Friday Squid Blogging: International Squid Awareness Day

It's International Cephalopod Awareness Days this week, and Tuesday was Squid Day. I can't believe I missed it. 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...

Zero-Day Vulnerabilities against Windows in the NSA Tools Released by the Shadow Brokers

In April, the Shadow Brokers -- presumably Russia -- released a batch of Windows exploits from what is presumably the NSA. Included in that release were eight different Windows vulnerabilities. Given a presumed theft date of the data as sometime between 2012 and 2013 -- based on timestamps of the...

DHS Mandates Federal Agencies to Run Vulnerability Disclosure Policy

The DHS is requiring all federal agencies to develop a vulnerability disclosure policy. The goal is that people who discover vulnerabilities in government systems have a mechanism for reporting them to someone who might actually do something about it. The devil is in the details, of course, but...

Employment Scam

Interesting story of an old-school remote-deposit capture fraud scam, wrapped up in a fake employment scam. Slashdot thread...

Click Here to Kill Everybody Reviews and Press Mentions

It's impossible to know all the details, but my latest book seems to be selling well. Initial reviews have been really positive: Boing Boing, Financial Times, Harris Online, Kirkus Reviews, Nature, Politico, and Virus Bulletin. I've also done a bunch of interviews -- either written or radio/podca...

Friday Squid Blogging: Flying Squid

Flying squid are real. 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: Squid Prices Rise as Catch Decreases

In Japan: Last year's haul sank 15% to 53,000 tons, according to the JF Zengyoren national federation of fishing cooperatives. The squid catch has fallen by half in just two years. The previous low was plumbed in 2016. Lighter catches have been blamed on changing sea temperatures, which impedes t...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Fake News

I never imagined that there would be fake news about squid. That website lets you write your own stories. 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...

SVR Attacks on Microsoft 365

FireEye is reporting the current known tactics that the SVR used to compromise Microsoft 365 cloud data as part of its SolarWinds operation: Mandiant has observed UNC2452 and other threat actors moving laterally to the Microsoft 365 cloud using a combination of four primary techniques: Steal the...

Russians Hack FBI Comms System

Yahoo News reported that the Russians have successfully targeted an FBI communications system: American officials discovered that the Russians had dramatically improved their ability to decrypt certain types of secure communications and had successfully tracked devices used by elite FBI...

Detecting Shoplifting Behavior

This system claims to detect suspicious behavior that indicates shoplifting: Vaak, a Japanese startup, has developed artificial intelligence software that hunts for potential shoplifters, using footage from security cameras for fidgeting, restlessness and other potentially suspicious body languag...

On the Security of Password Managers

There's new research on the security of password managers, specifically 1Password, Dashlane, KeePass, and Lastpass. This work specifically looks at password leakage on the host computer. That is, does the password manager accidentally leave plaintext copies of the password lying around memory? Al...

Alex Stamos on Content Moderation and Security

Former Facebook CISO Alex Stamos argues that increasing political pressure on social media platforms to moderate content will give them a pretext to turn all end-to-end crypto off -- which would be more profitable for them and bad for society. If we ask tech companies to fix ancient societal ills...

Friday Squid Blogging: More Problems with the Squid Emoji

Piling on from last week's post, the squid emoji's siphon is in the wrong place. 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...

Click Here to Kill Everybody News

My latest book is doing well. And I've been giving lots of talks and interviews about it. I can recommend three interviews: the Cyberlaw podcast with Stewart Baker, the Lawfare podcast with Ben Wittes, and Le Show with Henry Shearer. My book talk at Google is also available. The Audible version w...

Twelve-Year-Old Vulnerability Found in Windows Defender

Researchers found, and Microsoft has patched, a vulnerability in Windows Defender that has been around for twelve years. There is no evidence that anyone has used the vulnerability during that time. The flaw, discovered by researchers at the security firm SentinelOne, showed up in a driver that...

On Chinese "Spy Trains"

The trade war with China has reached a new industry: subway cars. Congress is considering legislation that would prevent the world's largest train maker, the Chinese-owned CRRC Corporation, from competing on new contracts in the United States. Part of the reasoning behind this legislation is...

