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 emergency services to the tune of billions of …
Back in the 1960s, if you played a 2,600Hz tone into an AT&T pay phone, you could make calls without paying. A phone hacker named John Draper noticed that the plastic whistle that came free in a box of Captain Crunch cereal worked to make the right …
In the first week of January, the pharmaceutical giant Merck quietly settled its years-long lawsuit over whether or not its property and casualty insurers would cover a $700 million claim filed after the devastating NotPetya cyberattack in 2017. The malware ultimately infected more than 40,000 of Merck’s …
Apple is rolling out a new “Stolen Device Protection” feature that seems well thought out: When Stolen Device Protection is turned on, Face ID or Touch ID authentication is required for additional actions, including viewing passwords or passkeys stored in iCloud Keychain, applying for a new Apple Card, turning …
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Benj Edwards ) In an editorial for Slate published Monday, renowned security researcher Bruce Schneier warned that AI models may enable a new era of mass spying, allowing companies and governments to automate the process of analyzing and summarizing large volumes of conversation data, fundamentally lowering …
In a rare squid/security post, here’s an article about unpatched vulnerabilities in the Squid caching proxy. 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 an excerpt from a longer paper. You can read the whole thing (complete with sidebars and illustrations) here. Our message is simple: it is possible to get the best of both worlds. We can and should get the benefits of the cloud while taking security back into …
Gene Spafford wrote an essay reflecting on the Morris Worm of 1988—35 years ago. His lessons from then are still applicable today. [...]
Another example of a large and influential state doing things the federal government won’t: Boards of directors, or other senior committees, are charged with overseeing cybersecurity risk management, and must retain an appropriate level of expertise to understand cyber issues, the rules say. Directors must sign off on …
Microsoft has announced an early access program for its LLM-based security chatbot assistant: Security Copilot. I am curious whether this thing is actually useful. [...]
Tadayoshi Kohno, Yasemin Acar, and Wulf Loh wrote excellent paper on ethical thinking within the computer security community: “ Ethical Frameworks and Computer Security Trolley Problems: Foundations for Conversation “: Abstract: The computer security research community regularly tackles ethical questions. The field of ethics / moral philosophy has for centuries considered what …
Laptop technicians routinely violate the privacy of the people whose computers they repair: Researchers at University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, recovered logs from laptops after receiving overnight repairs from 12 commercial shops. The logs showed that technicians from six of the locations had accessed personal data and that …
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 …
Paul van Oorschot’s webpage contains a complete copy of his book: Computer Security and the Internet: Tools and Jewels. It’s worth reading. [...]
This is weird : Once an hour, infected Macs check a control server to see if there are any new commands the malware should run or binaries to execute. So far, however, researchers have yet to observe delivery of any payload on any of the infected 30,000 machines, leaving …