I hope this is true: According to Jens Zimmermann, the German coalition negotiations had made it “quite clear” that the incoming government of the Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens and the business-friendly liberal FDP would reject “the weakening of encryption, which is being attempted under the guise of the …
Even before Apple made its announcement, law enforcement shifted their battle for backdoors to client-side scanning. The idea is that they wouldn’t touch the cryptography, but instead eavesdrop on communications and systems before encryption or after decryption. It’s not a cryptographic backdoor, but it’s still a …
We knew the basics of this story, but it’s good to have more detail. Here’s me in 2015 about this Juniper hack. Here’s me in 2007 on the NSA backdoor. [...]
In this post, I’ll collect links on Apple’s iPhone backdoor for scanning CSAM images. Previous links are here and here. Apple says that hash collisions in its CSAM detection system were expected, and not a concern. I’m not convinced that this secondary system was originally part …
Apple’s NeuralHash algorithm — the one it’s using for client-side scanning on the iPhone — has been reverse-engineered. Turns out it was already in iOS 14.3, and someone noticed : Early tests show that it can tolerate image resizing and compression, but not cropping or rotations. We also have …
Apple’s announcement that it’s going to start scanning photos for child abuse material is a big deal. ( Here are five news stories.) I have been following the details, and discussing it in several different email lists. I don’t have time right now to delve into the …
Apple’s announcement that it’s going to start scanning photos for child abuse material is a big deal. ( Here are five news stories.) I have been following the details, and discussing it in several different email lists. I don’t have time right now to delve into the …
Enlarge (credit: KiwiSDR ) A spectrum painted image made using KiwiSDR. (credit: xssfox) KiwiSDR is hardware that uses a software-defined radio to monitor transmissions in a local area and stream them over the Internet. A largely hobbyist base of users does all kinds of cool things with the playing-card-sized devices …
Motherboard got its hands on one of those Anom phones that were really FBI honeypots. The details are interesting. [...]
General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) is a mobile data standard that was widely used in the early 2000s. The first encryption algorithm for that standard was GEA-1, a stream cipher built on three linear-feedback shift registers and a non-linear combining function. Although the algorithm has a 64-bit key, the …
For three years, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Australian Federal Police owned and operated a commercial encrypted phone app, called AN0M, that was used by organized crime around the world. Of course, the police were able to read everything — I don’t even know if this qualifies …
Bizarro is a new banking trojan that is stealing financial information and crypto wallets....the program can be delivered in a couple of ways — either via malicious links contained within spam emails, or through a trojanized app. Using these sneaky methods, trojan operators will implant the malware onto a …
Developers have discovered a backdoor in the Codecov bash uploader. It’s been there for four months. We don’t know who put it there. Codecov said the breach allowed the attackers to export information stored in its users’ continuous integration (CI) environments. This information was then sent to …
Unknown hackers attempted to add a backdoor to the PHP source code. It was two malicious commits, with the subject “fix typo” and the names of known PHP developers and maintainers. They were discovered and removed before being pushed out to any users. But since 79% of the Internet …
Bloomberg News has a major story about the Chinese hacking computer motherboards made by Supermicro, Levono, and others. It’s been going on since at least 2008. The US government has known about it for almost as long, and has tried to keep the attack secret: China’s exploitation …
At the same time the Russians were using a backdoored SolarWinds update to attack networks worldwide, another threat actor — believed to be Chinese in origin — was using an already existing vulnerability in Orion to penetrate networks : Two people briefed on the case said FBI investigators recently found that the …
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) High-performance computer networks, some belonging to the world’s most prominent organizations, are under attack by a newly discovered backdoor that gives hackers the ability to remotely execute commands of their choice, researchers said on Tuesday. Kobalos, as researchers from security firm Eset have named …
A coordinated effort has captured the command-and-control servers of the Emotet botnet: Emotet establishes a backdoor onto Windows computer systems via automated phishing emails that distribute Word documents compromised with malware. Subjects of emails and documents in Emotet campaigns are regularly altered to provide the best chance of luring …
FireEye is reporting the current known tactics that the SVR used to compromise Microsoft 365 cloud data as part of its SolarWinds operation: Mandiant has observed UNC2452 and other threat actors moving laterally to the Microsoft 365 cloud using a combination of four primary techniques: Steal the Active Directory …
Crowdstrike is reporting on a sophisticated piece of malware that was able to inject malware into the SolarWinds build process: Key Points SUNSPOT is StellarParticle’s malware used to insert the SUNBURST backdoor into software builds of the SolarWinds Orion IT management product. SUNSPOT monitors running processes for those …
This is bad : More than 100,000 Zyxel firewalls, VPN gateways, and access point controllers contain a hardcoded admin-level backdoor account that can grant attackers root access to devices via either the SSH interface or the web administration panel. [...] Installing patches removes the backdoor account, which, according to Eye …