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Deceiving Windows Defender: The Big Stack Bypass
Defeating Windows Defender detection on Windows 10 by creating a large (>2MB) payload allocated on the stack
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 292 posts.
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Can a Tarot card reading be defamatory?
Crazed Tik-Toker's Tirade Against University Professor Raises Fact v. Opinion Issue
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Privacy is ok
I hate to write a piece just saying Someone Is Wrong On The Internet. But Reid Blackman’s The Signal App and the Danger of Privacy at All Costs (in the NYTimes , forsooth) is not just wrong but dangerously misleading. I haven’t seen a compact explainer on why, so here goes.
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Wiretapping Google smart speakers
I was recently rewarded a total of $107,500 by Google for responsibly disclosing security issues in the Google Home smart speaker that allowed an attacker within wireless proximity to install a "backdoor" account on the device, enabling them to send commands to it remotely over the Internet, access its microphone…
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What’s in a PR statement: LastPass breach explained
The LastPass statement on their latest breach is full of omissions, half-truths and outright lies. I’m providing the necessary context for some of their claims.
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Google removed my Yubikeys from a Google account 'just to be safe'
The world's worst security flow
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Reverse engineering yet another eBook format
In the distant past I was super into removing DRM from books and magazines (check out my posts on that topic: Removing Edge Magazine DRM , Removing Zinio DRM ). This interest eventually faded away, mostly because I just stopped using websites that wouldn’t allow me to download and own the products I paid for (kudos to…
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Cracking encrypted LastPass vaults
The recent (2022) compromise of Lastpass included email addresses, home addresses, names, and encrypted customer vaults. In this post I will demonstrate how attackers may leverage tools like Hashcat to crack an encrypted vault with a weak password.
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Reverse Engineering TikTok's VM Obfuscation
TikTok has a reputation for its aggressive data collection. The platform has implemented various methods to make it difficult for reverse-engineers to understand exactly what data is being collected and how it is being used.
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Password Requirements: Myths and Madness
Password requirements are weird. It seems impossible to set a new password in many websites. Why?
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Towards a More Open Secure Element Chip
“ Secure Element ” (SE) chips have traditionally taken a very closed-source, NDA-heavy approach. Thus, it piqued my interest when an early-stage SE chip startup, Cramium (still in stealth mode), approached me to advise on open source strategy. This blog post explains my reasoning for agreeing to advise Cramium, and…
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Let's Encrypt now supports ACME-CAA: closing the DV loophole
Today, Let's Encrypt announced that they are enabling an extension to DNS CAA records known as ACME-CAA ( RFC 8657 ). This came as a surprise to me, but a very pleasant one, since I wrote the ACME-CAA specification back in 2016 with Let's Encrypt in mind, and it was finally published as RFC 8657 back in 2019. To my…
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Get root on macOS 13.0.1 the macOS Dirty Cow bug
Get root on macOS 13.0.1 with CVE-2022-46689 (macOS equivalent of the Dirty Cow bug), using the testcase extracted from Apple’s XNU source.
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Getting started with nmap
Sysadmin doing syadmin stuff
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Six charged in mass takedown of DDoS-for-hire sites
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) today seized four-dozen domains that sold “booter” or “stresser” services — businesses that make it easy and cheap for even non-technical users to launch powerful Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks designed knock targets offline. The DOJ also charged six U.S. men with…
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Fuzzing ping(8) and finding a 24 year old bug
FreeBSD had a security fluctuation in their implementation of ping(8) the other day. As someone who has done a lot of work on ping(8) in OpenBSD this tickled my interests.
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Hacking on a plane: Leaking data of millions and taking over any account
Hacking on a plane, by Midjourney AI
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Linux Certificate Authority root stores have a too simple view of 'trust'
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Activision’s faulty anti-cheat software
Activision’s blind faith in the infallibility of their RICOCHET anti-cheat software , combined with a buggy and unstable Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II release, has resulted in faulty, permanent, and unappealable player account bans that prevent users from starting even the single-player game. These bans leave…
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Convincing ChatGPT to Eradicate Humanity with Python Code
Full stack software engineer / entrepreneur specialized in AI agents, cybersecurity and graphics. In my free time I enjoy surfing, free diving, and contributing to open source software.
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Hijacking infrared to make a dumb device smart
I own a very old ‘flat’ screen television from 2009. One of the reason this TV is still kicking around is because I have a strange sentimental affection for it. Another is that I have written automation for it that works really well and it would be a pain to migrate away from it.
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Consider Disabling Browser Push Notifications on Family and Friends Devices
A terrible user-hostile browser feature is being misused, surprising no one.
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New two-factor authenticator: Commodore 64
Multi-factor authentication is ripe for disruption. SMS 2FA is inherently defective. Phone authenticators get stolen. Security tokens get lo...
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“Invalid Username or Password”: a useless security measure (2014)
Login attempts fail because computer users can't remember their email or didn't input the right password. Most websites on the Internet won't tell you which one is actually incorrect.
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Oh, the Places Your Apple ID Will Go
Here is a short and curious Twitter thread from app developers and security researchers Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry: Apple’s analytics data include an ID called “dsId”. We were able to verify that “dsId” is the “Directory Services Identifier”, an ID that uniquely identifies an iCloud account. Meaning, Apple’s…
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Why CVE-2022-3602 was not detected by fuzz testing
So recently a very hyped memory corruption security vulnerability was discovered in the OpenSSL punycode parser. Some folks including Hanno ...