Click Here to Kill Everybody News

My latest book is doing well. And I've been giving lots of talks and interviews about it. I can recommend three interviews: the Cyberlaw podcast with Stewart Baker, the Lawfare podcast with Ben Wittes, and Le Show with Henry Shearer. My book talk at Google is also available. The Audible version w...

Three-Rotor Enigma Machine Up for Auction Today

Sotheby's is auctioning off a working, I think three-rotor Enigma machine today. They're expecting it to sell for about $200K. I have an Enigma, but it's missing the rotors...

That Bloomberg Supply-Chain-Hack Story

Back in October, Bloomberg reported that China has managed to install backdoors into server equipment that ended up in networks belonging to -- among others -- Apple and Amazon. Pretty much everybody has denied it including the US DHS and the UK NCSC. Bloomberg has stood by its story -- and is...

FBI Takes Down a Massive Advertising Fraud Ring

The FBI announced that it dismantled a large Internet advertising fraud network, and arrested eight people: A 13-count indictment was unsealed today in federal court in Brooklyn charging Aleksandr Zhukov, Boris Timokhin, Mikhail Andreev, Denis Avdeev, Dmitry Novikov, Sergey Ovsyannikov, Aleksandr...

Distributing Malware By Becoming an Admin on an Open-Source Project

The module "event-stream" was infected with malware by an anonymous someone who became an admin on the project. Cory Doctorow points out that this is a clever new attack vector: Many open source projects attain a level of "maturity" where no one really needs any new features and there aren't a lo...

Propaganda and the Weakening of Trust in Government

On November 4, 2016, the hacker "Guccifer 2.0,: a front for Russia's military intelligence service, claimed in a blogpost that the Democrats were likely to use vulnerabilities to hack the presidential elections. On November 9, 2018, President Donald Trump started tweeting about the senatorial...

How Surveillance Inhibits Freedom of Expression

In my book Data and Goliath, I write about the value of privacy. I talk about how it is essential for political liberty and justice, and for commercial fairness and equality. I talk about how it increases personal freedom and individual autonomy, and how the lack of it makes us all less secure. B...

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...

Using Machine Learning to Create Fake Fingerprints

Researchers are able to create fake fingerprints that result in a 20% false-positive rate. The problem is that these sensors obtain only partial images of users' fingerprints -- at the points where they make contact with the scanner. The paper noted that since partial prints are not as distinctiv...

Information Attacks against Democracies

Democracy is an information system. That's the starting place of our new paper: "Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy." In it, we look at democracy through the lens of information security, trying to understand the current waves of Internet disinformation attacks. Specifically, we wanted to...

The PCLOB Needs a Director

The US Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board is looking for a director. Among other things, this board has some oversight role over the NSA. More precisely, it can examine what any executive-branch agency is doing about counterterrorism. So it can examine the program of TSA watchlists, NSA...

What Happened to Cyber 9/11?

A recent article in the Atlantic asks why we haven't seen a"cyber 9/11" in the past fifteen or so years. I, too, remember the increasingly frantic and fearful warnings of a "cyber Peal Harbor," "cyber Katrina" -- when that was a thing -- or "cyber 9/11." I made fun of those warnings back then. Th...

Worst-Case Thinking Breeds Fear and Irrationality

Here's a crazy story from the UK. Basically, someone sees a man and a little girl leaving a shopping center. Instead of thinking "it must be a father and daughter, which happens millions of times a day and is perfectly normal," he thinks "this is obviously a case of child abduction and I must ale...

Israeli Surveillance Gear

The Israeli Defense Force mounted a botched raid in Gaza. They were attempting to install surveillance gear, which they ended up leaving behind. There are photos -- scroll past the video. Israeli media is claiming that the capture of this gear by Hamas causes major damage to Israeli electronic...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Sculptures

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...

