3092 matches found
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Sculpture in Massachusetts Building
Great blow-up sculpture. Blog moderation policy. The post Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Sculpture in Massachusetts Building appeared first on Schneier on Security...
Surveillance Watch
This is a fantastic project mapping the global surveillance industry...
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: Im speaking at eCrime 2024 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. The event runs from September 24 through 26, 2024, and my keynote is on the 24th. The list is maintained on this page...
The CrowdStrike Outage and Market-Driven Brittleness
Fridays massive internet outage, caused by a mid-sized tech company called CrowdStrike, disrupted major airlines, hospitals, and banks. Nearly 7,000 flights were canceled. It took down 911 systems and factories, courthouses, and television stations. Tallying the total cost will take time. The...
Hacking Scientific Citations
Some scholars are inflating their reference counts by sneaking them into metadata: Citations of scientific work abide by a standardized referencing system: Each reference explicitly mentions at least the title, authors names, publication year, journal or conference name, and page numbers of the...
Breaking a Password Manager
Interesting story of breaking the security of the RoboForm password manager in order to recover a cryptocurrency wallet password. Grand and Bruno spent months reverse engineering the version of the RoboForm program that they thought Michael had used in 2013 and found that the pseudo-random number...
New Attack on VPNs
This attack has been feasible for over two decades: Researchers have devised an attack against nearly all virtual private network applications that forces them to send and receive some or all traffic outside of the encrypted tunnel designed to protect it from snooping or tampering. TunnelVision, ...
Whale Song Code
During the Cold War, the US Navy tried to make a secret code out of whale song. The basic plan was to develop coded messages from recordings of whales, dolphins, sea lions, and seals. The submarine would broadcast the noises and a computer--the Combo Signal Recognizer CSR--would detect the specif...
Dan Solove on Privacy Regulation
Law professor Dan Solove has a new article on privacy regulation. In his email to me, he writes: "I’ve been pondering privacy consent for more than a decade, and I think I finally made a breakthrough with this article." His mini-abstract: In this Article I argue that most of the time, privacy...
Other Attempts to Take Over Open Source Projects
After the XZ Utils discovery, people have been examining other open-source projects. Surprising no one, the incident is not unique: The OpenJS Foundation Cross Project Council received a suspicious series of emails with similar messages, bearing different names and overlapping GitHub-associated...
US Cyber Safety Review Board on the 2023 Microsoft Exchange Hack
The US Cyber Safety Review Board released a report on the summer 2023 hack of Microsoft Exchange by China. It was a serious attack by the Chinese government that accessed the emails of senior US government officials. From the executive summary: The Board finds that this intrusion was preventable...
Friday Squid Blogging: New Species of Squid Discovered
A new species of squid was discovered, along with about a hundred other species. 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...
China Surveillance Company Hacked
Last week, someone posted something like 570 files, images and chat logs from a Chinese company called I-Soon. I-Soon sells hacking and espionage services to Chinese national and local government. Lots of details in the news articles. These arent details about the tools or techniques, more the...
Microsoft Is Spying on Users of Its AI Tools
Microsoft announced that it caught Chinese, Russian, and Iranian hackers using its AI tools--presumably coding tools--to improve their hacking abilities. From their report: In collaboration with OpenAI, we are sharing threat intelligence showing detected state affiliated adversaries--tracked as...
On the Insecurity of Software Bloat
Good essay on software bloat and the insecurities it causes. The world ships too much code, most of it by third parties, sometimes unintended, most of it uninspected. Because of this, there is a huge attack surface full of mediocre code. Efforts are ongoing to improve the quality of code itself,...
Documents about the NSA’s Banning of Furby Toys in the 1990s
Via a FOIA request, we have documents from the NSA about their banning of Furby toys. 404 Media has the story. EDITED TO ADD: The documents are now on Archive.org...
Friday Squid Blogging—18th Anniversary Post: New Species of Pygmy Squid Discovered
Theyre Ryukyuan pygmy squid Idiosepius kijimuna and Hannans pygmy squid Kodama jujutsu. The second one represents an entire new genus. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. And, yes, this is the eighteenth anniversary of...
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...
Identity Theft from 1965 Uncovered through Face Recognition
Interesting story: Napoleon Gonzalez, of Etna, assumed the identity of his brother in 1965, a quarter century after his siblings death as an infant, and used the stolen identity to obtain Social Security benefits under both identities, multiple passports and state identification cards, law...
Parmesan Anti-Forgery Protection
The Guardian is reporting about microchips in wheels of Parmesan cheese as an anti-forgery measure...
Privacy of Printing Services
The Washington Post has an article about popular printing services, and whether or not they read your documents and mine the data when you use them for printing: Ideally, printing services should avoid storing the content of your files, or at least delete daily. Print services should also...
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...
Credible Handwriting Machine
In case you dont have enough to worry about, someone has built a credible handwriting machine: This is still a work in progress, but the project seeks to solve one of the biggest problems with other homework machines, such as this one that I covered a few months ago after it blew up on social...
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...
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...
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...
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Is a Blockchain Thingy
I had no idea--until I read this incredibly jargon-filled article: Squid is a cross-chain liquidity and messaging router that swaps across multiple chains and their native DEXs via axlUSDC. So there. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I...
