Fraudulent Tactics on Amazon Marketplace

Fascinating article about the many ways Amazon Marketplace sellers sabotage each other and defraud customers. The opening example: framing a seller for false advertising by buying fake five-star reviews for their products. Defacement: Sellers armed with the accounts of Amazon distributors sometim...

On Disguise

The former CIA Chief of Disguise has a fascinating video about her work...

Friday Squid Blogging: Dissecting a Giant Squid

Lessons learned. 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...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I'm giving a book talk on Click Here to Kill Everybody at the Ford Foundation in New York City, on September 5, 2018. The Aspen Institute's Cybersecurity & Technology Program is holding a book launch for Click Here to Kill Everybod...

Boston Red Sox Caught Using Technology to Steal Signs

The Boston Red Sox admitted to eavesdropping on the communications channel between catcher and pitcher. Stealing signs is believed to be particularly effective when there is a runner on second base who can both watch what hand signals the catcher is using to communicate with the pitcher and can...

Alternatives to Government-Mandated Encryption Backdoors

Policy essay: "Encryption Substitutes," by Andrew Keane Woods: In this short essay, I make a few simple assumptions that bear mentioning at the outset. First, I assume that governments have good and legitimate reasons for getting access to personal data. These include things like controlling crim...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Dog Toy

Its sold out, but the pictures are cute. 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: Colossal Squid Photographed off the Coast of Antarctica

Wow. 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...

Chinese Supply-Chain Attack on Computer Systems

Bloomberg News has a major story about the Chinese hacking computer motherboards made by Supermicro, Levono, and others. Its been going on since at least 2008. The US government has known about it for almost as long, and has tried to keep the attack secret: Chinas exploitation of products made by...

Another SolarWinds Orion Hack

At the same time the Russians were using a backdoored SolarWinds update to attack networks worldwide, another threat actor -- believed to be Chinese in origin -- was using an already existing vulnerability in Orion to penetrate networks: Two people briefed on the case said FBI investigators...

Friday Squid Blogging: Editing the Squid Genome

Scientists have edited the genome of the Doryteuthis pealeii squid with CRISPR. A first. 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: An MRI Scan of a Squid's Brain

This paper30562-0 is filled with brain science that I do not understand news article, but fails to answer what I consider to be the important question: how do you keep a live squid still for long enough to do an MRI scan on them? As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the securi...

Attacking Driverless Cars with Projected Images

Interesting research -- "Phantom Attacks Against Advanced Driving Assistance Systems": Abstract: The absence of deployed vehicular communication systems, which prevents the advanced driving assistance systems ADASs and autopilots of semi/fully autonomous cars to validate their virtual perception...

Superhero Movies and Security Lessons

A paper I co-wrote was just published in Security Journal: "Superheroes on screen: real life lessons for security debates": Abstract: Superhero films and episodic shows have existed since the early days of those media, but since 9/11, they have become one of the most popular and most lucrative...

The Threat of Fake Academic Research

Interesting analysis of the possibility, feasibility, and efficacy of deliberately fake scientific research, something I had previously speculated about...

New DNS Hijacking Attacks

DNS hijacking isn't new, but this seems to be an attack of unprecedented scale: Researchers at Cisco's Talos security division on Wednesday revealed that a hacker group it's calling Sea Turtle carried out a broad campaign of espionage via DNS hijacking, hitting 40 different organizations. In the...

Friday Squid Blogging: Fried Squid Recipe

This is an easy fried squid recipe with saffron and agrodolce. 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...

Malware Installed in Asus Computers through Hacked Update Process

Kaspersky Labs is reporting on a new supply chain attack they call "Shadowhammer." In January 2019, we discovered a sophisticated supply chain attack involving the ASUS Live Update Utility. The attack took place between June and November 2018 and according to our telemetry, it affected a large...

CAs Reissue Over One Million Weak Certificates

Turns out that the software a bunch of CAs used to generate public-key certificates was flawed: they created random serial numbers with only 63 bits instead of the required 64. That may not seem like a big deal to the layman, but that one bit change means that the serial numbers only have half th...

Friday Squid Blogging: Good Squid Fishing in the Exmouth Gulf

The conditions are ideal for squid fishing in the Exmouth Gulf in West Australia. 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: Te Papa Colossal Squid Exhibition Is Being Renovated

The New Zealand home of the colossal squid exhibit is behind renovated. 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...

iOS 11 Allows Users to Disable Touch ID

A new feature in Apple's new iPhone operating system -- iOS 11 -- will allow users to quickly disable Touch ID. A new setting, designed to automate emergency services calls, lets iPhone users tap the power button quickly five times to call 911. This doesn't automatically dial the emergency servic...

On Robots Killing People

The robot revolution began long ago, and so did the killing. One day in 1979, a robot at a Ford Motor Company casting plant malfunctioned--human workers determined that it was not going fast enough. And so twenty-five-year-old Robert Williams was asked to climb into a storage rack to help move...

Commercial Location Data Used to Out Priest

A Catholic priest was outed through commercially available surveillance data. Vice has a good analysis: The news starkly demonstrates not only the inherent power of location data, but how the chance to wield that power has trickled down from corporations and intelligence agencies to essentially a...

Friday Squid Blogging: Underwater Cameras for Observing Squid

Interesting research paper. 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...

GPS Vulnerabilities

Really good op-ed in the New York Times about how vulnerable the GPS system is to interference, spoofing, and jamming -- and potential alternatives. The 2018 National Defense Authorization Act included funding for the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Transportation to jointly conduct...

Friday Squid Blogging: Amazing Video of a Black-Eyed Squid Trying to Eat an Owlfish

From the Monterey Bay Aquarium. 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...

