New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,773 posts.
AWS Certificate Manager: Deploy SSL/TLS-Based Apps on AWS
I am fascinated by things that are simple on the surface and complex underneath! For example, consider the popular padlock icon that is used to signify that traffic to and from a web site is encrypted: How does the browser know that it should display the green padlock? Well, that’s quite the story! It all […]
How we fought bad ads in 2015
Here are some of the top areas we focused on in our fight against bad ads in 2015.
EFF Pries More Information on Zero Days from the Government
Until just last week, the U.S. government kept up the charade that its use of a stockpile of security vulnerabilities for hacking was a closely held secret.[fn]For what it's worth, the government denies having a “Raiders of the Lost Ark style” stockpile of zero days.[/fn] In fact, in response to...
Analysis and Exploitation of a Linux Kernel Vulnerability
FortiMail Workspace Security secures user-facing apps from advanced threats that target Email, Browsers, Collaboration Tools and Cloud Storage Apps.
“Subject: Urgent Warning”
Back in December I got a desperate email from this person. A woman who said her Instagram had been hacked and since she found my contact info in the app she mailed me and asked for help. I of course replied and said that I have nothing to do with her being hacked but I … Continue reading “Subject: Urgent Warning” →
Phishing attack against Lastpass
Updated 2016-02-04 : LastPass has removed the button from notifications and now requires email confirmation for all logins from new IPs . This substantially mitigates LostPass, but does not eliminate it.
How Police Officers Seize Cash from Innocent Americans
Under civil forfeiture laws, police officers can take money from people with no proof of any wrongdoing, and without filing criminal charges. How does this work, and what happens to the money?
PayPal and zero-dollar invoice spam
I got a rather odd invoice via PayPal the other day, it looks like this: Naturally the first thing I did was to look for spoof email indicators, but none of the usual suspects were showing up: 1. It was from member@paypal.com.au 2. The mail headers were
You Can't Destroy the Village to Save It: W3C vs. DRM, Round Two
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the nonprofit body that maintains the Web's core standards, made a terrible mistake in 2013: they decided to add DRM—the digital locks that train your computer to say "I can't let you do that, Dave"; rather than "Yes, boss"—to the Web's standards. At the time,...
There are no secure smartphones
Modern smartphones have a CPU chip, and a baseband chip which handles radio network communications (GSM/UMTS/LTE/etc.) This chip is connected to the CPU via DMA. Thus, unless an IOMMU is used, the baseband has full access to main memory, and can compromise it arbitrarily.
Is curl|bash insecure?
Take control of your web by running your own personal cloud server with Sandstorm.
Cisco Must Be Held Accountable for Aiding China’s Human Rights Abuses
San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is urging a federal appeals court to reinstate a lawsuit seeking to hold Cisco Systems accountable for aiding in human rights abuses by building the Chinese government a system that Cisco officials knew was intended to identify—and facilitate...
Why NSA Surveillance Scares Me
Nothing To Hide explains why you should care about surveillance even though you have nothing to hide. But it missed the point that most con...
Verizon Routing Millions of IP Addresses for Cybercrime Gangs
Over the past few years, spammers have sought out large ranges of IP addresses. By spreading out their sending patterns across a wide range of IP addresses, they can attempt to defeat spam filters and get spam and malware emails delivered where they are not wanted. However, IPv4 addresses are getting scarce and hard…
Nvidia GPUs can break Chrome's incognito mode
When I launched Diablo III, I didn’t expect the pornography I had been looking at hours previously to be splashed on the screen. But that’s exactly what replaced the black loading scree…
China Shows How Surveillance Leads to Intimidation and Software Censorship
Xinjiang, home of the China's muslim Uighur minority, has long been the world's laboratory for Internet repression. Faced with widespread local unrest, and online debate, China has done everything it can to enforce its vision of the Net in the region, from imprisoning bloggers and online publishers...
Storing Passwords in a Highly Parallelized World
Why “Use bcrypt.” is not the best recommendation (anymore).
Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant
The governments of Australia, Germany, the UK and the US are destroying your privacy. Some people don't see the problem...
Android Full Disk Encryption Cold Boot Attack (2012)
At the end of 2011, Google released version 4.0 of its Android operating system for smartphones. For the first time, Android smartphone owners were supplied with a disk encryption feature that…
How to submit an app to Apple’s App Store when it uses encryption
Carousel Apps was the company behind Watu, the application for temporary staffing agencies. It was co-founded by Julian Johnson and Pablo Fernandez. They both since have moved to other things. Julian is working on many projects, but his main one is improving education and quality of life for children in Africa which…