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...
Decarbonizing Cryptocurrencies through Taxation
Maintaining bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies causes about 0.3 percent of global CO2 emissions. That may not sound like a lot, but its more than the emissions of Switzerland, Croatia, and Norway combined. As many cryptocurrencies crash and the FTX bankruptcy moves into the litigation stage,...
Friday Squid Blogging: Grounded Fishing Boat Carrying 16,000 Pounds of Squid
Rough seas are hampering efforts to salvage the boat: The Speranza Marie, carrying 16,000 pounds of squid and some 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel, hit the shoreline near Chinese Harbor at about 2 a.m. on Dec. 15. Six crew members were on board, and all were rescued without injury by another fishing...
Friday Squid Blogging: Injured Giant Squid and Paddleboarder
Heres a video--I dont know where its from--of an injured juvenile male giant squid grabbing on to a paddleboard. 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...
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...
Hacking Automobile Keyless Entry Systems
Suspected members of a European car-theft ring have been arrested: The criminals targeted vehicles with keyless entry and start systems, exploiting the technology to get into the car and drive away. As a result of a coordinated action carried out on 10 October in the three countries involved, 31...
Security Vulnerabilities in Covert CIA Websites
Back in 2018, we learned that covert system of websites that the CIA used for communications was compromised by--at least--China and Iran, and that the blunder caused a bunch of arrests, imprisonments, and executions. Were now learning that the CIA is still "using an irresponsibly secured system...
Facebook Has No Idea What Data It Has
This is from a court deposition: Facebooks stonewalling has been revealing on its own, providing variations on the same theme: It has amassed so much data on so many billions of people and organized it so confusingly that full transparency is impossible on a technical level. In the March 2022...
The LockBit Ransomware Gang Is Surprisingly Professional
This article makes LockBit sound like a legitimate organization: The DDoS attack last weekend that put a temporary stop to leaking Entrust data was seen as an opportunity to explore the triple extortion tactic to apply more pressure on victims to pay a ransom. LockBitSupp said that the ransomware...
Man-in-the-Middle Phishing Attack
Heres a phishing campaign that uses a man-in-the-middle attack to defeat multi-factor authentication: Microsoft observed a campaign that inserted an attacker-controlled proxy site between the account users and the work server they attempted to log into. When the user entered a password into the...
Remotely Controlling Touchscreens
This is more of a demonstration than a real-world vulnerability, but researchers can use electromagnetic interference to remotely control touchscreens. From a news article: Its important to note that the attack has a few key limitations. Firstly, the hackers need to know the targets phone passcod...
A Taxonomy of Access Control
My personal definition of a brilliant idea is one that is immediately obvious once its explained, but no one has thought of it before. I cant believe that no one has described this taxonomy of access control before Ittay Eyal laid it out in this paper. The paper is about cryptocurrency wallet...
Drone Deliveries into Prisons
Seems its now common to sneak contraband into prisons with a drone...
New UFEI Rootkit
Kaspersky is reporting on a new UFEI rootkit that survives reinstalling the operating system and replacing the hard drive. From an article: The firmware compromises the UEFI, the low-level and highly opaque chain of firmware required to boot up nearly every modern computer. As the software that...
Post-Roe Privacy
This is an excellent essay outlining the post-Roe privacy threat model. Summary: period tracking apps are largely a red herring. Taken together, this means the primary digital threat for people who take abortion pills is the actual evidence of intention stored on your phone, in the form of texts,...
2022 Workshop on Economics and Information Security (WEIS)
I did not attend WEIS this year, but Ross Anderson was there and liveblogged all the talks...
M1 Chip Vulnerability
This is a new vulnerability against Apples M1 chip. Researchers say that it is unpatchable. Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, however, have created a novel hardware attack, which combines memory corruption and speculative execution attacks to sidestep...
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...
Long Story on the Accused CIA Vault 7 Leaker
Long article about Joshua Schulte, the accused leaker of the WikiLeaks Vault 7 and Vault 8 CIA data. Well worth reading...
Friday Squid Blogging: More on the “Mind Boggling” Squid Genome
Octopus and squid genes are weird. 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...
New Sophisticated Malware
Mandiant is reporting on a new botnet. The group, which security firm Mandiant is calling UNC3524, has spent the past 18 months burrowing into victims networks with unusual stealth. In cases where the group is ejected, it wastes no time reinfecting the victim environment and picking up where thin...
Friday Squid Blogging: Ten-Foot Long Squid Washed onto Japanese Shore — ALIVE
This is rare: An about 3-meter-long giant squid was found stranded on a beach here on April 20, in what local authorities said was a rare occurrence. At around 10 a.m., a nearby resident spotted the squid at Ugu beach in Obama, Fukui Prefecture, on the Sea of Japan coast. According to the Obama...
Why Vaccine Cards Are So Easily Forged
My proof of COVID-19 vaccination is recorded on an easy-to-forge paper card. With little trouble, I could print a blank form, fill it out, and snap a photo. Small imperfections wouldn’t pose any problem; you can’t see whether the paper’s weight is right in a digital image. When I fly...