Reverse Engineering a Chinese Surveillance App

Human Rights Watch has reverse engineered an app used by the Chinese police to conduct mass surveillance on Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang. The details are fascinating, and chilling. Boing Boing post...

Another NSA Leaker Identified and Charged

In 2015, the Intercept started publishing "The Drone Papers," based on classified documents leaked by an unknown whistleblower. Today, someone who worked at the NSA, and then at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, was charged with the crime. It is unclear how he was initially identified...

Technology to Out Sex Workers

Two related stories: PornHub is using machine learning algorithms to identify actors in different videos, so as to better index them. People are worried that it can really identify them, by linking their stage names to their real names. Facebook somehow managed to link a sex worker's clients unde...

NSA Collects MS Windows Error Information

Back in 2013, Der Spiegel reported that the NSA intercepts and collects Windows bug reports: One example of the sheer creativity with which the TAO spies approach their work can be seen in a hacking method they use that exploits the error-proneness of Microsoft's Windows. Every user of the...

Friday Squid Blogging: 13-foot Giant Squid Caught off New Zealand Coast

It's probably a juvenile: Researchers aboard the New Zealand-based National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research Ltd NIWA research vessel Tangaroa were on an expedition to survey hoki, New Zealand's most valuable commercial fish, in the Chatham Rise ­ an area of ocean floor to the east of...

Side-Channel Attack against Electronic Locks

Several high-security electronic locks are vulnerable to side-channel attacks involving power monitoring...

Security and Human Behavior (SHB) 2019

Today is the second day of the twelfth Workshop on Security and Human Behavior, which I am hosting at Harvard University. SHB is a small, annual, invitational workshop of people studying various aspects of the human side of security, organized each year by Alessandro Acquisti, Ross Anderson, and...

New Attack Against Electrum Bitcoin Wallets

This is clever: How the attack works: Attacker added tens of malicious servers to the Electrum wallet network. Users of legitimate Electrum wallets initiate a Bitcoin transaction. If the transaction reaches one of the malicious servers, these servers reply with an error message that urges users t...

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...

Hacking a Segway

The Segway has a mobile app. It is hackable: While analyzing the communication between the app and the Segway scooter itself, Kilbride noticed that a user PIN number meant to protect the Bluetooth communication from unauthorized access wasn't being used for authentication at every level of the...

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: On the Efficacy of Squid as Bait

How to use squid as bait. 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: 80-Foot Steel Kraken Deliberately Sunk

The headline gives the story: "An 80-Foot Steel Kraken Will Create an Artificial Coral Reef Near the British Virgin Islands." 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...

Alex Stamos on Content Moderation and Security

Really interesting talk by former Facebook CISO Alex Stamos about the problems inherent in content moderation by social media platforms. Well worth watching...

Why Are Cryptographers Being Denied Entry into the US?

In March, Adi Shamir -- that's the "S" in RSA -- was denied a US visa to attend the RSA Conference. He's Israeli. This month, British citizen Ross Anderson couldn't attend an awards ceremony in DC because of visa issues. You can listen to his recorded acceptance speech. I've heard of two other...

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...

Amazon Is Losing the War on Fraudulent Sellers

Excellent article on fraudulent seller tactics on Amazon. The most prominent black hat companies for US Amazon sellers offer ways to manipulate Amazon's ranking system to promote products, protect accounts from disciplinary actions, and crush competitors. Sometimes, these black hat companies brib...

iOS 12.1 Vulnerability

This is really just to point out that computer security is really hard: Almost as soon as Apple released iOS 12.1 on Tuesday, a Spanish security researcher discovered a bug that exploits group Facetime calls to give anyone access to an iPhone users' contact information with no need for a passcode...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I'm speaking at SecIT by Heise in Hannover, Germany on March 26, 2020. The list is maintained on this page...

Friday Squid Blogging: Color-Changing Properties of the Opalescent Inshore Squid

Interesting stuff. 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...

Credit Card Privacy

Good article in the Washington Post on all the surveillance associated with credit card use...

Massive iPhone Hack Targets Uyghurs

China is being blamed for a massive surveillance operation that targeted Uyghur Muslims. This story broke in waves, the first wave being about the iPhone. Earlier this year, Google's Project Zero found a series of websites that have been using zero-day vulnerabilities to indiscriminately install...

Wanted: Cybersecurity Imagery

Eli Sugarman of the Hewlettt Foundation laments about the sorry state of cybersecurity imagery: The state of cybersecurity imagery is, in a word, abysmal. A simple Google Image search for the term proves the point: It's all white men in hoodies hovering menacingly over keyboards, green...

Resetting Your GE Smart Light Bulb

If you need to reset the software in your GE smart light bulb -- firmware version 2.8 or later -- just follow these easy instructions: Start with your bulb off for at least 5 seconds. 1. Turn on for 8 seconds 2. Turn off for 2 seconds 3. Turn on for 8 seconds 4. Turn off for 2 seconds 5. Turn on...

Details of the Cloud Hopper Attacks

Reuters has a long article on the Chinese government APT attack called Cloud Hopper. It was much bigger than originally reported. The hacking campaign, known as "Cloud Hopper," was the subject of a U.S. indictment in December that accused two Chinese nationals of identity theft and fraud...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid-Focused Menus in Croatia

This is almost over: From 1 December 2018 -- 6 January 2019, Days of Adriatic squid will take place at restaurants all over north-west Istria. Restaurants will be offering affordable full-course menus based on Adriatic squid, combined with quality local olive oil and fine wines. As usual, you can...

