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The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 4,333 posts.
In a Twitter discussion last week on ransomware attacks, KrebsOnSecurity noted that virtually all ransomware strains have a built-in failsafe designed to cover the backsides of the malware purveyors: They simply will not install on a Microsoft Windows computer that already has one of many types of virtual keyboards…
As part of my MSc, I have to take an online exam. Obviously, this means I am highly likely to cheat by looking up things on Wikipedia or by having a bit of paper with notes on it. EVIL! So, the exam body requires me to install ProctorU. It's a service which lets someone watch you through your laptop camera while you…
Digging into the world of "pig-butchering" scams
We have a CPU mystery! We found a way to cause some processors to enter a glitch state where the normal rules don’t apply, but what does that mean…?
Browse the comments on virtually any story about a ransomware attack and you will almost surely encounter the view that the victim organization could have avoided paying their extortionists if only they’d had proper data backups. But the ugly truth is there are many non-obvious reasons why victims end up paying even…
Since I am not living in my home country, I frequently use two different SIM cards and prefer having a phone with dual-sim support. This limits your choice s...
You just can't finish off Zuckerberg.
the one good use of copyright is prying things open
A series of unfortunate agents.
This blog is reserved for more serious things, and ordinarily I wouldn’t spend time on questions like the above. But much as I’d like to spend my time writing about exciting topics, som…
The European Union’s controversial Chat Control proposal has been withdrawn once again following intense public pressure. This marks another defeat for legislation that would have mandated scanning of encrypted messages across the EU.
Recently, account takeovers, email hacking, and targeted phishing attacks have been all over the news. Hacks of various politicians, allegedly carried out by Russian hackers, have yielded troves of data. Despite the supposed involvement of state-sponsored agents, some hacks were not reliant on complex zero-day…
This is a lightly edited transcript of my presentation today at the ACCSS/NCSC/Surf seminar ‘Cyber Security and Society’. I want to thank the organizers for inviting me to their conference & giving me a great opportunity to talk about something I worry about a lot. Here are the original slides with notes, which may be…
How does this keep happening? It is a mystery.
The following analysis was performed on a S8 data line locator which replied to the hidden SMS command for version query ( *3646655* ) with:
How we bypassed Apple's regulatory restrictions, built a Faraday cage and enabled georestricted features on the Airpods Pro 2 for our grandparents.
I decided to write this post because there's no concise way to explain the nuances of what's being described as one of the largest data breaches ever. Usually, it's easy to articulate a data breach; a service people provide their information to had someone snag it through
As one of the maintainers of eCryptfs , and a long time Thinkpad owner, I have been asked many times to add support to eCryptfs for Th...
This story is wild. The short version: OpenAI were running a cybersecurity test against an unreleased model, with the model’s guardrail features turned off. Rather than solve the test, the …
Have you ever tried to download videos from YouTube? I mean manually without relying on software like youtube-dl, yt-dlp or one of “these” websites. It’s much more complicated than you might think.
And almost made lots of money
OverviewA long while back I had an idea to hack a WiFi smart light bulb to do something more useful to me. Actually, I had a few different ideas of things to do with them. One of these ideas was to mo…
Google recently announced the rollout of their Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), a new advertising-surveillance initiative that seeks to replace third-party cookies with a new user profiling technique that garners data generated by the browser itself.
As the Coronavirus pandemic continues to force people to work from home, countless companies are now holding daily meetings using videoconferencing services from Zoom . But without the protection of a password, there’s a decent chance your next Zoom meeting could be “Zoom bombed” — attended or disrupted by someone who…
