam that uses legitimate PayPal messaging. Basically, the scammers use the PayPal invoicing system to send the email. The email lists a phone number to dispute the charge, which is not PayPal and quickly turns into a request to download and...

Security and Cheap Complexity

Ive been saying that complexity is the worst enemy of security for a long time now. Heres me in 1999. And its been true for a long time. In 2018, Thomas Dullien of Googles Project Zero talked about "cheap complexity." Andrew Appel summarizes: The anomaly of cheap complexity. For most of human...

$23 Million YouTube Royalties Scam

Scammers were able to convince YouTube that other peoples music was their own. They successfully stole $23 million before they were caught. No one knows how common this scam is, and how much money total is being stolen in this way. Presumably this is not an uncommon fraud. While the size of the...

Apple’s Lockdown Mode

I havent written about Apples Lockdown Mode yet, mostly because I havent delved into the details. This is how Apple describes it: Lockdown Mode offers an extreme, optional level of security for the very few users who, because of who they are or what they do, may be personally targeted by some of...

Ecuador’s Attempt to Resettle Edward Snowden

Someone hacked the Ecuadorian embassy in Moscow and found a document related to Ecuadors 2013 efforts to bring Edward Snowden there. If you remember, Snowden was traveling from Hong Kong to somewhere when the US revoked his passport, stranding him in Russia. In the document, Ecuador asks Russia t...

On the Subversion of NIST by the NSA

Nadiya Kostyuk and Susan Landau wrote an interesting paper: "Dueling Over DUALECDRBG: The Consequences of Corrupting a Cryptographic Standardization Process": Abstract: In recent decades, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST, which develops cryptographic standards for...

Twitter Used Two-Factor Login Details for Ad Targeting

Twitter was fined $150 million for using phone numbers and email addresses collected for two-factor authentication for ad targeting...

Smartphones and Civilians in Wartime

Interesting article about civilians using smartphones to assist their militaries in wartime, and how that blurs the important legal distinction between combatants and non-combatants: The principle of distinction between the two roles is a critical cornerstone of international humanitarian law­--t...

Remotely Controlling Touchscreens

Researchers have demonstrated controlling touchscreens at a distance, at least in a laboratory setting: The core idea is to take advantage of the electromagnetic signals to execute basic touch events such as taps and swipes into targeted locations of the touchscreen with the goal of taking over...

Manipulating Machine-Learning Systems through the Order of the Training Data

Yet another adversarial ML attack: Most deep neural networks are trained by stochastic gradient descent. Now “stochastic” is a fancy Greek word for “random”; it means that the training data are fed into the model in random order. So what happens if the bad guys can cause the order to be not rando...

The Onion on Google Map Surveillance

"Google Maps Adds Shortcuts through Houses of People Google Knows Arent Home Right Now." Excellent satire...

Attacks on Managed Service Providers Expected to Increase

CISA, NSA, FBI, and similar organizations in the other Five Eyes countries are warning that attacks on MSPs--as a vector to their customers--are likely to increase. No details about what this prediction is based on. Makes sense, though. The SolarWinds attack was incredibly successful for the...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Skin–Inspired Insulating Material

Interesting: Drawing inspiration from cephalopod skin, engineers at the University of California, Irvine invented an adaptive composite material that can insulate beverage cups, restaurant to-go bags, parcel boxes and even shipping containers. … "The metal islands in our composite material are ne...

Russian Cyberattack against Ukrainian Power Grid Prevented

A Russian cyberweapon, similar to the one used in 2016, was detected and removed before it could be used. Key points: ESET researchers collaborated with CERT-UA to analyze the attack against the Ukrainian energy company The destructive actions were scheduled for 2022-04-08 but artifacts suggest...

Friday Squid Blogging: Do Squid Have Emotions?

Scientists are now debating whether octopuses, squid, and crabs have emotions. Short answer: we dont know, but cant rule it out. There may be a point when humans can no longer assume that crayfish, shrimp, and other invertebrates dont feel pain and other emotions. "If they can no longer be...

Details of an NSA Hacking Operation

Pangu Lab in China just published a report of a hacking operation by the Equation Group aka the NSA. It noticed the hack in 2013, and was able to map it with Equation Group tools published by the Shadow Brokers aka some Russian group. …the scope of victims exceeded 287 targets in 45 countries,...

Vulnerability in Stalkerware Apps

TechCrunch is reporting -- but not describing in detail -- a vulnerability in a series of stalkerware apps that exposes personal information of the victims. The vulnerability isnt in the apps installed on the victims phones, but in the website the stalker goes to view the information the app...

Privacy Violating COVID Tests

A good lesson in reading the fine print: Cignpost Diagnostics, which trades as ExpressTest and offers £35 tests for holidaymakers, said it holds the right to analyse samples from seals to "learn more about human health" -- and sell information on to third parties. Individuals are required to give...

