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...

The Doghouse: Crown Sterling

A decade ago, the Doghouse was a regular feature in both my email newsletter Crypto-Gram and my blog. In it, I would call out particularly egregious -- and amusing -- examples of cryptographic "snake oil." I dropped it both because it stopped being fun and because almost everyone converged on...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Why Mexican Jumbo Squid Populations Have Declined

A group of scientists conclude that it's shifting weather patterns and ocean conditions. 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...

Attacking the Intel Secure Enclave

Interesting paper by Michael Schwarz, Samuel Weiser, Daniel Gruss. The upshot is that both Intel and AMD have assumed that trusted enclaves will run only trustworthy code. Of course, that's not true. And there are no security mechanisms that can deal with malicious enclaves, because the designers...

AI Emotion-Detection Arms Race

Voice systems are increasingly using AI techniques to determine emotion. A new paper describes an AI-based countermeasure to mask emotion in spoken words. Their method for masking emotion involves collecting speech, analyzing it, and extracting emotional features from the raw signal. Next, an AI...

The Myth of Consumer-Grade Security

The Department of Justice wants access to encrypted consumer devices but promises not to infiltrate business products or affect critical infrastructure. Yet that's not possible, because there is no longer any difference between those categories of devices. Consumer devices are critical...

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...

Detecting Credit Card Skimmers

Modern credit card skimmers hidden in self-service gas pumps communicate via Bluetooth. There's now an app that can detect them: The team from the University of California San Diego, who worked with other computer scientists from the University of Illinois, developed an app called Bluetana which...

Friday Squid Blogging: Vulnerabilities in Squid Server

It's always nice when I can combine squid and security: Multiple versions of the Squid web proxy cache server built with Basic Authentication features are currently vulnerable to code execution and denial-of-service DoS attacks triggered by the exploitation of a heap buffer overflow security flaw...

License Plate "NULL"

There was a DefCon talk by someone with the vanity plate "NULL." The California system assigned him every ticket with no license plate: $12,000. Although the initial $12,000-worth of fines were removed, the private company that administers the database didn't fix the issue and new NULL tickets ar...

Modifying a Tesla to Become a Surveillance Platform

From DefCon: At the Defcon hacker conference today, security researcher Truman Kain debuted what he calls the Surveillance Detection Scout. The DIY computer fits into the middle console of a Tesla Model S or Model 3, plugs into its dashboard USB port, and turns the car's built-in cameras­ -- the...

Google Finds 20-Year-Old Microsoft Windows Vulnerability

There's no indication that this vulnerability was ever used in the wild, but the code it was discovered in -- Microsoft's Text Services Framework -- has been around since Windows XP...

Surveillance as a Condition for Humanitarian Aid

Excellent op-ed on the growing trend to tie humanitarian aid to surveillance. Despite the best intentions, the decision to deploy technology like biometrics is built on a number of unproven assumptions, such as, technology solutions can fix deeply embedded political problems. And that auditing fo...

Influence Operations Kill Chain

Influence operations are elusive to define. The Rand Corp.'s definition is as good as any: "the collection of tactical information about an adversary as well as the dissemination of propaganda in pursuit of a competitive advantage over an opponent." Basically, we know it when we see it, from bots...

Friday Squid Blogging: Robot Squid Propulsion

Interesting research: The squid robot is powered primarily by compressed air, which it stores in a cylinder in its nose do squids have noses?. The fins and arms are controlled by pneumatic actuators. When the robot wants to move through the water, it opens a value to release a modest amount of...

Software Vulnerabilities in the Boeing 787

Boeing left its software unprotected, and researchers have analyzed it for vulnerabilities: At the Black Hat security conference today in Las Vegas, Santamarta, a researcher for security firm IOActive, plans to present his findings, including the details of multiple serious security flaws in the...

Bypassing Apple FaceID's Liveness Detection Feature

Apple's FaceID has a liveness detection feature, which prevents someone from unlocking a victim's phone by putting it in front of his face while he's sleeping. That feature has been hacked: Researchers on Wednesday during Black Hat USA 2019 demonstrated an attack that allowed them to bypass a...

Side-Channel Attack against Electronic Locks

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

Attorney General Barr and Encryption

Last month, Attorney General William Barr gave a major speech on encryption policy­what is commonly known as "going dark." Speaking at Fordham University in New York, he admitted that adding backdoors decreases security but that it is worth it. Some hold this view dogmatically, claiming that it i...

Exploiting GDPR to Get Private Information

A researcher abused the GDPR to get information on his fiancee: It is one of the first tests of its kind to exploit the EU's General Data Protection Regulation GDPR, which came into force in May 2018. The law shortened the time organisations had to respond to data requests, added new types of...

Evaluating the NSA's Telephony Metadata Program

Interesting analysis: "Examining the Anomalies, Explaining the Value: Should the USA FREEDOM Act's Metadata Program be Extended?" by Susan Landau and Asaf Lubin. Abstract: The telephony metadata program which was authorized under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, remains one of the most controversi...

Friday Squid Blogging: Sinuous Asperoteuthis Mangoldae Squid

Great video of the Sinuous Asperoteuthis Mangoldae 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...

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...