Zipcar Disruption

This isn't a security story, but it easily could have been. Last Saturday, Zipcar had a system outage: "an outage experienced by a third party telecommunications vendor disrupted connections between the company's vehicles and its reservation software." That didn't just mean people couldn't get ca...

Prices for Zero-Day Exploits Are Rising

Companies are willing to pay ever-increasing amounts for good zero-day exploits against hard-to-break computers and applications: On Monday, market-leading exploit broker Zerodium said it would pay up to $2 million for zero-click jailbreaks of Apple's iOS, $1.5 million for one-click iOS jailbreak...

Long-Range Familial Searching Forensics

Good article on using long-range familial searching -- basically, DNA matching of distant relatives -- as a police forensics tool. EDITED TO ADD 1/5: A smattering of papers on the topic...

GoldenEye Malware

I don't have anything to say -- mostly because I'm otherwise busy -- about the malware known as GoldenEye, NotPetya, or ExPetr. But I wanted a post to park links. Please add any good relevant links in the comments...

DARPA Is Developing an Open-Source Voting System

This sounds like a good development: ...a new $10 million contract the Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA has launched to design and build a secure voting system that it hopes will be impervious to hacking. The first-of-its-kind system will be designed by an...

New Australian Backdoor Law

Last week, Australia passed a law giving the government the ability to demand backdoors in computers and communications systems. Details are still to be defined, but it's really bad. Note: Many people e-mailed me to ask why I haven't blogged this yet. One, I was busy with other things. And two,...

Friday Squid Blogging: Eating More Squid

This research paper concludes that we'll be eating more squid in the future. 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...

Hacking McDonald's for Free Food

This hack was possible because the McDonald's app didn't authenticate the server, and just did whatever the server told it to do: McDonald's receipts in Germany end with a link to a survey page. Once you take the survey, you receive a coupon code for a free small beverage, redeemable within a...

Default Password for GPS Trackers

Many GPS trackers are shipped with the default password 123456. Many users don't change them. We just need to eliminate default passwords. This is an easy win. EDITED TO ADD 9/12: A California law bans default passwords starting in 2020...

The Effects of Iran's Telegram Ban

The Center for Human Rights in Iran has released a report outlining the effect's of that country's ban on Telegram, a secure messaging app used by about half of the country. The ban will disrupt the most important, uncensored platform for information and communication in Iran, one that is used...

Harassment By Package Delivery

People harassing women by delivering anonymous packages purchased from Amazon. On the one hand, there is nothing new here. This could have happened decades ago, pre-Internet. But the Internet makes this easier, and the article points out that using prepaid gift cards makes this anonymous. I am...

Australia Considering New Law Weakening Encryption

News from Australia: Under the law, internet companies would have the same obligations telephone companies do to help law enforcement agencies, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said. Law enforcement agencies would need warrants to access the communications. "We've got a real problem in that the la...

Zero-Click Exploit in iPhones

Make sure you update your iPhones: Citizen Lab says two zero-days fixed by Apple today in emergency security updates were actively abused as part of a zero-click exploit chain dubbed BLASTPASS to deploy NSO Groups Pegasus commercial spyware onto fully patched iPhones. The two bugs, tracked as...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid-Like Underwater Drone

The Sea Hunting Autonomous Reconnaissance Drone SHARD swims like a squid and can explode on command. 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...

Software Developers and Security

According to a survey: "68% of the security professionals surveyed believe it's a programmer's job to write secure code, but they also think less than half of developers can spot security holes." And that's a problem. Nearly half of security pros surveyed, 49%, said they struggle to get developer...

Zoom Vulnerability

The Zoom conferencing app has a vulnerability that allows someone to remotely take over the computer's camera. It's a bad vulnerability, made worse by the fact that it remains even if you uninstall the Zoom app: This vulnerability allows any website to forcibly join a user to a Zoom call, with...

The Concept of "Return on Data"

This law review article by Noam Kolt, titled "Return on Data," proposes an interesting new way of thinking of privacy law. Abstract: Consumers routinely supply personal data to technology companies in exchange for services. Yet, the relationship between the utility U consumers gain and the data D...

Using a Fake Hand to Defeat Hand-Vein Biometrics

Nice work: One attraction of a vein based system over, say, a more traditional fingerprint system is that it may be typically harder for an attacker to learn how a user's veins are positioned under their skin, rather than lifting a fingerprint from a held object or high quality photograph, for...

