Friday Squid Blogging: "How the Squid Lost Its Shell"

Interesting essay by Danna Staaf, the author of Squid Empire. I mentioned the book two weeks ago. 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...

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...

A Framework for Cyber Security Insurance

New paper: "Policy measures and cyber insurance: a framework," by Daniel Woods and Andrew Simpson, Journal of Cyber Policy, 2017. Abstract: The role of the insurance industry in driving improvements in cyber security has been identified as mutually beneficial for both insurers and policy-makers. ...

Police Have Disrupted the Emotet Botnet

A coordinated effort has captured the command-and-control servers of the Emotet botnet: Emotet establishes a backdoor onto Windows computer systems via automated phishing emails that distribute Word documents compromised with malware. Subjects of emails and documents in Emotet campaigns are...

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...

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...

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...

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...

USB Cable with Embedded Wi-Fi Controller

It's only a prototype, but this USB cable has an embedded Wi-Fi controller. Whoever controls that Wi-Fi connection can remotely execute commands on the attached computer...

iPhone FaceTime Vulnerability

This is kind of a crazy iPhone vulnerability: it's possible to call someone on FaceTime and listen on their microphone -- and see from their camera -- before they accept the call. This is definitely an embarrassment, and Apple was right to disable Group FaceTime until it's fixed. But it's hard to...

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...

Conservation of Threat

Here's some interesting research about how we perceive threats. Basically, as the environment becomes safer we basically manufacture new threats. From an essay about the research: To study how concepts change when they become less common, we brought volunteers into our laboratory and gave them a...

Friday Squid Blogging: Japanese "Dude Food" Includes Squid

This seems to be a trend. 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...

Military Robots as a Nature Analog

This very interesting essay looks at the future of military robotics and finds many analogs in nature: Imagine a low-cost drone with the range of a Canada goose, a bird that can cover 1,500 miles in a single day at an average speed of 60 miles per hour. Planet Earth profiled a single flock of sno...

Detecting Stingrays

Researchers are developing technologies that can detect IMSI-catchers: those fake cell phone towers that can be used to surveil people in the area. This is good work, but it's unclear to me whether these devices can detect all the newer IMSI-catchers that are being sold to governments worldwide...

New Open SSH Vulnerability

Its a serious one: The vulnerability, which is a signal handler race condition in OpenSSHs server sshd, allows unauthenticated remote code execution RCE as root on glibc-based Linux systems; that presents a significant security risk. This race condition affects sshd in its default configuration. ...

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...

Breaking RSA through Insufficiently Random Primes

Basically, the SafeZone library doesnt sufficiently randomize the two prime numbers it used to generate RSA keys. Theyre too close to each other, which makes them vulnerable to recovery. There arent many weak keys out there, but there are some: So far, Böck has identified only a handful of keys i...

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...

Wi-Fi Devices as Physical Object Sensors

The new 802.11bf standard will turn Wi-Fi devices into object sensors: In three years or so, the Wi-Fi specification is scheduled to get an upgrade that will turn wireless devices into sensors capable of gathering data about the people and objects bathed in their signals. "When 802.11bf will be...

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...

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...

Georgia’s Ballot-Marking Devices

Andrew Appel discusses Georgias voting machines, how the paper ballots facilitated a recount, and the problem with automatic ballot-marking devices: Suppose the polling-place optical scanners had been hacked enough to change the outcome. Then this would have been detected in the audit, and in...

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: On Squid Communication

They can communicate using bioluminescent flashes: New research published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences presents evidence for a previously unknown semantic-like ability in Humboldt squid. What's more, these squid can enhance the visibility of their skin patterns by...

Security of Health Information

The world is racing to contain the new COVID-19 virus that is spreading around the globe with alarming speed. Right now, pandemic disease experts at the World Health Organization WHO, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDC, and other public-health agencies are gathering information...

Deep Learning to Find Malicious Email Attachments

Google presented its system of using deep-learning techniques to identify malicious email attachments: At the RSA security conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Google's security and anti-abuse research lead Elie Bursztein will present findings on how the new deep-learning scanner for documents...

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...

Edward Snowden's Memoirs

Ed Snowden has published a book of his memoirs: Permanent Record. I have not read it yet, but I want to point you all towards two pieces of writing about the book. The first is an excellent review of the book and Snowden in general by SF writer and essayist Jonathan Lethem, who helped make a shor...

Another Attack Against Driverless Cars

In this piece of research, attackers successfully attack a driverless car system -- Renault Captur's "Level 0" autopilot Level 0 systems advise human drivers but do not directly operate cars -- by following them with drones that project images of fake road signs in 100ms bursts. The time is too...

Vulnerabilities in the WPA3 Wi-Fi Security Protocol

Researchers have found several vulnerabilities in the WPA3 Wi-Fi security protocol: The design flaws we discovered can be divided in two categories. The first category consists of downgrade attacks against WPA3-capable devices, and the second category consists of weaknesses in the Dragonfly...

Former Mozilla CTO Harassed at the US Border

This is a pretty awful story of how Andreas Gal, former Mozilla CTO and US citizen, was detained and threatened at the US border. CBP agents demanded that he unlock his phone and computer. Know your rights when you enter the US. The EFF publishes a handy guide. And if you want to encrypt your...

Hacking Instagram to Get Free Meals in Exchange for Positive Reviews

This is a fascinating hack: In today's digital age, a large Instagram audience is considered a valuable currency. I had also heard through the grapevine that I could monetize a large following -- or in my desired case -- use it to have my meals paid for. So I did just that. I created an Instagram...

Letterlocking

Really good article on the now-lost art of letterlocking...

The Effects of GDPR's 72-Hour Notification Rule

The EU's GDPR regulation requires companies to report a breach within 72 hours. Alex Stamos, former Facebook CISO now at Stanford University, points out how this can be a problem: Interesting impact of the GDPR 72-hour deadline: companies announcing breaches before investigations are complete. 1...

Fooling Face Recognition with Infrared Light

Yet another development in the arms race between facial recognition systems and facial-recognition-system foolers. BoingBoing post...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: How the Optic Lobe Controls Squid Camouflage

Experiments on the oval squid. 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...

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...

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...

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...

Tomato-Plant Security

I have a soft spot for interesting biological security measures, especially by plants. I've used them as examples in several of my books. Here's a new one: when tomato plants are attacked by caterpillars, they release a chemical that turns the caterpillars on each other: It's common for...

An Assassin's Teapot

This teapot has two chambers. Liquid is released from one or the other depending on whether an air hole is covered. I want one...

New Bluetooth Attack

New attack breaks forward secrecy in Bluetooth. Three news articles: BLUFFS is a series of exploits targeting Bluetooth, aiming to break Bluetooth sessions forward and future secrecy, compromising the confidentiality of past and future communications between devices. This is achieved by exploitin...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: The Evolution of Squid

Good video about the evolutionary history of squid. 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...

Stealing Xbox Codes

Detailed story of Volodymyr Kvashuk, a Microsoft insider who noticed a bug in the companys internal systems that allowed him to create unlimited Xbox gift cards, and stole $10.1 million before he was caught...

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...

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...

DNI’s Annual Threat Assessment

The office of the Director of National Intelligence released its "Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community." Cybersecurity is covered on pages 20-21. Nothing surprising: Cyber threats from nation states and their surrogates will remain acute. States increasing use of cyber...