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Security & Privacy
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907

Janky Apple ID Security

I had another instance of my Apple ID mysteriously being locked. First, my iPhone wanted me to enter the password again, which I thought was the “normal” thing it has done every few months, almost since I got it. But after doing so it said that my account was locked.

915

My cat alerted me to a DDoS attack

A few years ago, my cat gave me my most memorable middle of the night software engineering incident. I was working at a startup, and we didn’t have a formal on-call rotation yet. That was a deliberate decision, since being on-call is painful, and the team was good about just collectively keeping an eye out for urgent…

921

Verified curl

Don't trust. Verify. I could not resist making a fake book cover Here follows a brief description on how you can detect if the curl package would ever make an xz. xz (and its library liblzma) was presumably selected as a target because it is an often used component and by extension via systemd it … Continue reading…

926

The xz attack shell script

Andres Freund published the existence of the xz attack on 2024-03-29 to the public oss-security@openwall mailing list. The day before, he alerted Debian security and the (private) distros@openwall list. In his mail, he says that he dug into this after “observing a few odd symptoms around liblzma (part of the xz…

927

Timeline of the xz open source attack

Over a period of over two years, an attacker using the name “Jia Tan” worked as a diligent, effective contributor to the xz compression library, eventually being granted commit access and maintainership. Using that access, they installed a very subtle, carefully hidden backdoor into liblzma, a part of xz that also…

928

Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

When I announced my Black Ops 3 integrity bypass, someone commented that my research was not impressive and I should try analyzing Denuvo instead. That kinda stuck with me, so I did what everyone would do and spent the last 5 months of my free time reverse engineering and bypassing the Denuvo DRM in Hogwarts Legacy. I…