Fishermen are catching more squid as other fish are depleted. Blog moderation policy. | Continue reading
NIST’s second draft of its “SP 800-63-4“—its digital identify guidelines—finally contains some really good rules about passwords: The following requirements apply to passwords: lVerifiers and CSPs SHALL require passwords to be a minimum of eight characters in length and SHOULD re … | Continue reading
A good—long, complex—analysis of the EU’s new Cyber Resilience Act. | Continue reading
Clever: A malware campaign uses the unusual method of locking users in their browser’s kiosk mode to annoy them into entering their Google credentials, which are then stolen by information-stealing malware. Specifically, the malware “locks” the user’s browser on Google’s login pa … | Continue reading
Israel’s brazen attacks on Hezbollah last week, in which hundreds of pagers and two-way radios exploded and killed at least 37 people, graphically illustrated a threat that cybersecurity experts have been warning about for years: Our international supply chains for computerized e … | Continue reading
I always like a good hack. And this story delivers. Basically, the New York City bikeshare program has a system to reward people who move bicycles from full stations to empty ones. By deliberately moving bikes to create artificial problems, and exploiting exactly how the system c … | Continue reading
The teaser for Squid Game Season Two dropped. Blog moderation policy. | Continue reading
This is really interesting. It’s a phishing attack targeting GitHub users, tricking them to solve a fake Captcha that actually runs a script that is copied to the command line. Clever. | Continue reading
The FBI has shut down a botnet run by Chinese hackers: The botnet malware infected a number of different types of internet-connected devices around the world, including home routers, cameras, digital video recorders, and NAS drives. Those devices were used to help infiltrate sens … | Continue reading
Wow. It seems they all exploded simultaneously, which means they were triggered. Were they each tampered with physically, or did someone figure out how to trigger a thermal runaway remotely? Malicious code update, or natural vulnerability? I have no idea, but I expect we will all … | Continue reading
Interesting social engineering attack: luring potential job applicants with fake recruiting pitches, trying to convince them to download malware. From a news article These particular attacks from North Korean state-funded hacking team Lazarus Group are new, but the overall malwar … | Continue reading
CISA wants everyone—and government agencies in particular—to remove or upgrade an Ivanti Cloud Service Appliance (CSA) that is no longer being supported. Welcome to the security nightmare that is the Internet of Things. | Continue reading
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at eCrime 2024 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. The event runs from September 24 through 26, 2024, and my keynote is at 8:45 AM ET on the 24th. I’m briefly speaking at the EPIC Champion of Freedom Awards … | Continue reading
This is an odd story of serving squid during legislative negotiations in the Philippines. | Continue reading
Over the summer, I gave a talk about AI and democracy at TedXBillings. The recording is | Continue reading
Microsoft is updating SymCrypt, its core cryptographic library, with new quantum-secure algorithms. Microsoft’s details are here. From a news article: The first new algorithm Microsoft added to SymCrypt is called ML-KEM. Previously known as CRYSTALS-Kyber, ML-KEM is one of three … | Continue reading
New research evaluating the effectiveness of reward modeling during Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF): “SEAL: Systematic Error Analysis for Value ALignment.” The paper introduces quantitative metrics for evaluating the effectiveness of modeling and aligning human … | Continue reading
According to Microsoft researchers, North Korean hackers have been using a Chrome zero-day exploit to steal cryptocurrency. | Continue reading
In 2018, Australia passed the Assistance and Access Act, which—among other things—gave the government the power to force companies to break their own encryption. The Assistance and Access Act includes key components that outline investigatory powers between government and industr … | Continue reading
The first live video of the Promachoteuthis squid, filmed at a newly discovered seamount off the coast of Chile. Blog moderation policy. | Continue reading
There is a side-channel attack against YubiKey access tokens that allows someone to clone a device. It’s a complicated attack, requiring the victim’s username and password, and physical access to their YubiKey—as well as some technical expertise and equipment. Still, nice piece o … | Continue reading
Really interesting analysis of the American M-209 encryption device and its security. | Continue reading
This story seems straightforward. A city is the victim of a ransomware attack. They repeatedly lie to the media about the severity of the breach. A security researcher repeatedly proves their statements to be lies. The city gets mad and sues the researcher. Let’s hope the judge t … | Continue reading
The NSA’s “National Cryptographic School Television Catalogue” from 1991 lists about 600 COMSEC and SIGINT training videos. There are a bunch explaining the operations of various cryptographic equipment, and a few code words I have never heard of before. | Continue reading
