Easy SMS Hijacking

Vice is reporting on a cell phone vulnerability caused by commercial SMS services. One of the things these services permit is text message forwarding. It turns out that with a little bit of anonymous money -- in this case, $16 off an anonymous prepaid credit card -- and a few lies, you can forwar...

Exploiting Spectre Over the Internet

Google has demonstrated exploiting the Spectre CPU attack remotely over the web: Today, were sharing proof-of-concept PoC code that confirms the practicality of Spectre exploits against JavaScript engines. We use Google Chrome to demonstrate our attack, but these issues are not specific to Chrome...

Illegal Content and the Blockchain

Security researchers have recently discovered a botnet with a novel defense against takedowns. Normally, authorities can disable a botnet by taking over its command-and-control server. With nowhere to go for instructions, the botnet is rendered useless. But over the years, botnet designers have...

On the Insecurity of ES&S Voting Machines’ Hash Code

Andrew Appel and Susan Greenhalgh have a blog post on the insecurity of ES&Ss software authentication system: It turns out that ES&S has bugs in their hash-code checker: if the "reference hashcode" is completely missing, then itll say "yes, boss, everything is fine" instead of reporting an error...

Security Analysis of Apple’s “Find My…” Protocol

Interesting research: "Who Can Find My Devices? Security and Privacy of Apples Crowd-Sourced Bluetooth Location Tracking System": Abstract: Overnight, Apple has turned its hundreds-of-million-device ecosystem into the worlds largest crowd-sourced location tracking network called offline finding O...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at the Australian Cyber Conference 2021 on March 17 and 18, 2021. I’m keynoting the all-virtual RSA Conference 2021, May 17-20, 2021. I’ll be speaking at an Informa event on September 14, 2021. Details to come. The lis...

Friday Squid Blogging: On SQUIDS

A good tutorial: But we can go beyond the polarization of electrons and really leverage the electron waviness. By interleaving thin layers of superconducting and normal materials, we can make the quantum electronic equivalents of transistors and diodes such as Superconducting Tunnel Junctions SJT...

Metadata Left in Security Agency PDFs

Really interesting research: "Exploitation and Sanitization of Hidden Data in PDF Files" Abstract: Organizations publish and share more and more electronic documents like PDF files. Unfortunately, most organizations are unaware that these documents can compromise sensitive information like author...

Fast Random Bit Generation

Science has a paper and commentary on generating 250 random terabits per second with a laser. I dont know how cryptographically secure they are, but that can be cleaned up with something like Fortuna. EDITED TO ADD 3/12: Here are free versions of the paper and the commentary...

More on the Chinese Zero-Day Microsoft Exchange Hack

Nick Weaver has an excellent post on the Microsoft Exchange hack: The investigative journalist Brian Krebs has produced a handy timeline of events and a few things stand out from the chronology. The attacker was first detected by one group on Jan. 5 and another on Jan. 6, and Microsoft acknowledg...

On Not Fixing Old Vulnerabilities

How is this even possible? …26% of companies Positive Technologies tested were vulnerable to WannaCry, which was a threat years ago, and some even vulnerable to Heartbleed. "The most frequent vulnerabilities detected during automated assessment date back to 2013-­2017, which indicates a lack of...

Hacking Digitally Signed PDF Files

Interesting paper: "Shadow Attacks: Hiding and Replacing Content in Signed PDFs": Abstract: Digitally signed PDFs are used in contracts and invoices to guarantee the authenticity and integrity of their content. A user opening a signed PDF expects to see a warning in case of any modification. In...

Friday Squid Blogging: Vampire Squid Fossil

A 30-million-year-old vampire squid fossil was found, lost, and then re-found in Hungary. 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...

No, RSA Is Not Broken

I have been seeing this paper by cryptographer Peter Schnorr making the rounds: "Fast Factoring Integers by SVP Algorithms." It describes a new factoring method, and its abstract ends with the provocative sentence: "This destroys the RSA cryptosystem." It does not. At best, its an improvement in...

Threat Model Humor

At a hospital...

Four Microsoft Exchange Zero-Days Exploited by China

Microsoft has issued an emergency Microsoft Exchange patch to fix four zero-day vulnerabilities currently being exploited by China. EDITED TO ADD 3/12: Exchange Online is not affected...

Chinese Hackers Stole an NSA Windows Exploit in 2014

Check Point has evidence that probably government affiliated Chinese hackers stole and cloned an NSA Windows hacking tool years before probably government affiliated Russian hackers stole and then published the same tool. Heres the timeline: The timeline basically seems to be, according to Check...

Encoded Message in the Perseverance Mars Lander’s Parachute

NASA made an oblique reference to a coded message in the color pattern of the Perseverance Mars Lander s parachute. More information...

Mysterious Macintosh Malware

This is weird: Once an hour, infected Macs check a control server to see if there are any new commands the malware should run or binaries to execute. So far, however, researchers have yet to observe delivery of any payload on any of the infected 30,000 machines, leaving the malwares ultimate goal...

National Security Risks of Late-Stage Capitalism

Early in 2020, cyberspace attackers apparently working for the Russian government compromised a piece of widely used network management software made by a company called SolarWinds. The hack gave the attackers access to the computer networks of some 18,000 of SolarWinds’s customers, including US...

Friday Squid Blogging: Far Side Cartoon

The Far Side on 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...

The Problem with Treating Data as a Commodity

Excellent Brookings paper: "Why data ownership is the wrong approach to protecting privacy." From the introduction: Treating data like it is property fails to recognize either the value that varieties of personal information serve or the abiding interest that individuals have in their personal...

