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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,337 posts.
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Facebook paid $4.5K for disclosure of my user account exploit
Back in 2009 I found a major security exploit on both Facebook and the than popular MySpace which exposed access to a user's personal data. I reported both data leaks to the social networks, and…
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Liberty Reserve Founder Arrested, Site Shuttered
The founder of Liberty Reserve , a digital currency that has evolved as perhaps the most popular form of payment in the cybercrime underground, was reportedly arrested in Spain this week on suspicion of money laundering. News of the law enforcement action may help explain an ongoing three-day outage at…
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Improving the security of your SSH private key files
Update (July 2015): This post is now rather outdated, and the procedure for modifying your private key files is no longer recommended. A better solution is to use ssh-keygen -o .
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Surveillance and the Internet of Things
The Internet has turned into a massive surveillance tool. We’re constantly monitored on the Internet by hundreds of companies—both familiar and unfamiliar. Everything we do there is recorded, collected, and collated—sometimes by corporations wanting to sell us stuff and sometimes by governments wanting to keep an eye…
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A Profanity-Laced Video Game Password That Breaks Everything
Most of these passwords were gibberish that required a pen-and-paper to write down and remember. One password, however, is more memorable, and much more sinister.
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Exploiting a Go Binary
Earlier this year, tylerni7 showed us a proof of concept for a 32 bit Go exploit using this issue . geohot and I had a wager over who could get the first remote code execution on play.golang.org : he won, but just barely ;-). Props also to ricky for helping to find the underlying cause/writing the patch. Here is a…
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Worthless security claims
I’ve been considering purchasing one of these t-shirts: This shirt would announce to everyone who crosses my path that I am, in fact, the world’s greatest lover. They would know this because I have a t-shirt that tells them so and it would give them enormous
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A determined 'hacker' decrypts RDS-TMC
RDS-TMC uses an encryption algorithm simple enough to be run using pen-and-paper hardware.
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Exploiting a Bug in Google's Glass
A few days ago, I posted to Twitter a picture I took of a Google Glass unit running software that I had modified. I did this while in the Bay Area after picking it up from Google's headquarters in Mountain View. I was unable to provide many more details at the time, as I first was busy driving home, and then became…
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How I attacked a fellow student
I’m a college student studying abroad at the University of Pennsylvania, studying a mixture of CS, Physics and Music. This semester I decided to take a course CIS551: Network and Computer Security, eager to learn about the field. This is the story of how as part of the course, I compromised the security of one […]
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Zerocoin: making Bitcoin anonymous
Wow, what the heck is going on with Bitcoin? When I started this post, the value of a single bitcoin had surged upwards of $250. It’s corrected a bit since then (down $100 or so), but it̵…
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A non-mathematical explanation of one way functions
Alice and Bob are crossword enthusiasts. Every morning they rush to complete the Daily Telegraph cryptic crossword . One morning Alice fini...
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Nice Security Mindset Example
A real-world one-way function: Alice and Bob procure the same edition of the white pages book for a particular town, say Cambridge. For each letter Alice wants to encrypt, she finds a person in the book whose last name starts with this letter and uses his/her phone number as the encryption of that letter. To decrypt…
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Don't Copy-Paste from Website to Terminal
You surely know this: You're looking at some website with some useful shell commands. However, those commands are long as hell and you know you're probably not gonna need them for a few years or so (so there's no need to memorize them). So, what do you do? You copy-paste them. Here's an example:
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How to implement HTTPS in an insufficient manner
HTTPS or SSL or TLS or whatever you want to call it can be a confusing beast. Some say it’s just about protecting your password and banking info whilst the packets are flying around the web but I’ve long said that SSL is not about encryption [https://www.
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ISP Advertisement Injection - CMA Communications
Apple Inc. endorsing H&R Block with a beautiful bright green banner ad, compliments of CMA Communications. Tired from the day’s ev...
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Comcast caught hijacking web traffic
On November 20th, 2012 Comcast hijacked my HTTP traffic and re-routed it through their own servers, injecting a “notice” on the page before completing the request. What this means is instead of my web request being routed to the website I wanted to visit, Comcast took it upon themselves to hijack my web…
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What I've Been Thinking About
I’m starting to think about my next book, which will be about power and the Internet—from the perspective of security. My objective will be to describe current trends, explain where those trends are leading us, and discuss alternatives for avoiding that outcome. Many of my recent essays have touched on various facets…
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Problems with the TSA
Coverage: Hacker News , Slashdot , BoingBoing , RT America News , Tumblr , RightThisMinute , RTM update , PapersPlease 2014 & 2015
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Worst CAPTCHA Ever
By definition, CAPTCHA should be easy to read by humans but hard to read by machines. Apparently, they don’t agree with that at D&B:
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Changes to the Blog
I have made a few changes to my blog that I’d like to talk about. The first is the various buttons associated with each post: a Facebook Like button, a Retweet button, and so on. These buttons are ubiquitous on the Internet now. We publishers like them because it makes it easier for our readers to share our content. I…