I’ve been writing about the problem with lawful-access backdoors in encryption for decades now: that as soon as you create a mechanism for law enforcement to bypass encryption, the bad guys will use it too. Turns out the same thing is true for non-technical backdoors: The advisory said …

Really interesting research: “ An LLM-Assisted Easy-to-Trigger Backdoor Attack on Code Completion Models: Injecting Disguised Vulnerabilities against Strong Detection “: Abstract : Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed code com- pletion tasks, providing context-based suggestions to boost developer productivity in software engineering. As users often fine-tune these models for specific applications, poisoning …

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Chinese hackers (Salt Typhoon) penetrated the networks of US broadband providers, and might have accessed the backdoors that the federal government uses to execute court-authorized wiretap requests. Those backdoors have been mandated by law—CALEA—since 1994. It’s a weird story …

Hackers can execute commands on a remote computer by sending malformed emails to a Zimbra mail server. It’s critical, but difficult to exploit. In an email sent Wednesday afternoon, Proofpoint researcher Greg Lesnewich seemed to largely concur that the attacks weren’t likely to lead to mass infections …

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Researchers still don’t know the cause of a recently discovered malware infection affecting almost 1.3 million streaming devices running an open source version of Android in almost 200 countries. Security firm Doctor Web reported Thursday that malware named Android.Vo1d has backdoored the …

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 industry. These components include: Technical Assistance Requests (TARs …

Enlarge (credit: BeeBright / Getty Images / iStockphoto ) Researchers have determined that two fake AWS packages downloaded hundreds of times from the open source NPM JavaScript repository contained carefully concealed code that backdoored developers' computers when executed. The packages— img-aws-s3-object-multipart-copy and legacyaws-s3-object-multipart-copy —were attempts to appear as aws-s3-object-multipart-copy, a legitimate JavaScript …

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images ) WordPress plugins running on as many as 36,000 websites have been backdoored in a supply-chain attack with unknown origins, security researchers said on Monday. So far, five plugins are known to be affected in the campaign, which was active as recently as Monday morning …

No word on how this backdoor was installed: A software maker serving more than 10,000 courtrooms throughout the world hosted an application update containing a hidden backdoor that maintained persistent communication with a malicious website, researchers reported Thursday, in the latest episode of a supply-chain attack. The software …

Enlarge (credit: JAVS) A software maker serving more than 10,000 courtrooms throughout the world hosted an application update containing a hidden backdoor that maintained persistent communication with a malicious website, researchers reported Thursday, in the latest episode of a supply-chain attack. The software, known as the JAVS Viewer …

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Hackers abused an antivirus service for five years in order to infect end users with malware. The attack worked because the service delivered updates over HTTP, a protocol vulnerable to attacks that corrupt or tamper with data as it travels over the Internet. The unknown …

After the XZ Utils discovery, people have been examining other open-source projects. Surprising no one, the incident is not unique: The OpenJS Foundation Cross Project Council received a suspicious series of emails with similar messages, bearing different names and overlapping GitHub-associated emails. These emails implored OpenJS to take action …

Last week, the internet dodged a major nation-state attack that would have had catastrophic cybersecurity repercussions worldwide. It’s a catastrophe that didn’t happen, so it won’t get much attention—but it should. There’s an important moral to the story of the attack and its discovery …

The cybersecurity world got really lucky last week. An intentionally placed backdoor in xz Utils, an open-source compression utility, was pretty much accidentally discovered by a Microsoft engineer—weeks before it would have been incorporated into both Debian and Red Hat Linux. From ArsTehnica : Malicious code added to xz …

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) On Friday, a lone Microsoft developer rocked the world when he revealed a backdoor had been intentionally planted in xz Utils, an open source data compression utility available on almost all installations of Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. The person or people behind this …

Enlarge / Internet Backdoor in a string of binary code in a shape of an eye. (credit: Getty Images) Researchers have found a malicious backdoor in a compression tool that made its way into widely used Linux distributions, including those from Red Hat and Debian. The compression utility, known as …

Enlarge / Internet Backdoor in a string of binary code in a shape of an eye. (credit: Getty Images) Researchers have found a malicious backdoor in a compression tool that made its way into widely used Linux distributions, including those from Red Hat and Debian. The compression utility, known as …

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that breaking end-to-end encryption by adding backdoors violates human rights : Seemingly most critically, the [Russian] government told the ECHR that any intrusion on private lives resulting from decrypting messages was “necessary” to combat terrorism in a democratic society. To back up …

Kaspersky researchers are detailing “an attack that over four years backdoored dozens if not thousands of iPhones, many of which belonged to employees of Moscow-based security firm Kaspersky.” It’s a zero-click exploit that makes use of four iPhone zero-days. The most intriguing new detail is the targeting of …

This is a fun challenge: The NIST elliptic curves that power much of modern cryptography were generated in the late ’90s by hashing seeds provided by the NSA. How were the seeds generated? Rumor has it that they are in turn hashes of English sentences, but the person who …

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Hackers backed by the Chinese government are planting malware into routers that provides long-lasting and undetectable backdoor access to the networks of multinational companies in the US and Japan, governments in both countries said Wednesday. The hacking group, tracked under names including BlackTech, Palmerworm, Temp …

Totally expected, but still good to hear : Onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, Meredith Whittaker, the president of the Signal Foundation, which maintains the nonprofit Signal messaging app, reaffirmed that Signal would leave the U.K. if the country’s recently passed Online Safety Bill forced Signal to build “backdoors …

Jake Appelbaum’s PhD thesis contains several new revelations from the classified NSA documents provided to journalists by Edward Snowden. Nothing major, but a few more tidbits. Kind of amazing that that all happened ten years ago. At this point, those documents are more historical than anything else. And …

A bunch of networks, including US Government networks, have been hacked by the Chinese. The hackers used forged authentication tokens to access user email, using a stolen Microsoft Azure account consumer signing key. Congress wants answers. The phrase “ negligent security practices ” is being tossed about—and with good reason …

Seems that there is a deliberate backdoor in the twenty-year-old TErrestrial Trunked RAdio (TETRA) standard used by police forces around the world. The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), an organization that standardizes technologies across the industry, first created TETRA in 1995. Since then, TETRA has been used in products …