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Thoughts on the Durov Arrest
Today we learn that Pavel Durov, founder of the popular messaging app Telegram, has been arrested as his private jet landed in France. Early indications are that the arrest stems from Telegram̵…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,333 posts.
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New 0-Day Attacks Linked to China's 'Volt Typhoon'
Malicious hackers are exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Versa Director , a software product used by many Internet and IT service providers. Researchers believe the activity is linked to Volt Typhoon , a Chinese cyber espionage group focused on infiltrating critical U.S. networks and laying the groundwork for the…
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Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?
This blog is reserved for more serious things, and ordinarily I wouldn’t spend time on questions like the above. But much as I’d like to spend my time writing about exciting topics, som…
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How de-Googled is Lineage OS?
Lineage OS is based on the Android Open-Source Project, whose primary maintainer is Google. To what extent can it be considered Google-free?
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Firewalling your code
When writing code, you can call any function as long as it’s public, and similarly, you can access any object’s public properties or methods. Usually, access to code is all or none – a piece of code can be either public or private. Lately, I’ve been thinking about ways to implement more fine-grained access controls…
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The Cryptographic Doom Principle (2011)
When it comes to designing secure protocols, I have a principle that goes like this: if you have to perform any cryptographic operation before verifying the MAC on a message you’ve received, it will somehow inevitably lead to doom.
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Modern Wardriving (2023)
Let’s start by defining the word Wardriving: it is the search for WIFI wireless networks from a vehicle equipped with a computer. This would be the classic definition. I define modern wardriving as the search for WIFI networks, Bluetooth devices … Continue reading →
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Hacking with PDF (2022)
Inspiration of how we can use PDF as an attack vector and perform multiple attacks with huge subsequences to the victim.
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Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach
I decided to write this post because there's no concise way to explain the nuances of what's being described as one of the largest data breaches ever. Usually, it's easy to articulate a data breach; a service people provide their information to had someone snag it through
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Hacking the largest airline and hotel rewards platform (2023)
Between March 2023 and May 2023, we identified multiple security vulnerabilities within points.com, the backend provider for a significant portion of airline and hotel rewards programs. These vulnerabilities would have enabled an attacker to access sensitive customer account information, including names, billing…
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SQL Injection Isn't Dead: Smuggling Queries at the Protocol Level
PDF slides from a presentation by Paul Gerste at DEF CON 32. It turns out some databases have vulnerabilities in their binary protocols that can be exploited by carefully crafted …
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Hacking a Virtual Power Plant
I recently had solar panels and a battery storage system from GivEnergy installed at my house. A major selling point for me was that they have a local network API which can be used to monitor and…
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Apple memory holed its broken promise for an OCSP opt-out
When you launch an app, macOS connects to Apple's OCSP service to check whether the app's Developer ID code signing certificate has been revoked by Apple. In November 2020, Apple's OCSP service experienced a mass outage , preventing Mac users worldwide from launching apps. In response and remedy to this outage, Apple…
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PSA: Internet Archive "glitch" deletes years of user data and accounts
Recently at Internet Archive a “glitch” (their choice of word) deleted a great many accounts, including my account that had been at archive.org/details/@ging...
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Don’t let your domain name become a sitting duck
More than a million domain names — including many registered by Fortune 100 firms and brand protection companies — are vulnerable to takeover by cybercriminals thanks to authentication weaknesses at a number of large web hosting providers and domain registrars, new research finds.
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Just disconnect the internet
So, let's say that a security vendor, we'll call them ClownStrike, accidentally takes down most of their Windows install base with a poorly tested content update. Rough day at the office, huh? There are lots of things you could say about this, lots of reasons it happens this way, lots of people to blame and not to…
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Why the CrowdStrike bug hit banks hard
Regulation-induced monocultures meet unfortunate but explicable engineering decisions.
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OpenSSL bug exposed up to 255 bytes of client heap and existed since 2011
Silently sends up to 255 bytes of the client's heap to the server . The server must support NPN , and the heap data is encrypted in transit.
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How did Facebook intercept their competitor's encrypted mobile app traffic?
A technical investigation into information uncovered in a class action lawsuit that Facebook had intercepted encrypted traffic from user's devices running the Onavo Protect app in order to gain competitive insights.
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Crooks Bypassed Google's Email Verification to Create Workspace Accounts, Acces
Google says it recently fixed an authentication weakness that allowed crooks to circumvent the email verification required to create a Google Workspace account, and leverage that to impersonate a domain holder at third-party services that allow logins through Google’s “Sign in with Google” feature.
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CrowdStrike will be liable for damages in France, based on the OVH precedent
Hello, Today I am doing a quick post to cover the recent CrowdStrike incident that is estimated to have disabled 8.5M computers and caused more than $5.4B in damages since last week. Now a common q…
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Phish-friendly domain registry ".top" put on notice
The Chinese company in charge of handing out domain names ending in “ .top ” has been given until mid-August 2024 to show that it has put in place systems for managing phishing reports and suspending abusive domains, or else forfeit its license to sell domains. The warning comes amid the release of new findings that…
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Hiding Linux Processes with Bind Mounts
Lately I’ve been thinking about Stephan Berger’s recent blog post on hiding Linux processes with bind mounts. Bottom line here is that if you have an evil process you want to hide, use …
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Deluge of Fake Mac App Store Reviews
Yesterday I discovered a deluge of recent fake customer reviews for a number of top paid apps in the United States Mac App Store. (Each country has its own version of the App Store with separate reviews.) I've now checked the reviews for all of the current top 40 paid apps in the Mac App Store, and 8 of those apps…
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Jailbreaking RabbitOS
Critics unanimously agree that it sucks , and some have accused the company of deliberate deception . Rabbit Inc. reportedly accepts returns, but customers are so eager to get rid of their R1s that even new-in-box units are selling for well below RRP ($200) on secondary markets.