On Chinese-Owned Technology Platforms

I am a co-author on a report published by the Hoover Institution: "Chinese Technology Platforms Operating in the United States." From a blog post: The report suggests a comprehensive framework for understanding and assessing the risks posed by Chinese technology platforms in the United States and...

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...

Dependency Confusion: Another Supply-Chain Vulnerability

Alex Birsan writes about being able to install malware into proprietary corporate software by naming the code files to be identical to internal corporate code files. From a ZDNet article: Today, developers at small or large companies use package managers to download and import libraries that are...

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...

Router Security

This report is six months old, and I dont know anything about the organization that produced it, but it has some alarming data about router security. Conclusion: Our analysis showed that Linux is the most used OS running on more than 90% of the devices. However, many routers are powered by very o...

WEIS 2021 Call for Papers

The 20th Annual Workshop on the Economics of Information Security WEIS 2021 will be held online in June. We just published the call for papers...

Virginia Data Privacy Law

Virginia is about to get a data privacy law, modeled on Californias law...

Browser Tracking Using Favicons

Interesting research on persistent web tracking using favicons. For those who dont know, favicons are those tiny icons that appear in browser tabs next to the page name. Abstract: The privacy threats of online tracking have garnered considerable attention in recent years from researchers and...

Malicious Barcode Scanner App

Interesting story about a barcode scanner app that has been pushing malware on to Android phones. The app is called Barcode Scanner. Its been around since 2017 and is owned by the Ukrainian company Lavabird Ldt. But a December 2020 update included some new features: However, a rash of malicious...

US Cyber Command Valentine’s Day Cryptography Puzzles

The US Cyber Command has released a series of ten Valentines Day "Cryptography Challenge Puzzles." Slashdot thread. Reddit thread. And heres the archived link, in case Cyber Command takes the page down...

Deliberately Playing Copyrighted Music to Avoid Being Live-Streamed

Vice is reporting on a new police hack: playing copyrighted music when being filmed by citizens, trying to provoke social media sites into taking the videos down and maybe even banning the filmers: In a separate part of the video, which Devermont says was filmed later that same afternoon, Devermo...

On Vulnerability-Adjacent Vulnerabilities

At the virtual Enigma Conference, Googles Project Zeros Maggie Stone gave a talk about zero-day exploits in the wild. In it, she talked about how often vendors fix vulnerabilities only to have the attackers tweak their exploits to work again. From a MIT Technology Review article: Soon after they...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Flying Squid

How squid fly. 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...

Medieval Security Techniques

Sonja Drummer describes with photographs two medieval security techniques. The first is a for authentication: a document has been cut in half with an irregular pattern, so that the two halves can be brought together to prove authenticity. The second is for integrity: hashed lines written above an...

Attack against Florida Water Treatment Facility

A water treatment plant in Oldsmar, Florida, was attacked last Friday. The attacker took control of one of the systems, and increased the amount of sodium hydroxide -- thats lye -- by a factor of 100. This could have been fatal to people living downstream, if an alert operator hadnt noticed the...

Ransomware Profitability

Analyzing cryptocurrency data, a research group has estimated a lower-bound on 2020 ransomware revenue: $350 million, four times more than in 2019. Based on the companys data, among last years top earners, there were groups like Ryuk, Maze now-defunct, Doppelpaymer, Netwalker disrupted by...

Web Credit Card Skimmer Steals Data from Another Credit Card Skimmer

MalwareBytes is reporting a weird software credit card skimmer. It harvests credit card data stolen by another, different skimmer: Even though spotting multiple card skimmer scripts on the same online shop is not unheard of, this one stood out due to its highly specialized nature. "The threat...

SonicWall Zero-Day

Hackers are exploiting a zero-day in SonicWall: In an email, an NCC Group spokeswoman wrote: "Our team has observed signs of an attempted exploitation of a vulnerabilitythat affects the SonicWall SMA 100 series devices. We are working closely with SonicWall to investigate this in more depth." In...

NoxPlayer Android Emulator Supply-Chain Attack

It seems to be the season of sophisticated supply-chain attacks. This one is in the NoxPlayer Android emulator: ESET says that based on evidence its researchers gathered, a threat actor compromised one of the companys official API api.bignox.com and file-hosting servers res06.bignox.com. Using th...

Friday Squid Blogging: Live Giant Squid Found in Japan

A giant squid was found alive in the port of Izumo, Japan. Not a lot of news, just this Twitter thread with a couple of videos. If confirmed, I believe this will be the THIRD time EVER a giant squid was filmed alive! As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in...

Presidential Cybersecurity and Pelotons

President Biden wants his Peloton in the White House. For those who have missed the hype, its an Internet-connected stationary bicycle. It has a screen, a camera, and a microphone. You can take live classes online, work out with your friends, or join the exercise social network. And all of that i...

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...

More SolarWinds News

Microsoft analyzed details of the SolarWinds attack: Microsoft and FireEye only detected the Sunburst or Solorigate malware in December, but Crowdstrike reported this month that another related piece of malware, Sunspot, was deployed in September 2019, at the time hackers breached SolarWinds...

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: Squids Don’t Like Pile-Driving Noises

New research: Pile driving occurs during construction of marine platforms, including offshore windfarms, producing intense sounds that can adversely affect marine animals. We quantified how a commercially and economically important squid Doryteuthis pealeii: Lesueur 1821 responded to pile driving...

Including Hackers in NATO Wargames

This essay makes the point that actual computer hackers would be a useful addition to NATO wargames: The international information security community is filled with smart people who are not in a military structure, many of whom would be excited to pose as independent actors in any upcoming...