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The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 371 posts.
I've spent the last week or two writing code to make sense of the massive hack of data from TeleMessage, the comically insecure company that makes a modified Signal app that Trump's former national security advisor Mike Waltz was caught using. I've decided to publish my code
Recently I got a friend to finally join me on Signal. He asked something about whether or not Signal is truly secure and private, like if it was safe from US government surveillance. I told him: “Well, it’s end-to-end encrypted, so they don’t know what we’re talking about, but they definitely know that we’re talking…
A dns-prefetch tag in an HTML email makes Evolution Mail do a DNS lookup on open, even with remote content blocked. The developers blame WebKitGTK.
Two interesting new papers regarding LLM security and prompt injection came to my attention this weekend. Agents Rule of Two: A Practical Approach to AI Agent Security The first is …
Musings on SBOMs and licensing woes.
Just before a decisive meeting in Brussels, digital rights expert and former Member of the European Parliament Dr. Patrick Breyer is sounding the alarm. Using a "deceptive sleight of hand," a mandatory and expanded Chat Control is being pushed through the back door, in a form even more intrusive tha
I was chatting with a close friend of mine and he sent me a link to his new SaaS that he's developing.
Spoiler: I have data from the story in the title of this post, it's mostly what I expected it to be, I've just added it to HIBP where I've called it "Data Troll", and I'm going to give everyone a lot more context below. Here goes:
Let's Discuss the organization providing a false sense of security at an unbeatable price.
A quick note on the importance of reading the terms of service!
Well for a quick weekend recap I’m going to look at which 3rd party SDKs and API calls I can find in the big 4 Android chat apps based. We’ll be using free data from AppGoblin which you can feel free to browse at any of the links below or on tables. Data is collected via de-compiled SDKs and MITM API traffic.
It was yet another day at the office. Our team was internally discussing moving to a different platform analytics solution. Our team was really leaning more towards Posthog. It’s one of the brilliant -I personally believe it’s the best- products on the market. And that’s where the story has begun… We have a somewhat…
Last month, KrebsOnSecurity tracked the sudden emergence of hundreds of polished online gaming and wagering websites that lure people with free credits and eventually abscond with any cryptocurrency funds deposited by players. We’ve since learned that these scam gambling sites have proliferated thanks to a new Russian…
This new paper by 11 authors from organizations including IBM, Invariant Labs, ETH Zurich, Google and Microsoft is an excellent addition to the literature on prompt injection and LLM security. …
I have heard stories of more aggressive interrogation of electronic devices at US border crossings. I know a lot about securing computers, but very little about securing phones. Are there easy ways to delete data—files, photos, etc.—on phones so it can’t be recovered? Does resetting a phone to factory defaults erase…
Vercel recently announced BotID, an anti-bot meant to protect against bots without requiring manual intervention. This post reverse-engineers the script and takes a peek inside.
In this article I want to document my journey implementing fast TCP fingerprinting in a golang webserver, using eBPF.
Modern login systems require a second factor (2FA) to log in, in addition to the standard username and password combination. A Time-based one-time password (TOTP) as a 6-digit number is often used. Password managers like [1Password](https://1password.com/), [KeePass (or respective forks)](https://keepass.info/) and…
Because I'm a massive nerd, I actually try to read specification documents. As I've ranted ad nauseam before, the current TOTP spec is irresponsibly obsolete. The three major implementations of the spec - Google, Apple, and Yubico - all subtly disagree on how it should be implemented. Every other MFA app has their own…
A message posted on Monday to the homepage of the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is the latest exhibit in the Trump administration’s continued disregard for basic cybersecurity protections. The message instructed recently-fired CISA employees to get in touch so they can be rehired and then…
AppGoblin has now run over 40k apps in an emulator, tracking millions of API calls thousands of advertising domains. Unfortunately, some of them are dark, meaning they have no landing page of any kind, and I’m unclear who controls these domains.
IDO based smart watches are a security nightmare, and there's likely millions of them out there
I've been slowly removing Google apps from my life, and one of the last ones left is Authenticator. In this post I look at migrating codes out of Authenticator to a command-line OTP tool, and the steps involved.
A Texas firm recently charged with conspiring to distribute synthetic opioids in the United States is at the center of a vast network of companies in the U.S. and Pakistan whose employees are accused of using online ads to scam westerners seeking help with trademarks, book writing, mobile app development and logo…
A fun project that I learned a lot from.
New court documents shed light on what a 25-year-old DOGE worker named Marko Elez did inside Treasury Department payment systems, including what Treasury staff did to limit his access. The documents indicate that the situation is more nuanced than previously reported.
Authoritarianism is on the rise throughout the globe. Governments wants to monitor your social media accounts so they can make you disappear if you engage in wrongthink such as opposing wars or genocide. This is worsened by misguided laws like Chat control that would mandate scanning of all digital communication…
It’s been almost 2 full years since Linux became a CNA (Certificate Numbering Authority) which meant that we (i.e. the kernel.org community) are now responsible for issuing all CVEs for the Linux kernel. During this time, we’ve become one of the largest creators of CVEs by quantity, going from nothing to number 3 in…
The conventional wisdom is that hashing more entropy sources can't hurt: if H is any modern cryptographic hash function then H(x,y,z) is at least as good a random number as H(x,y), no matter how awful z is. So we pile one source on top of another, hashing them all together and hoping that at least one of them is good.