AT&T Employees Took Bribes to Unlock Smartphones

This wasn't a small operation: A Pakistani man bribed AT call-center employees to install malware and unauthorized hardware as part of a scheme to fraudulently unlock cell phones, according to the US Department of Justice. Muhammad Fahd, 34, was extradited from Hong Kong to the US on Friday and i...

Brazilian Cell Phone Hack

I know there's a lot of politics associated with this story, but concentrate on the cybersecurity aspect for a moment. The cell phones of a thousand Brazilians, including senior government officials, were hacked -- seemingly by actors much less sophisticated than rival governments. Brazil's...

Phone Pharming for Ad Fraud

Interesting article on people using banks of smartphones to commit ad fraud for profit. No one knows how prevalent ad fraud is on the Internet. I believe it is surprisingly high -- here's an article that places losses between $6.5 and $19 billion annually -- and something companies like Google an...

Regulating International Trade in Commercial Spyware

Siena Anstis, Ronald J. Deibert, and John Scott-Railton of Citizen Lab published an editorial calling for regulating the international trade in commercial surveillance systems until we can figure out how to curb human rights abuses. Any regime of rigorous human rights safeguards that would make a...

Friday Squid Blogging: Piglet Squid Video

Really neat. 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...

More on Backdooring (or Not) WhatsApp

Yesterday, I blogged about a Facebook plan to backdoor WhatsApp by adding client-side scanning and filtering. It seems that I was wrong, and there are no such plans. The only source for that post was a Forbes essay by Kalev Leetaru, which links to a previous Forbes essay by him, which links to a...

Disabling Security Cameras with Lasers

There's a really interesting video of protesters in Hong Kong using some sort of laser to disable security cameras. I know nothing more about the technologies involved...

How Privacy Laws Hurt Defendants

Rebecca Wexler has an interesting op-ed about an inadvertent harm that privacy laws can cause: while law enforcement can often access third-party data to aid in prosecution, the accused don't have the same level of access to aid in their defense: The proposed privacy laws would make this situatio...

Facebook Plans on Backdooring WhatsApp

This article points out that Facebook's planned content moderation scheme will result in an encryption backdoor into WhatsApp: In Facebook's vision, the actual end-to-end encryption client itself such as WhatsApp will include embedded content moderation and blacklist filtering algorithms. These...

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...

ACLU on the GCHQ Backdoor Proposal

Back in January, two senior GCHQ officials proposed a specific backdoor for communications systems. It was universally derided as unworkable -- by me, as well. Now Jon Callas of the ACLU explains why...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Humbolt Squid in Mexico Are Getting Smaller

The Humbolt squid are getting smaller: Rawley and the other researchers found a flurry of factors that drove the jumbo squid's demise. The Gulf of California historically cycled between warm-water El Niño conditions and cool-water La Niña phases. The warm El Niño waters were inhospitable to jumbo...

Insider Logic Bombs

Add to the "not very smart criminals" file: According to court documents, Tinley provided software services for Siemens' Monroeville, PA offices for nearly ten years. Among the work he was asked to perform was the creation of spreadsheets that the company was using to manage equipment orders. The...

Software Developers and Security

According to a survey: "68% of the security professionals surveyed believe it's a programmer's job to write secure code, but they also think less than half of developers can spot security holes." And that's a problem. Nearly half of security pros surveyed, 49%, said they struggle to get developer...

Attorney General William Barr on Encryption Policy

Yesterday, Attorney General William Barr gave a major speech on encryption policy -- what is commonly known as "going dark." Speaking at Fordham University in New York, he admitted that adding backdoors decreases security but that it is worth it. Some hold this view dogmatically, claiming that it...

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...

Hackers Expose Russian FSB Cyberattack Projects

More nation-state activity in cyberspace, this time from Russia: Per the different reports in Russian media, the files indicate that SyTech had worked since 2009 on a multitude of projects since 2009 for FSB unit 71330 and for fellow contractor Quantum. Projects include: Nautilus -- a project for...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Mural

Large squid mural in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. 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...

A Harlequin Romance Novel about Hackers

Really...

John Paul Stevens Was a Cryptographer

I didn't know that Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens "was also a cryptographer for the Navy during World War II." He was a proponent of individual privacy...

Identity Theft on the Job Market

Identity theft is getting more subtle: "My job application was withdrawn by someone pretending to be me": When Mr Fearn applied for a job at the company he didn't hear back. He said the recruitment team said they'd get back to him by Friday, but they never did. At first, he assumed he was...

Zoom Vulnerability

The Zoom conferencing app has a vulnerability that allows someone to remotely take over the computer's camera. It's a bad vulnerability, made worse by the fact that it remains even if you uninstall the Zoom app: This vulnerability allows any website to forcibly join a user to a Zoom call, with...

Palantir's Surveillance Service for Law Enforcement

Motherboard got its hands on Palantir's Gotham user's manual, which is used by the police to get information on people: The Palantir user guide shows that police can start with almost no information about a person of interest and instantly know extremely intimate details about their lives. The...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I'm speaking at Black Hat USA 2019 in Las Vegas on Wednesday, August 7 and Thursday, August 8, 2019. I'm speaking on "Information Security in the Public Interest" at DefCon 27 in Las Vegas on Saturday, August 10, 2019. The list is...