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Security & Privacy

The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 4,440 posts.

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1952

We want Texans to know their rights

Last May, EFF reported that a sheriff’s office in Texas searched data from more than 83,000 automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras to track down a woman suspected of self-managing an abortion. ALPRs are promoted as tools for keeping communities safe by finding missing persons and locating...

1957

Cyberespionage Using SS7 via Circles

Circles is a surveillance firm that reportedly exploits weaknesses in the global mobile phone system to snoop on calls, texts, and the location of phones around the globe, and is affiliated with NSO Group, which develops the oft-abused Pegasus spyware. Using Internet scanning, we found a unique signature associated…

1961

PiFex: JTAG Hacking with a Raspberry Pi

With this blog post, we'll introduce the PiFex, a basic companion board for the Raspberry Pi designed to teach users the basics of hardware hacking and embedded protocols. We will then demonstrate how to use the PiFex to access a JTAG tap on an undocumented SSD, allowing memory reads and GDB access to the SSD CPU.

1964

The Government Uses Zero Days for “Offense”

Little by little, the government is opening up about its use of computer security vulnerabilities. Last month, the NSA disclosed that it has historically “released more than 91% of vulnerabilities discovered in products that have gone through our internal review process and that are made and used...

1965

OCSP Service Has Reached End of Life

Today we turned off our Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) service, as announced in December of last year. We stopped including OCSP URLs in our certificates more than 90 days ago, so all Let’s Encrypt certificates that contained OCSP URLs have now expired. Going forward, we will publish revocation information…

1973

Facebook Sponsors Let's Encrypt

We’re happy to share today that Facebook is the newest Gold sponsor of Let’s Encrypt. Facebook has taken multiple important steps to support and advance encryption this year, and we are glad to see Let’s Encrypt as the latest example. According to Alex Stamos, Chief Security Officer at Facebook, “Making it easier for…

1979

Bitcoin 0.13.0 Binary Safety Warning

Bitcoin.org has reason to suspect that the binaries for the upcoming Bitcoin Core release will likely be targeted by state sponsored attackers. As a website, Bitcoin.org does not have the technical resources to guarantee that we can defend ourselves from attackers of this calibre. We ask the Bitcoin community, and in…