Mythology About Security
Ed Felton tweeted a few days ago: “Often hear that the reason today’s Internet is not more secure is that the early designers failed to imagine that security could ever matter. That is a myth…
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,335 posts.
Ed Felton tweeted a few days ago: “Often hear that the reason today’s Internet is not more secure is that the early designers failed to imagine that security could ever matter. That is a myth…
A blog about programming, the tech industry, and tech education.
Social media sites are littered with seemingly innocuous little quizzes, games and surveys urging people to reminisce about specific topics, such as “What was your first job,” or “What was your first car?” The problem with participating in these informal surveys is that in doing so you may be inadvertently giving away…
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Gmail's "dots don't matter" feature lets scammers create an account on, say, Netflix, with your email address but different dots. Results in convincing phishing emails.
Over the past several years I’ve been privileged to observe two contradictory and fascinating trends. The first is that we’re finally starting to use the cryptography that researchers h…
Apple has released new developer APIs that will allow mobile advertising conversion tracking while protecting individual user privacy. The new APIs are part of the StoreKit framework and include a …
The U.S. Secret Service is warning financial institutions about a new scam involving the temporary theft of chip-based debit cards issued to large corporations. In this scheme, the fraudsters intercept new debit cards in the mail and replace the chips on the cards with chips from old cards. When the unsuspecting…
Short version: For the $12 cost of a domain, I was able to rank in Google search results against Amazon, Walmart etc. for high value money terms in the US. The…
tl;dr: In August 2017, I reported a vulnerability to Panera Bread that allowed the full name, home address, email address, food/dietary…
Panerabread.com , the Web site for the American chain of bakery-cafe fast casual restaurants by the same name, leaked millions of customer records — including names, email and physical addresses, birthdays and the last four digits of the customer’s credit card number — for at least eight months before it was yanked…
UPDATE: PLEASE HELP ME TEST At some point you just need to stop looking and be blissfully ignorant...this was not one of those days. In and update to my previously updated blog article , I have found another instance where the plaintext password was written to system logs. Thi
In my last post I covered the basics of kernel debugging in macOS. In this post we will put some of that to use and work through the process of reversing a macOS kernel module. As I said in my last post, in macOS there is a kernel module named “Don’t Steal Mac OS X” (DSMOS) which registers a function with the Mach-O…
The penny first dropped for me just over 7 years ago to the day: The only secure password is the one you can't remember [https://www.troyhunt.com/only-secure-password-is-one-you-cant/]. In an era well before the birth of Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.
VPN leaks users’ IPs via WebRTC: I’ve tested hundred VPN and Proxy providers and 19 of them leaks users’ IPs via WebRTC (16%)
Did you think Meltdown was bad? Unprivileged applications being able to read kernel memory at speeds possibly as high as megabytes per seco...
UPDATE: PLEASE HELP ME TEST UPATE TO THE UPDATE: Similar log entries are now found in another system log that is more persistent, see the article here . UPDATE: This is still vulnerable on current versions of macOS 10.13.3 when encrypted an ALREADY EXISTING unencrypted APFS volume
Multiple security firms recently identified cryptocurrency mining service Coinhive as the top malicious threat to Web users, thanks to the tendency for Coinhive’s computer code to be used on hacked Web sites to steal the processing power of its visitors’ devices. This post looks at how Coinhive vaulted to the top of…
There's no way to sugar-coat this: Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) only exists due to a whole bunch of highly illegal activity that has harmed many individuals and organisations alike. That harm extends all the way from those in data breaches feeling a sense of
In this post, I’m going to discuss a vulnerability I discovered in Ledger hardware wallets. The vulnerability arose due to Ledger’s use of a custom architecture to work around many of the limitations of their Secure Element.
When coding style survives compilation: de-anonymizing programmers from executable binaries Caliskan et al., NDSS’18 As a programmer you have a unique style, and stylometry techniques can be used t…
One of the effects of GDPR—the new EU General Data Protection Regulation—is that we’re all going to be learning a lot more about who collects our data and what they do with it. Consider PayPal, that just released a list of over 600 companies they share customer data with. Here’s a good visualization of that data. Is…