Security and Human Behavior (SHB) 2022

Today is the second day of the fifteenth Workshop on Security and Human Behavior, hosted by Ross Anderson and Alice Hutchings at the University of Cambridge. After two years of having this conference remotely on Zoom, its nice to be back together in person. SHB is a small, annual, invitational...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Bites Diver

I agree; the diver deserved 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...

Malware-Infested Smart Card Reader

Brian Krebs has an interesting story of a smart ID card reader with a malware-infested Windows driver, and US government employees who inadvertently buy and use them. But by all accounts, the potential attack surface here is enormous, as many federal employees clearly will purchase these readers...

Manipulating Machine-Learning Systems through the Order of the Training Data

Yet another adversarial ML attack: Most deep neural networks are trained by stochastic gradient descent. Now “stochastic” is a fancy Greek word for “random”; it means that the training data are fed into the model in random order. So what happens if the bad guys can cause the order to be not rando...

The Justice Department Will No Longer Charge Security Researchers with Criminal Hacking

Following a recent Supreme Court ruling, the Justice Department will no longer prosecute "good faith" security researchers with cybercrimes: The policy for the first time directs that good-faith security research should not be charged. Good faith security research means accessing a computer solel...

Forging Australian Driver’s Licenses

The New South Wales digital drivers license has multiple implementation flaws that allow for easy forgeries. This file is encrypted using AES-256-CBC encryption combined with Base64 encoding. A 4-digit application PIN which gets set during the initial onboarding when a user first instals the...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Street Art

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...

The Onion on Google Map Surveillance

"Google Maps Adds Shortcuts through Houses of People Google Knows Arent Home Right Now." Excellent satire...

Bluetooth Flaw Allows Remote Unlocking of Digital Locks

Locks that use Bluetooth Low Energy to authenticate keys are vulnerable to remote unlocking. The research focused on Teslas, but the exploit is generalizable. In a video shared with Reuters, NCC Group researcher Sultan Qasim Khan was able to open and then drive a Tesla using a small relay device...

Websites that Collect Your Data as You Type

A surprising number of websites include JavaScript keyloggers that collect everything you type as you type it, not just when you submit a form. Researchers from KU Leuven, Radboud University, and University of Lausanne crawled and analyzed the top 100,000 websites, looking at scenarios in which a...

iPhone Malware that Operates Even When the Phone Is Turned Off

Researchers have demonstrated iPhone malware that works even when the phone is fully shut down. t turns out that the iPhone’s Bluetooth chip­--which is key to making features like Find My work­--has no mechanism for digitally signing or even encrypting the firmware it runs. Academics at Germany’s...

Attacks on Managed Service Providers Expected to Increase

CISA, NSA, FBI, and similar organizations in the other Five Eyes countries are warning that attacks on MSPs--as a vector to their customers--are likely to increase. No details about what this prediction is based on. Makes sense, though. The SolarWinds attack was incredibly successful for the...

The NSA Says that There are No Known Flaws in NIST’s Quantum-Resistant Algorithms

Rob Joyce, the director of cybersecurity at the NSA, said so in an interview: The NSA already has classified quantum-resistant algorithms of its own that it developed over many years, said Joyce. But it didnt enter any of its own in the contest. The agencys mathematicians, however, worked with NI...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking on “Securing a World of Physically Capable Computers” at OWASP Belgium’s chapter meeting in Antwerp, Belgium, on May 17, 2022. I’m speaking at Future Summits in Antwerp, Belgium, on May 18, 2022. I’m speaking at IT-S N...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squidmobile

The Squidmobile. 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...

Surveillance by Driverless Car

San Francisco police are using autonomous vehicles as mobile surveillance cameras. Privacy advocates say the revelation that police are actively using AV footage is cause for alarm. “This is very concerning,” Electronic Frontier Foundation EFF senior staff attorney Adam Schwartz told Motherboard...

ICE Is a Domestic Surveillance Agency

Georgetown has a new report on the highly secretive bulk surveillance activities of ICE in the US: When you think about government surveillance in the United States, you likely think of the National Security Agency or the FBI. You might even think of a powerful police agency, such as the New York...

