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 authenticate messages digitally. [...] ECDSA signatures rely on a …
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 sepratists. [...]
Beanstalk Farms is a decentralized finance project that has a majority stake governance system: basically people have proportiona 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 to give himself …
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 undetectable backdoor into a classifier. On …
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. [...]
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 on June 2, 2022. I’m speaking at the 14th International Conference on …
The Department of Energy, CISA, the FBI, and the NSA jointly issued an advisory describing a sophisticated piece of malware called Pipedream that’s designed to attack a wide range of industrial control systems. This is clearly from a government, but no attribution is given. There’s also no …
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 that the attack had …
John Oliver has an excellent segment on data brokers and surveillance capitalism. [...]
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 Bitcoin’s arrival, academic security researchers — and then companies like Chainalysis — began to tear gaping holes in …
Scientists are now debating whether octopuses, squid, and crabs have emotions. Short answer: we don’t know, but can’t rule it out. There may be a point when humans can no longer assume that crayfish, shrimp, and other invertebrates don’t feel pain and other emotions. “If they …
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 of the country …
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 actor known to security researchers as Sandworm …
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. [...]
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 long as the proper …
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 you’re wondering, no, that is not normal in the security community. While experts tell me that the concept of a “responsible disclosure …
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 …
These techniques are not new, but they’re increasingly popular :...some forms of MFA are stronger than others, and recent events show that these weaker forms aren’t much of a hurdle for some hackers to clear. In the past few months, suspected script kiddies like the Lapsus$ data …
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 the express …
The malicious uses of these technologies are scary : Police reportedly arrived on the scene last week and found the man crouched beside the woman’s passenger side door. According to the police, the man had, at some point, wrapped his Apple Watch across the spokes of the woman’s …
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 …
Research : Abstract: The retreating ice cover of the Central Arctic Ocean (CAO) fuels speculations on future fisheries. However, very little is known about the existence of harvestable fish stocks in this 3.3 million–square kilometer ecosystem around the North Pole. Crossing the Eurasian Basin, we documented an uninterrupted …
Gus Simmons is an early pioneer in cryptography and computer security. I know him best for his work on authentication and covert channels, specifically as related to nuclear treaty verification. His work is cited extensively in Applied Cryptography. He has written a memoir of growing up dirt-poor in 1930s …
In kernel version 5.17, both /dev/random and /dev/urandom have been replaced with a new — identical — algorithm based on the BLAKE2 hash function, which is an excellent security improvement. [...]
The Office of Inspector General has audited NASA’s insider threat program: While NASA has a fully operational insider threat program for its classified systems, the vast majority of the Agency’s information technology (IT) systems — including many containing high-value assets or critical infrastructure — are unclassified and are therefore …