On the Irish Health Services Executive Hack

A detailed report of the 2021 ransomware attack against Ireland’s Health Services Executive lists some really bad security practices: The report notes that: The HSE did not have a Chief Information Security Officer CISO or a “single responsible owner for cybersecurity at either senior executive o...

Breaking 256-bit Elliptic Curve Encryption with a Quantum Computer

Researchers have calculated the quantum computer size necessary to break 256-bit elliptic curve public-key cryptography: Finally, we calculate the number of physical qubits required to break the 256-bit elliptic curve encryption of keys in the Bitcoin network within the small available time frame...

Finding Vulnerabilities in Open Source Projects

The Open Source Security Foundation announced $10 million in funding from a pool of tech and financial companies, including $5 million from Microsoft and Google, to find vulnerabilities in open source projects: The "Alpha" side will emphasize vulnerability testing by hand in the most popular...

Merck Wins Insurance Lawsuit re NotPetya Attack

The insurance company Ace American has to pay for the losses: On 6th December 2021, the New Jersey Superior Court granted partial summary judgment attached in favour of Merck and International Indemnity, declaring that the War or Hostile Acts exclusion was inapplicable to the dispute. Merck...

An Examination of the Bug Bounty Marketplace

Heres a fascinating report: "Bounty Everything: Hackers and the Making of the Global Bug Marketplace." From a summary: …researchers Ryan Ellis and Yuan Stevens provide a window into the working lives of hackers who participate in “bug bounty” programs­ -- programs that hire hackers to discover an...

Ransomware Attacks against Water Treatment Plants

According to a report from CISA last week, there were three ransomware attacks against water treatment plants last year. WWS Sector cyber intrusions from 2019 to early 2021 include: In August 2021, malicious cyber actors used Ghost variant ransomware against a California-based WWS facility. The...

Hacking a Power Supply

This hack targets the firmware on modern power supplies. Yes, power supplies are also computers. Normally, when a phone is connected to a power brick with support for fast charging, the phone and the power adapter communicate with each other to determine the proper amount of electricity that can ...

Traffic Analysis of Home Security Cameras

Interesting research on home security cameras with cloud storage. Basically, attackers can learn very basic information about what's going on in front of the camera, and infer when there is someone home. News article. Slashdot thread...

The Security Value of Inefficiency

For decades, we have prized efficiency in our economy. We strive for it. We reward it. In normal times, that's a good thing. Running just at the margins is efficient. A single just-in-time global supply chain is efficient. Consolidation is efficient. And that's all profitable. Inefficiency, on th...

Friday Squid Blogging: Fantastic Video of a Juvenile Giant Squid

It's amazing: Then, about 20 hours into the recording from the Medusa's fifth deployment, Dr. Robinson saw the sharp points of tentacles sneaking into the camera's view. "My heart felt like exploding," he said on Thursday, over a shaky phone connection from the ship's bridge. At first, the animal...

Quantum Computing and Cryptography

Quantum computing is a new way of computing -- one that could allow humankind to perform computations that are simply impossible using today's computing technologies. It allows for very fast searching, something that would break some of the encryption algorithms we use today. And it allows us to...

Google Employees Use a Physical Token as Their Second Authentication Factor

Krebs on Security is reporting that all 85,000 Google employees use two-factor authentication with a physical token. A Google spokesperson said Security Keys now form the basis of all account access at Google. "We have had no reported or confirmed account takeovers since implementing security key...

IoT Inspector Tool from Princeton

Researchers at Princeton University have released IoT Inspector, a tool that analyzes the security and privacy of IoT devices by examining the data they send across the Internet. They've already used the tool to study a bunch of different IoT devices. From their blog post: Finding 3: Many IoT...

Cabinet of Secret Documents from Australia

This story of leaked Australian government secrets is unlike any other I've heard: It begins at a second-hand shop in Canberra, where ex-government furniture is sold off cheaply. The deals can be even cheaper when the items in question are two heavy filing cabinets to which no-one can find the...

New Book Coming in September: "Click Here to Kill Everybody"

My next book is still on track for a September 2018 publication. Norton is still the publisher. The title is now Click Here to Kill Everybody: Peril and Promise on a Hyperconnected Planet, which I generally refer to as CH2KE. The table of contents has changed since I last blogged about this, and ...

Amazon's Door Lock Is Amazon's Bid to Control Your Home

Interesting essay about Amazon's smart lock: When you add Amazon Key to your door, something more sneaky also happens: Amazon takes over. You can leave your keys at home and unlock your door with the Amazon Key app -- but it's really built for Amazon deliveries. To share online access with family...

Wondermark on Security

Another comic...

Surveillance Intermediaries

Interesting law-journal article: "Surveillance Intermediaries," by Alan Z. Rozenshtein. Abstract:Apple's 2016 fight against a court order commanding it to help the FBI unlock the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino terrorists exemplifies how central the question of regulating government...