Apple Mail Now Blocks Email Trackers

Apple Mail now blocks email trackers by default. Most email newsletters you get include an invisible "image," typically a single white pixel, with a unique file name. The server keeps track of every time this "image" is opened and by which IP address. This quirk of internet history means that...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Filmed Changing Color for Camouflage Purposes

Video of oval squid Sepioteuthis lessoniana changing color in reaction to their background. The research paper claims this is the first time this has been documented. 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...

Corporate Involvement in International Cybersecurity Treaties

The Paris Call for Trust and Stability in Cyberspace is an initiative launched by French President Emmanuel Macron during the 2018 UNESCO’s Internet Governance Forum. It’s an attempt by the worlds governments to come together and create a set of international norms and standards for a reliable,...

15.3 Million Request-Per-Second DDoS Attack

Cloudflare is reporting a large DDoS attack against an unnamed company "operating a crypto launchpad." While this isnt the largest application-layer attack weve seen, it is the largest weve seen over HTTPS. HTTPS DDoS attacks are more expensive in terms of required computational resources because...

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...

Using Pupil Reflection in Smartphone Camera Selfies

Researchers are using the reflection of the smartphone in the pupils of faces taken as selfies to infer information about how the phone is being used: For now, the research is focusing on six different ways a user can hold a device like a smartphone: with both hands, just the left, or just the...

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...

Video Conferencing Apps Sometimes Ignore the Mute Button

New research: "Are You Really Muted?: A Privacy Analysis of Mute Buttons in Video Conferencing Apps": Abstract: In the post-pandemic era, video conferencing apps VCAs have converted previously private spaces -- bedrooms, living rooms, and kitchens -- into semi-public extensions of the office. And...

Microsoft Issues Report of Russian Cyberattacks against Ukraine

Microsoft has a comprehensive report on the dozens of cyberattacks -- and even more espionage operations -- Russia has conducted against Ukraine as part of this war: At least six Russian Advanced Persistent Threat APT actors and other unattributed threats, have conducted destructive attacks,...

Zero-Day Vulnerabilities Are on the Rise

Both Google and Mandiant are reporting a significant increase in the number of zero-day vulnerabilities reported in 2021. Google: 2021 included the detection and disclosure of 58 in-the-wild 0-days, the most ever recorded since Project Zero began tracking in mid-2014. That’s more than double the...

SMS Phishing Attacks are on the Rise

SMS phishing attacks -- annoyingly called "smishing" -- are becoming more common. I know that I have been receiving a lot of phishing SMS messages over the past few months. I am not getting the "Fedex package delivered" messages the article talks about. Mine are usually of the form: "Thank you fo...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Skin–Inspired Insulating Material

Interesting: Drawing inspiration from cephalopod skin, engineers at the University of California, Irvine invented an adaptive composite material that can insulate beverage cups, restaurant to-go bags, parcel boxes and even shipping containers. … "The metal islands in our composite material are ne...

Java Cryptography Implementation Mistake Allows Digital-Signature Forgeries

Interesting implementation mistake: The vulnerability, which Oracle patched on Tuesday, affects the company’s implementation of the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm in Java versions 15 and above. ECDSA is an algorithm that uses the principles of elliptic curve cryptography to authentica...

Long Article on NSO Group

Ronan Farrow has a long article in the New Yorker on NSO Group, which includes the news that someone -- probably Spain -- used the software to spy on domestic Catalonian separatists...

Clever Cryptocurrency Theft

Beanstalk Farms is a decentralized finance project that has a majority stake governance system: basically people have proportional votes based on the amount of currency they own. A clever hacker used a "flash loan" feature of another decentralized finance project to borrow enough of the currency ...

Undetectable Backdoors in Machine-Learning Models

New paper: "Planting Undetectable Backdoors in Machine Learning Models": Abstract: Given the computational cost and technical expertise required to train machine learning models, users may delegate the task of learning to a service provider. We show how a malicious learner can plant an undetectab...

