Last summer, the San Francisco police illegally used surveillance cameras at the George Floyd protests. The EFF is suing the police: This surveillance invaded the privacy of protesters, targeted people of color, and chills and deters participation and organizing for future protests. The SFPD also violated San Francisco’s …
Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen a bunch of writing about what seems to be fake COVID-19 testing sites. They take your name and info, and do a nose swab, but you never get test results. Speculation centered around data harvesting, but that didn’t make sense …
Rolling Stone is reporting that the UK government has hired the M&C Saatchi advertising agency to launch an anti-encryption advertising campaign. Presumably they’ll lean heavily on the “think of the children!” rhetoric we’re seeing in this current wave of the crypto wars. The technical eavesdropping mechanisms …
Here’s a fascinating report: “ Bounty Everything: Hackers and the Making of the Global Bug Marketplace.” From a summary :...researchers Ryan Ellis and Yuan Stevens provide a window into the working lives of hackers who participate in “bug bounty” programs — programs that hire hackers to discover and report bugs …
New research : The researchers from the FAS Center for Systems Biology discovered a network of genes important in squid eye development that are known to also play a crucial role in limb development across animals, including vertebrates and insects. The scientists say these genes have been repurposed in squid …
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m giving an online-only talk on “Securing a World of Physically Capable Computers” as part of Teleport’s Security Visionaries 2022 series, on January 18, 2022. I’m speaking at IT-S Now 2022 in …
I don’t even know what I think about this. Researchers have developed a malware detection system that uses EM waves: “ Obfuscation Revealed: Leveraging Electromagnetic Signals for Obfuscated Malware Classification.” Abstract : The Internet of Things (IoT) is constituted of devices that are exponentially growing in number and in complexity …
Remember when the US and Australian police surreptitiously owned and operated the encrypted cell phone app ANOM? They arrested 800 people in 2021 based on that operation. New documents received by Motherboard show that over 100 of those phones were shipped to users in the US, far more than …
Researchers have figured how how to intercept and fake an iPhone reboot: We’ll dissect the iOS system and show how it’s possible to alter a shutdown event, tricking a user that got infected into thinking that the phone has been powered off, but in fact, it’s …
Some European cell phone carriers, and now T-Mobile, are blocking Apple’s Private Relay anonymous browsing feature. This could be an interesting battle to watch. Slashdot thread. [...]
The City of Austin is warning about QR codes stuck to parking meters that take people to fraudulent payment sites. [...]
The price of squid in Korea is rising due to limited supply. 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. [...]
Norton 360 can now mine Ethereum. It’s opt-in, and the company keeps 15%. It’s hard to uninstall this option. [...]
DuckDuckGo has had a banner year : And yet, DuckDuckGo. The privacy-oriented search engine netted more than 35 billion search queries in 2021, a 46.4% jump over 2020 (23.6 billion). That’s big. Even so, the company, which bills itself as the “Internet privacy company,” offering a search …
Both Russia and Ukraine are preparing for military operations in cyberspace. [...]
We have discovered a squid — (Oegopsida, Magnapinnidae, Magnapinna sp.) — that lives at 6,000 meters deep. :They’re really weird,” says Vecchione. “They drift along with their arms spread out and these really long, skinny, spaghetti-like extensions dangling down underneath them.” Microscopic suckers on those filaments enable the squid …
This development suprises no one who has been paying attention: Researchers now believe AirTags, which are equipped with Bluetooth technology, could be revealing a more widespread problem of tech-enabled tracking. They emit a digital signal that can be detected by devices running Apple’s mobile operating system. Those devices …
Someone left it in a cemetery. 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 US has returned $154 million in bitcoins stolen by a Sony employee. However, on December 1, following an investigation in collaboration with Japanese law enforcement authorities, the FBI seized the 3879.16242937 BTC in Ishii’s wallet after obtaining the private key, which made it possible to transfer …
Citizen Lab published another report on the spyware used against two Egyptian nationals. One was hacked by NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware. The other was hacked both by Pegasus and by the spyware from another cyberweapons arms manufacturer: Cytrox. We haven’t heard a lot about Cytrox and its …
This seems big : The UK government has officially included decapod crustaceans–including crabs, lobsters, and crayfish–and cephalopod mollusks–including octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish–in its Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill. This means they are now recognized as “sentient beings” in the UK. As usual, you can also use this …
Log4j is being exploited by all sorts of attackers, all over the Internet: At that point it was reported that there were over 100 attempts to exploit the vulnerability every minute. “Since we started to implement our protection we prevented over 1,272,000 attempts to allocate the vulnerability …
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at the RSA Conference 2022 in San Francisco on February 8, 2022. I’m speaking at IT-S Now 2022 in Vienna on June 2, 2022. I’m speaking at the 14th International …
It’s serious : The range of impacts is so broad because of the nature of the vulnerability itself. Developers use logging frameworks to keep track of what happens in a given application. To exploit Log4Shell, an attacker only needs to get the system to log a strategically crafted string …
NSO Group’s descent into Internet pariah status continues. Its Pegasus spyware was used against nine US State Department employees. We don’t know which NSO Group customer trained the spyware on the US. But the company does: NSO Group said in a statement on Thursday that it did …