ShadowBrokers Releases NSA UNITEDRAKE Manual

The ShadowBrokers released the manual for UNITEDRAKE, a sophisticated NSA Trojan that targets Windows machines: Able to compromise Windows PCs running on XP, Windows Server 2003 and 2008, Vista, Windows 7 SP 1 and below, as well as Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, the attack tool acts as a...

Friday Squid Blogging: Food Supplier Passes Squid Off as Octopus

According to a lawsuit main article behind paywall, "a Miami-based food vendor and its supplier have been misrepresenting their squid as octopus in an effort to boost profits." As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read m...

Keylogger Found in HP Laptop Audio Drivers

This is a weird story: researchers have discovered that an audio driver installed in some HP laptops includes a keylogger, which records all keystrokes to a local file. There seems to be nothing malicious about this, but it's a vivid illustration of how hard it is to secure a modern computer. The...

Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?

Persuasion is as old as our species. Both democracy and the market economy depend on it. Politicians persuade citizens to vote for them, or to support different policy positions. Businesses persuade consumers to buy their products or services. We all persuade our friends to accept our choice of...

Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid Genome Analyzed

This is fantastic work: In total, the researchers identified approximately 2.7 billion DNA base pairs, which is around 90 percent the size of the human genome. There's nothing particularly special about that size, especially considering that the axolotl genome is 10 times larger than the human...

Detecting Credit Card Skimmers

Modern credit card skimmers hidden in self-service gas pumps communicate via Bluetooth. There's now an app that can detect them: The team from the University of California San Diego, who worked with other computer scientists from the University of Illinois, developed an app called Bluetana which...

Attorney General William Barr on Encryption Policy

Yesterday, Attorney General William Barr gave a major speech on encryption policy -- what is commonly known as "going dark." Speaking at Fordham University in New York, he admitted that adding backdoors decreases security but that it is worth it. Some hold this view dogmatically, claiming that it...

My Blogging

Blog regulars will notice that I haven't been posting as much lately as I have in the past. There are two reasons. One, it feels harder to find things to write about. So often it's the same stories over and over. I don't like repeating myself. Two, I am busy writing a book. The title is still:...

I Am Parting With My Crypto Library

The time has come for me to find a new home for my paper cryptography library. Its about 150 linear feet of books, conference proceedings, journals, and monographs -- mostly from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. My preference is that it goes to an educational institution, but will consider a corporat...

Details on Uzbekistan Government Malware: SandCat

Kaspersky has uncovered an Uzbeki hacking operation, mostly due to incompetence on the part of the government hackers. The group's lax operational security includes using the name of a military group with ties to the SSS to register a domain used in its attack infrastructure; installing Kaspersky...

Modifying a Tesla to Become a Surveillance Platform

From DefCon: At the Defcon hacker conference today, security researcher Truman Kain debuted what he calls the Surveillance Detection Scout. The DIY computer fits into the middle console of a Tesla Model S or Model 3, plugs into its dashboard USB port, and turns the car's built-in cameras­ -- the...

First American Financial Corp. Data Records Leak

Krebs on Security is reporting a massive data leak by the real estate title insurance company First American Financial Corp. "The title insurance agency collects all kinds of documents from both the buyer and seller, including Social Security numbers, drivers licenses, account statements, and eve...

Maliciously Tampering with Medical Imagery

In what I am sure is only a first in many similar demonstrations, researchers are able to add or remove cancer signs from CT scans. The results easily fool radiologists. I don't think the medical device industry has thought at all about data integrity and authentication issues. In a world where...

Cyberinsurance and Acts of War

I had not heard about this case before. Zurich Insurance has refused to pay Mondelez International's claim of $100 million in damages from NotPetya. It claims it is an act of war and therefor not covered. Mondelez is suing. Those turning to cyber insurance to manage their exposure presently face...

Propaganda and the Weakening of Trust in Government

On November 4, 2016, the hacker "Guccifer 2.0,: a front for Russia's military intelligence service, claimed in a blogpost that the Democrats were likely to use vulnerabilities to hack the presidential elections. On November 9, 2018, President Donald Trump started tweeting about the senatorial...