Friday Squid Blogging: Strawberry Squid Video

Beautiful video shot off the California coast. 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 speaking at Future Summits in Antwerp, Belgium, on May 18, 2022. I’m speaking at IT-S Now 2022 in Vienna, Austria, on June 2, 2022. I’m speaking at the 14th International Conference on Cyber Conflict, CyCon 2022, in Tallinn,...

Industrial Control System Malware Discovered

The Department of Energy, CISA, the FBI, and the NSA jointly issued an advisory describing a sophisticated piece of malware called Pipedream thats designed to attack a wide range of industrial control systems. This is clearly from a government, but no attribution is given. Theres also no indicati...

Russian Cyberattack against Ukrainian Power Grid Prevented

A Russian cyberweapon, similar to the one used in 2016, was detected and removed before it could be used. Key points: ESET researchers collaborated with CERT-UA to analyze the attack against the Ukrainian energy company The destructive actions were scheduled for 2022-04-08 but artifacts suggest...

John Oliver on Data Brokers

John Oliver has an excellent segment on data brokers and surveillance capitalism...

De-anonymizing Bitcoin

Andy Greenberg wrote a long article -- an excerpt from his new book -- on how law enforcement de-anonymized bitcoin transactions to take down a global child porn ring. Within a few years of Bitcoins arrival, academic security researchers -- and then companies like Chainalysis -- began to tear...

Friday Squid Blogging: Do Squid Have Emotions?

Scientists are now debating whether octopuses, squid, and crabs have emotions. Short answer: we dont know, but cant rule it out. There may be a point when humans can no longer assume that crayfish, shrimp, and other invertebrates dont feel pain and other emotions. "If they can no longer be...

AirTags Are Used for Stalking Far More than Previously Reported

Ever since Apple introduced AirTags, security people have warned that they could be used for stalking. But while there have been a bunch of anecdotal stories, this is the first vaguely scientific survey: Motherboard requested records mentioning AirTags in a recent eight month period from dozens o...

US Disrupts Russian Botnet

The Justice Department announced the disruption of a Russian GRU-controlled botnet: The Justice Department today announced a court-authorized operation, conducted in March 2022, to disrupt a two-tiered global botnet of thousands of infected network hardware devices under the control of a threat...

Cyberweapons Arms Manufacturer FinFisher Shuts Down

FinFisher has shut down operations. This is the spyware company whose products were used, among other things, to spy on Turkish and Bahraini political opposition...

Hackers Using Fake Police Data Requests against Tech Companies

Brian Krebs has a detailed post about hackers using fake police data requests to trick companies into handing over data. Virtually all major technology companies serving large numbers of users online have departments that routinely review and process such requests, which are typically granted as...

Wyze Camera Vulnerability

Wyze ignored a vulnerability in its home security cameras for three years. Bitdefender, who discovered the vulnerability, let the company get away with it. In case youre wondering, no, that is not normal in the security community. While experts tell me that the concept of a "responsible disclosur...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Migration and Climate Change

New research on the changing migration of the Doryteuthis opalescens as a result of climate change. News article: Stanford researchers have solved a mystery about why a species of squid native to California has been found thriving in the Gulf of Alaska about 1,800 miles north of its expected rang...

Bypassing Two-Factor Authentication

These techniques are not new, but theyre increasingly popular: …some forms of MFA are stronger than others, and recent events show that these weaker forms arent much of a hurdle for some hackers to clear. In the past few months, suspected script kiddies like the Lapsus$ data extortion gang and...

Chrome Zero-Day from North Korea

North Korean hackers have been exploiting a zero-day in Chrome. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2022-0609, was exploited by two separate North Korean hacking groups. Both groups deployed the same exploit kit on websites that either belonged to legitimate organizations and were hacked or were set up for...

Stalking with an Apple Watch

The malicious uses of these technologies are scary: Police reportedly arrived on the scene last week and found the man crouched beside the womans passenger side door. According to the police, the man had, at some point, wrapped his Apple Watch across the spokes of the womans passenger side front...

A Detailed Look at the Conti Ransomware Gang

Based on two years of leaked messages, 60,000 in all: The Conti ransomware gang runs like any number of businesses around the world. It has multiple departments, from HR and administrators to coders and researchers. It has policies on how its hackers should process their code, and shares best...