Mailing Tech Support a Bomb

I understand his frustration, but this is extreme: When police asked Cryptopay what could have motivated Salonen to send the company a pipe bomb ­ or, rather, two pipe bombs, which is what investigators found when they picked apart the explosive package ­ the only thing the company could think of...

Hidden Cameras in Streetlights

Both the US Drug Enforcement Administration DEA and Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE are hiding surveillance cameras in streetlights. According to government procurement data, the DEA has paid a Houston, Texas company called Cowboy Streetlight Concealments LLC roughly $22,000 since June 20...

Chip Cards Fail to Reduce Credit Card Fraud in the US

A new study finds that credit card fraud has not declined since the introduction of chip cards in the US. The majority of stolen card information comes from hacked point-of-sale terminals. The reasons seem to be twofold. One, the US uses chip-and-signature instead of chip-and-PIN, obviating the...

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...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I'm speaking at Kiwicon in Wellington, New Zealand on November 16, 2018. I'm appearing on IBM Resilient's End of Year Review webinar on "The Top Cyber Security Trends in 2018 and Predictions for the Year Ahead," December 6, 2018 at...

Oracle and "Responsible Disclosure"

I've been writing about "responsible disclosure" for over a decade; here's an essay from 2007. Basically, it's a tacit agreement between researchers and software vendors. Researchers agree to withhold their work until software companies fix the vulnerabilities, and software vendors agree not to...

New IoT Security Regulations

Due to ever-evolving technological advances, manufacturers are connecting consumer goods­ -- from toys to light bulbs to major appliances­ -- to the Internet at breakneck speeds. This is the Internet of Things, and it's a security nightmare. The Internet of Things fuses products with communicatio...

Hiding Secret Messages in Fingerprints

This is a fun steganographic application: hiding a message in a fingerprint image. Can't see any real use for it, but that's okay...

Friday Squid Blogging: Australian Fisherman Gets Inked

Pretty good video. 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 Pentagon Is Publishing Foreign Nation-State Malware

This is a new thing: The Pentagon has suddenly started uploading malware samples from APTs and other nation-state sources to the website VirusTotal, which is essentially a malware zoo that's used by security pros and antivirus/malware detection engines to gain a better understanding of the threat...

Privacy and Security of Data at Universities

Interesting paper: "Open Data, Grey Data, and Stewardship: Universities at the Privacy Frontier," by Christine Borgman: Abstract: As universities recognize the inherent value in the data they collect and hold, they encounter unforeseen challenges in stewarding those data in ways that balance...

iOS 12.1 Vulnerability

This is really just to point out that computer security is really hard: Almost as soon as Apple released iOS 12.1 on Tuesday, a Spanish security researcher discovered a bug that exploits group Facetime calls to give anyone access to an iPhone users' contact information with no need for a passcode...

Consumer Reports Reviews Wireless Home-Security Cameras

Consumer Reports is starting to evaluate the security of IoT devices. As part of that, it's reviewing wireless home-security cameras. It found significant security vulnerabilities in D-Link cameras: In contrast, D-Link doesn't store video from the DCS-2630L in the cloud. Instead, the camera has i...

Security of Solid-State-Drive Encryption

Interesting research: "Self-encrypting deception: weaknesses in the encryption of solid state drives SSDs": Abstract: We have analyzed the hardware full-disk encryption of several SSDs by reverse engineering their firmware. In theory, the security guarantees offered by hardware encryption are...

Troy Hunt on Passwords

Troy Hunt has a good essay about why passwords are here to stay, despite all their security problems: This is why passwords aren't going anywhere in the foreseeable future and why insert thing here isn't going to kill them. No amount of focusing on how bad passwords are or how many accounts have...

Friday Squid Blogging: Eating More Squid

This research paper concludes that we'll be eating more squid in the future. 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...

How to Punish Cybercriminals

Interesting policy paper by Third Way: "To Catch a Hacker: Toward a comprehensive strategy to identify, pursue, and punish malicious cyber actors": In this paper, we argue that the United States currently lacks a comprehensive overarching strategic approach to identify, stop and punish...

