The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,337 posts.
-Sept. 9, 12:30 p.m. CT, Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico: Halfway down the southbound four-lane highway from Cancun to the ancient ruins in Tulum, traffic inexplicably slowed to a halt. There was some sort of checkpoint ahead by the Mexican Federal Police. I began to wonder whether it was a good idea to have brought along…
A few weeks ago, some friends and I decided that our houses weren’t crammed full enough with useless crap and so we embarked on a journey to a large junk shop surplus warehouse. The place was a vast hangar brimming with old and curious pieces of technology ranging from IBM keyboards to VHS video editing …
Someone recently noticed a Washington Post story on the TSA that originally contained a detailed photograph of all the TSA master keys. It’s now blurred out of the Washington Post story, but the image is still floating around the Internet. The whole thing neatly illustrates one of the main problems with backdoors…
Back in June, I was doing some analysis on a Windows driver and discovered that the INIT section had the read, write, and executable characteristics flags set. Windows executables (drivers included…
One consequence of these unsolicited security scans is that — since they feed a variety of inputs to forms, including the account creation form — I see a lot of obviously fake signup attempts (alas, none yet from the world's most obviously fake domain name ). These are harmless, since the signup code sends out a…
What does it mean for a baby monitor to be safe? Some things are clearly essential: It should not explode; it should not release significant quantities of dangerous gasses; if it's designed to be placed within reach of a baby, it should not pose an electrocution or choking hazard. Less obviously, if it has data or…
In this blog I look at how widespread the usage of common security based HTTP response headers are in the Alexa Top 1 Million most visited sites.
AshleyMadison.com , a site that helps married people cheat and whose slogan is “Life is Short, have an Affair,” recently put up a half million (Canadian) dollar bounty for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of the Impact Team — the name chosen by the hacker(s) who recently leaked data on more than 30…
While traveling through Dulles Airport last week, I noticed an Internet oddity. The nearby AT&T hotspot was fairly fast—that was a pleasant surprise.
I found myself in somewhat of a unique position last week: I’d made the Ashley Madison data searchable for verified subscribers of Have I been pwned? [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) and now – perhaps unsurprisingly in retrospect – I was being inundated with email. I mean hundreds of emails every day
In addition to unforgettable life experiences and personal growth, one thing I got out of DEF CON 23 was a copy of POC||GTFO 0x08 from Travis Goodspeed. The coolest article I’ve read so far in it is “Deniable Backdoors Using Compiler Bugs,” in which the authors abused a pre-existing bug in CLANG to create a backdoored…
Most bugs are straightforward, but occasionally one comes up which is not so clear in its impact. Such is the case with a bug which is fixed in tarsnap 1.0.36 . This bug causes the NUL string termination byte to overflow the heap-allocated buffer used for paths of objects examined as tarsnap traverses a directory…
Since there haven't been any major public announcements regarding PS4 hacking for a long time now, I wanted to explain a bit about how far PS4 hacking has come, and what is preventing further progression.
Many news sites and blogs are reporting that the data stolen last month from 37 million users of AshleyMadison.com — a site that facilitates cheating and extramarital affairs — has finally been posted online for the world to see. In the past 48 hours, several huge dumps of data claiming to be the actual AshleyMadison…
Yesterday the New York Times and ProPublica posted a lengthy investigation based on leaked NSA documents, outlining the extensive surveillance collaboration between AT&T and the U.S. government…
There's a little kerfuffle going on over on HN about a newly discovered local root exploit on OS X 10.10.5 , so I thought this might be a g...
Collection of my projects and hacks.
Dual_EC was almost certainly an NSA backdoor. Extended Random is the TLS extension that would have made it practical to exploit. Did NSA plant that one too? A look at the evidence.
Personal website of Stefan Heule