Israeli Surveillance Gear

The Israeli Defense Force mounted a botched raid in Gaza. They were attempting to install surveillance gear, which they ended up leaving behind. There are photos -- scroll past the video. Israeli media is claiming that the capture of this gear by Hamas causes major damage to Israeli electronic...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Sculptures

Pretty. 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...

Traffic Analysis of the LTE Mobile Standard

Interesting research in using traffic analysis to learn things about encrypted traffic. It's hard to know how critical these vulnerabilities are. They're very hard to close without wasting a huge amount of bandwidth. The active attacks are more interesting. EDITED TO ADD 7/3: More information. I...

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: Amazingly Realistic Squid Drawings

The squid drawings of Yuuki Tokuda are simply incredible. I tried to figure out how to buy one of them, but everything is in Japanese. 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 Can Edit Their Own Genome

Amazing: Revealing yet another super-power in the skillful squid, scientists have discovered that squid massively edit their own genetic instructions not only within the nucleus of their neurons, but also within the axon -- the long, slender neural projections that transmit electrical impulses to...

New Reductor Nation-State Malware Compromises TLS

Kaspersky has a detailed blog post about a new piece of sophisticated malware that it's calling Reductor. The malware is able to compromise TLS traffic by infecting the computer with hacked TLS engine substituted on the fly, "marking" infected TLS handshakes by compromising the underlining...

France Outlines Its Approach to Cyberwar

In a document published earlier this month in French, France described the legal framework in which it will conduct cyberwar operations. Lukasz Olejnik explains what it means, and it's worth reading...

The Cost of Cybercrime

Really interesting paper calculating the worldwide cost of cybercrime: Abstract: In 2012 we presented the first systematic study of the costs of cybercrime. In this paper,we report what has changed in the seven years since. The period has seen major platform evolution, with the mobile phone...

How Technology and Politics Are Changing Spycraft

Interesting article about how traditional nation-based spycraft is changing. Basically, the Internet makes it increasingly possible to generate a good cover story; cell phone and other electronic surveillance techniques make tracking people easier; and machine learning will make all of this...

TSB Bank Disaster

This seems like an absolute disaster: The very short version is that a UK bank, TSB, which had been merged into and then many years later was spun out of Lloyds Bank, was bought by the Spanish bank Banco Sabadell in 2015. Lloyds had continued to run the TSB systems and was to transfer them over t...

Facebook and Cambridge Analytica

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, news articles and commentators have focused on what Facebook knows about us. A lot, it turns out. It collects data from our posts, our likes, our photos, things we type and delete without posting, and things we do while not on Facebook and even when...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Product Recall

Lidl is recalling two of its packaged squid products because of the presence of struvite salt crystals. The danger is unclear. The article says that struvite crystals "may be mistaken as glass fragments," which isn't actually dangerous. It also says: "As these salt crystals may cause injury, the...

What the NSA Collects via 702

New York Times reporter Charlie Savage writes about some bad statistics we're all using: Among surveillance legal policy specialists, it is common to cite a set of statistics from an October 2011 opinion by Judge John Bates, then of the FISA Court, about the volume of internet communications the...

New Windows IPv6 Zero-Click Vulnerability

The press is reporting a critical Windows vulnerability affecting IPv6. As Microsoft explained in its Tuesday advisory, unauthenticated attackers can exploit the flaw remotely in low-complexity attacks by repeatedly sending IPv6 packets that include specially crafted packets. Microsoft also share...

Microsoft Secure Boot Bug

Microsoft is currently patching a zero-day Secure-Boot bug. The BlackLotus bootkit is the first-known real-world malware that can bypass Secure Boot protections, allowing for the execution of malicious code before your PC begins loading Windows and its many security protections. Secure Boot has...

Technology and Policymakers

Technologists and policymakers largely inhabit two separate worlds. It's an old problem, one that the British scientist CP Snow identified in a 1959 essay entitled The Two Cultures. He called them sciences and humanities, and pointed to the split as a major hindrance to solving the world's...

More on Law Enforcement Backdoor Demands

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy convened an Encryption Working Group to attempt progress on the "going dark" debate. They have released their report: "Moving the Encryption Policy Conversation Forward. The main...

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...

Science Fiction Writers Helping Imagine Future Threats

The French army is going to put together a team of science fiction writers to help imagine future threats. Leaving aside the question of whether science fiction writers are better or worse at envisioning nonfictional futures, this isn't new. The US Department of Homeland Security did the same thi...

Unhackable Cryptography?

A recent article overhyped the release of EverCrypt, a cryptography library created using formal methods to prove security against specific attacks. The Quanta magazine article sets off a series of "snake-oil" alarm bells. The author's Github README is more measured and accurate, and illustrates...

Reconstructing SIGSALY

Lessons learned in reconstructing the World War II-era SIGSALY voice encryption system...

Facebook's New Privacy Hires

The Wired headline sums it up nicely -- "Facebook Hires Up Three of Its Biggest Privacy Critics": In December, Facebook hired Nathan White away from the digital rights nonprofit Access Now, and put him in the role of privacy policy manager. On Tuesday of this week, lawyers Nate Cardozo, of the...