Finding the Location of Telegram Users

Security researcher Ahmed Hassan has shown that spoofing the Androids "People Nearby" feature allows him to pinpoint the physical location of Telegram users: Using readily available software and a rooted Android device, hes able to spoof the location his device reports to Telegram servers. By usi...

Latest on the SVR’s SolarWinds Hack

The New York Times has an in-depth article on the latest information about the SolarWinds hack not a great name, since its much more far-reaching than that. Interviews with key players investigating what intelligence agencies believe to be an operation by Russia’s S.V.R. intelligence service...

Kubernetes Security

Attack matrix for Kubernetes, using the MITRE ATT framework. A good first step towards understand the security of this suddenly popular and very complex container orchestration system...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Eggs

Cool photo. 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. EDITED TO ADD 3/4: I just deleted a slew of comments about COVID 19. I may reinstate some of them later; right now I want some time t...

Chinese Hackers Bypassing Two-Factor Authentication

Interesting story of how a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group is bypassing the RSA SecurID two-factor authentication system. How they did it remains unclear; although, the Fox-IT team has their theory. They said APT20 stole an RSA SecurID software token from a hacked system, which the Chinese...

NordVPN Breached

There was a successful attack against NordVPN: Based on the command log, another of the leaked secret keys appeared to secure a private certificate authority that NordVPN used to issue digital certificates. Those certificates might be issued for other servers in NordVPN's network or for a variety...

Congressional Report on the 2017 Equifax Data Breach

The US House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has just released a comprehensive report on the 2017 Equifax hack. It's a great piece of writing, with a detailed timeline, root cause analysis, and lessons learned. Lance Spitzner also commented on this. Here is my...

More Spectre/Meltdown-Like Attacks

Back in January, we learned about a class of vulnerabilities against microprocessors that leverages various performance and efficiency shortcuts for attack. I wrote that the first two attacks would be just the start: It shouldn't be surprising that microprocessor designers have been building...

How DNA Databases Violate Everyone's Privacy

If you're an American of European descent, there's a 60% chance you can be uniquely identified by public information in DNA databases. This is not information that you have made public; this is information your relatives have made public. Research paper: "Identity inference of genomic data using...

Friday Squid Blogging: New Tool for Grabbing Squid and other Fragile Sea Creatures

Interesting video of a robot grabber that's delicate enough to capture squid and even jellyfish in the ocean. 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...

Maliciously Changing Someone's Address

Someone changed the address of UPS corporate headquarters to his own apartment in Chicago. The company discovered it three months later. The problem, of course, is that in the US there isn't any authentication of change-of-address submissions: According to the Postal Service, nearly 37 million...

Extracting Secrets from Machine Learning Systems

This is fascinating research about how the underlying training data for a machine-learning system can be inadvertently exposed. Basically, if a machine-learning system trains on a dataset that contains secret information, in some cases an attacker can query the system to extract that secret...

Fraud Detection in Pokémon Go

I play Pokémon Go. There, I've admitted it. One of the interesting aspects of the game I've been watching is how the game's publisher, Niantic, deals with cheaters. There are three basic types of cheating in Pokémon Go. The first is botting, where a computer plays the game instead of a person. Th...

Yet Another Russian Hack of the NSA -- This Time with Kaspersky's Help

The Wall Street Journal has a bombshell of a story. Yet another NSA contractor took classified documents home with him. Yet another Russian intelligence operation stole copies of those documents. The twist this time is that the Russians identified the documents because the contractor had Kaspersk...

Voting Machine Security

Last week, DefCon hosted a "Voter Hacker Village" event. Every single voting machine there was easily hackable. Here are detailed details. There should be a summary report soon; I'll add it to this post when it's published...

Roombas will Spy on You

The company that sells the Roomba autonomous vacuum wants to sell the data about your home that it collects. Some questions: What happens if a Roomba user consents to the data collection and later sells his or her home -- especially furnished -- and now the buyers of the data have a map of a home...

Side-Channel Attack against CRYSTALS-Kyber

CRYSTALS-Kyber is one of the public-key algorithms currently recommended by NIST as part of its post-quantum cryptography standardization process. Researchers have just published a side-channel attack--using power consumption--against an implementation of the algorithm that was supposed to be...

Security Analysis of Threema

A group of Swiss researchers have published an impressive security analysis of Threema. We provide an extensive cryptographic analysis of Threema, a Swiss-based encrypted messaging application with more than 10 million users and 7000 corporate customers. We present seven different attacks against...

AirDropped Gun Photo Causes Terrorist Scare

A teenager on an airplane sent a photo of a replica gun via AirDrop to everyone who had their settings configured to receive unsolicited photos from strangers. This caused a three-hour delay as the plane -- still at the gate -- was evacuated and searched. The teen was not allowed to reboard. I ca...

The DarkSide Ransomware Gang

The New York Times has a long story on the DarkSide ransomware gang. A glimpse into DarkSides secret communications in the months leading up to the Colonial Pipeline attack reveals a criminal operation on the rise, pulling in millions of dollars in ransom payments each month. DarkSide offers what...

When AIs Start Hacking

If you dont have enough to worry about already, consider a world where AIs are hackers. Hacking is as old as humanity. We are creative problem solvers. We exploit loopholes, manipulate systems, and strive for more influence, power, and wealth. To date, hacking has exclusively been a human activit...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Orders Down in Italy

COVID-19 is depressing the demand for squid in Italy. The article is a week old, and already seems almost comically quaint. 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...

Supply-Chain Attack against the Electron Development Platform

Electron is a cross-platform development system for many popular communications apps, including Skype, Slack, and WhatsApp. Security vulnerabilities in the update system allows someone to silently inject malicious code into applications. From a news article: At the BSides LV security conference o...