Buying Used Voting Machines on eBay

This is not surprising: This year, I bought two more machines to see if security had improved. To my dismay, I discovered that the newer model machines -- those that were used in the 2016 election -- are running Windows CE and have USB ports, along with other components, that make them even easie...

Was the Triton Malware Attack Russian in Origin?

The conventional story is that Iran targeted Saudi Arabia with Triton in 2017. New research from FireEye indicates that it might have been Russia. I don't know. FireEye likes to attribute all sorts of things to Russia, but the evidence here looks pretty good...

ID Systems Throughout the 50 States

Jim Harper at CATO has a good survey of state ID systems in the US...

Cell Phone Security and Heads of State

Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that the Russians and the Chinese were eavesdropping on President Donald Trump's personal cell phone and using the information gleaned to better influence his behavior. This should surprise no one. Security experts have been talking about the potenti...

More on the Supermicro Spying Story

I've blogged twice about the Bloomberg story that China bugged Supermicro networking equipment destined to the US. We still don't know if the story is true, although I am increasingly skeptical because of the lack of corroborating evidence to emerge. We don't know anything more, but this is the...

Security Vulnerability in Internet-Connected Construction Cranes

This seems bad: The F25 software was found to contain a capture replay vulnerability -- basically an attacker would be able to eavesdrop on radio transmissions between the crane and the controller, and then send their own spoofed commands over the air to seize control of the crane. "These devices...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Falsely Labeled as Octopus

Two New Yorkers have been charged with importing squid from Peru and then reselling it as octopus. Yet another problem that a blockchain-enabled supply-chain system won't solve. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read ...

Detecting Fake Videos

This story nicely illustrates the arms race between technologies to create fake videos and technologies to detect fake videos: These fakes, while convincing if you watch a few seconds on a phone screen, aren't perfect yet. They contain tells, like creepily ever-open eyes, from flaws in their...

Android Ad-Fraud Scheme

BuzzFeed is reporting on a scheme where fraudsters buy legitimate Android apps, track users' behavior in order to mimic it in a way that evades bot detectors, and then uses bots to perpetuate an ad-fraud scheme. After being provided with a list of the apps and websites connected to the scheme,...

China's Hacking of the Border Gateway Protocol

This is a long -- and somewhat technical -- paper by Chris C. Demchak and Yuval Shavitt about China's repeated hacking of the Internet Border Gateway Protocol BGP: "China's Maxim ­ Leave No Access Point Unexploited: The Hidden Story of China Telecom's BGP Hijacking." BGP hacking is how large...

On Disguise

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

Are the Police Using Smart-Home IoT Devices to Spy on People?

IoT devices are surveillance devices, and manufacturers generally use them to collect data on their customers. Surveillance is still the business model of the Internet, and this data is used against the customers' interests: either by the device manufacturer or by some third party the manufacture...

Friday Squid Blogging: Roasted Squid with Tomatillo Salsa

Recipe and commentary. 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...

West Virginia Using Internet Voting

This is crazy and dangerous. West Virginia is allowing people to vote via a smart-phone app. Even crazier, the app uses blockchain -- presumably because they have no idea what the security issues with voting actually are...

Government Perspective on Supply Chain Security

This is an interesting interview with a former NSA employee about supply chain security. I consider this to be an insurmountable problem right now...

Privacy for Tigers

Ross Anderson has some new work: As mobile phone masts went up across the world's jungles, savannas and mountains, so did poaching. Wildlife crime syndicates can not only coordinate better but can mine growing public data sets, often of geotagged images. Privacy matters for tigers, for snow...

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...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I'm speaking at Data in Smarter Cities in New York City on October 23, 2018. I'm speaking at the Cyber Security Summit in Minneapolis, Minnesota on October 24, 2018. I'm speaking at ISF's 29th Annual World Congress in Las Vegas,...