Interesting vulnerability: …a special lane at airport security called Known Crewmember (KCM). KCM is a TSA program that allows pilots and flight attendants to bypass security screening, even when flying on domestic personal trips. The KCM process is fairly simple: the employee us … | Continue reading
Details. Blog moderation policy. | Continue reading
The “long lost lecture” by Adm. Grace Hopper has been published by the NSA. (Note that there are two parts.) It’s a wonderful talk: funny, engaging, wise, prescient. Remember that talk was given in 1982, less than a year before the ARPANET switched to TCP/IP and the internet went … | Continue reading
Matthew Green wrote a really good blog post on what Telegram’s encryption is and is not. | Continue reading
Ars Technica has a good article on what’s happening in the world of television surveillance. More than even I realized. | Continue reading
This is a big deal. A US Appeals Court ruled that geofence warrants—these are general warrants demanding information about all people within a geographical boundary—are unconstitutional. The decision seems obvious to me, but you can’t take anything for granted. | Continue reading
Making self-healing materials based on the teeth in squid suckers. Blog moderation policy. | Continue reading
This site will let you take a selfie with a New York City traffic surveillance camera. | Continue reading
This is a fantastic project mapping the global surveillance industry. | Continue reading
Rolling Stone has a long investigative story (non-paywalled version here) about a CIA agent who spent years posing as an Islamic radical. Unrelated, but also in the “real life spies” file: a fake Sudanese diving resort run by Mossad. | Continue reading
This is yet another insecure Internet-of-things story, this one about wireless gear shifters for bicycles. These gear shifters are used in big-money professional bicycle races like the Tour de France, which provides an incentive to actually implement this attack. Research paper. … | Continue reading
Palo Alto Networks published its semi-annual report on ransomware. From the Executive Summary: Unit 42 monitors ransomware and extortion leak sites closely to keep tabs on threat activity. We reviewed compromise announcements from 53 dedicated leak sites in the first half of 2024 … | Continue reading
How did I not know before now that there was a market for squid oil? The squid oil market has experienced robust growth in recent years, expanding from $4.56 billion in 2023 to $4.94 billion in 2024 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.5%. The growth in the historic perio … | Continue reading
The press is reporting a critical Windows vulnerability affecting IPv6. As Microsoft explained in its Tuesday advisory, unauthenticated attackers can exploit the flaw remotely in low-complexity attacks by repeatedly sending IPv6 packets that include specially crafted packets. Mic … | Continue reading
From the Federal Register: After three rounds of evaluation and analysis, NIST selected four algorithms it will standardize as a result of the PQC Standardization Process. The public-key encapsulation mechanism selected was CRYSTALS-KYBER, along with three digital signature schem … | Continue reading
Texas is suing General Motors for collecting driver data without consent and then selling it to insurance companies: From CNN: In car models from 2015 and later, the Detroit-based car manufacturer allegedly used technology to “collect, record, analyze, and transmit highly detaile … | Continue reading
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at eCrime 2024 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. The event runs from September 24 through 26, 2024, and my keynote is on the 24th. The list is maintained on this page. | Continue reading
Really interesting article on the ancient-manuscript scholars who are applying their techniques to the Voynich Manuscript. No one has been able to understand the writing yet, but there are some new understandings: Davis presented her findings at the medieval-studies conference an … | Continue reading
Interesting paper: “Generative AI Misuse: A Taxonomy of Tactics and Insights from Real-World Data“: Generative, multimodal artificial intelligence (GenAI) offers transformative potential across industries, but its misuse poses significant risks. Prior research has shed light on t … | Continue reading
Yet another SQUID acronym: SQUID, short for Surrogate Quantitative Interpretability for Deepnets, is a computational tool created by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) scientists. It’s designed to help interpret how AI models analyze the genome. Compared with other analysis too … | Continue reading
Consumer Reports has a new study of people-search site removal services, concluding that they don’t really work: As a whole, people-search removal services are largely ineffective. Private information about each participant on the people-search sites decreased after using the peo … | Continue reading
It’s possible to cancel other people’s voter registration: On Friday, four days after Georgia Democrats began warning that bad actors could abuse the state’s new online portal for canceling voter registrations, the Secretary of State’s Office acknowledged to ProPublica that it ha … | Continue reading
When an airplane crashes, impartial investigatory bodies leap into action, empowered by law to unearth what happened and why. But there is no such empowered and impartial body to investigate CrowdStrike’s faulty update that recently unfolded, ensnarling banks, airlines, and emerg … | Continue reading
Ford has a new patent application for a system where cars monitor each other’s speeds, and then report then to some central authority. Slashdot thread. | Continue reading