It turns out that it’s surprisingly easy to create a fake Harvard student and get a harvard.edu email account. Scammers are using that prestigious domain name to shill brands : Basically, it appears that anyone with $300 to spare can – or could, depending on whether Harvard successfully shuts …
Interesting Twitter thread on how cell phone metadata can be used to identify and track people who don’t want to be identified and tracked. [...]
Really interesting research demonstrating how to hide vulnerabilities in source code by manipulating how Unicode text is displayed. It’s really clever, and not the sort of attack one would normally think about. From Ross Anderson’s blog : We have discovered ways of manipulating the encoding of source code …
In what maybe peak hype, Squid Game has its own cryptocurrency. Not in the fictional show, but in real life. 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 …
Microsoft is reporting that the same attacker that was behind the SolarWinds breach — the Russian SVR, which Microsoft is calling Nobelium — is continuing with similar supply-chain attacks: Nobelium has been attempting to replicate the approach it has used in past attacks by targeting organizations integral to the global IT …
Vice has a detailed article about how the FBI gets data from cell phone providers like AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, based on a leaked (I think) 2019 139-page presentation. [...]
Citizen Lab is reporting that a New York Times journalist was hacked with the NSO Group’s spyware Pegasus, probably by the Saudis. The world needs to do something about these cyberweapons arms manufacturers. This kind of thing isn’t enough; NSO Group is an Israeli company. [...]
Squid are eating Maine shrimp, causing a collapse of the ecosystem. This seems to be a result of climate change. Maine’s shrimp fishery has been closed for nearly a decade since the stock’s collapse in 2013. Scientists are now saying a species of squid that came into …
Someone has been hacking telecommunications networks around the world: LightBasin (aka UNC1945) is an activity cluster that has been consistently targeting the telecommunications sector at a global scale since at least 2016, leveraging custom tools and an in-depth knowledge of telecommunications network architectures. Recent findings highlight this cluster’s …
Roger Grimes on why multifactor authentication isn’t a panacea : The first time I heard of this issue was from a Midwest CEO. His organization had been hit by ransomware to the tune of $10M. Operationally, they were still recovering nearly a year later. And, embarrassingly, it was his …
Here’s a story of someone who, with three compatriots, rented textbooks from Amazon and then sold them instead of returning them. They used gift cards and prepaid credit cards to buy the books, so there was no available balance when Amazon tried to charge them the buyout price …
Researchers trained a machine-learning system on videos of people typing their PINs into ATMs: By using three tries, which is typically the maximum allowed number of attempts before the card is withheld, the researchers reconstructed the correct sequence for 5-digit PINs 30% of the time, and reached 41% for …
According to a report from CISA last week, there were three ransomware attacks against water treatment plants last year. WWS Sector cyber intrusions from 2019 to early 2021 include: In August 2021, malicious cyber actors used Ghost variant ransomware against a California-based WWS facility. The ransomware variant had been …
The Missouri governor wants to prosecute the reporter who discovered a security vulnerability in a state’s website, and then reported it to the state. The newspaper agreed to hold off publishing any story while the department fixed the problem and protected the private information of teachers around the …
The Missouri governor wants to prosecute the reporter who discovered a security vulnerability in a state’s website, and then reported it to the state. The newspaper agreed to hold off publishing any story while the department fixed the problem and protected the private information of teachers around the …
New video of a large squid in the Red Sea at about 2,800 feet. 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. [...]
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 …
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’ll be speaking at an Informa event on November 29, 2021. Details to come. The list is maintained on this page. [...]
New paper: “ This Person (Probably) Exists. Identity Membership Attacks Against GAN Generated Faces. Abstract: Recently, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have achieved stunning realism, fooling even human observers. Indeed, the popular tongue-in-cheek website http://thispersondoesnotexist.com, taunts users with GAN generated images that seem too real to believe. On the …
It’s a matter of going after those with deep pockets. From Wired : Cloudflare was sued in November 2018 by Mon Cheri Bridals and Maggie Sottero Designs, two wedding dress manufacturers and sellers that alleged Cloudflare was guilty of contributory copyright infringement because it didn’t terminate services for …
I feel sorry for the accused : The “security incident” that forced a New-York bound flight to make an emergency landing at LaGuardia Airport on Saturday turned out to be a misunderstanding — after an airline passenger mistook another traveler’s camera for a bomb, sources said Sunday. American Airlines Flight …
It’s not actually banned in the EU yet — the legislative process is much more complicated than that — but it’s a step: a total ban on biometric mass surveillance. To respect “privacy and human dignity,” MEPs said that EU lawmakers should pass a permanent ban on the automated …
Pretty pictures of a strawberry squid ( Histioteuthis heteropsis ). 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 interesting: A company that is a critical part of the global telecommunications infrastructure used by AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and several others around the world such as Vodafone and China Mobile, quietly disclosed that hackers were inside its systems for years, impacting more than 200 of its …
Facebook — along with Instagram and WhatsApp — went down globally today. Basically, someone deleted their BGP records, which made their DNS fall apart....at approximately 11:39 a.m. ET today (15:39 UTC), someone at Facebook caused an update to be made to the company’s Border Gateway Protocol …