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Security & Privacy

The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 204 posts.

2014
31

Which is better, Adblock or Adblock Plus?

Note: This is explicitly posted in my private blog rather than the Adblock Plus blog. This post represents my own opinion only. It is likely unwise to rant about a competing project but I just don’t want to keep my findings to myself. If you are here for Adblock Plus bashing and don’t care enough to read the post…

32

When security goes right

A few weeks ago, I heard that my slow and unreliable ISP was raising their prices, and I decided to look around for a better ISP. I found one in the form of Novus , which has fibre runs to towers around the Vancouver area. I signed up; they came to the building and placed the necessary patch cable in the basement…

34

Hacking PayPal Accounts with one click

Today I am going to publicly disclose a critical vulnerability I have found during my research in PayPal, This vulnerability enabled me to completely bypass the CSRF Prevention System implemented by PayPal, The vulnerability is patched very fast and PayPal paid me the maximum bounty they give ;).

41

Comments on the Sony Hack

I don’t have a lot to say about the Sony hack, which seems to still be ongoing. I want to highlight a few points, though. At this point, the attacks seem to be a few hackers and not the North Korean government. (My guess is that it’s not an insider, either.) That we live in the world where we aren’t sure if any given…

44

Zeroing buffers is insufficient

With a bit of care and a cooperative compiler, we can zero a buffer — but that's not what we need. What we need to do is zero every location where sensitive data might be stored. Remember, the whole reason we had sensitive information in memory in the first place was so that we could use it; and that usage almost…

45

Heartbleed

Heartbleed is a catastrophic bug in OpenSSL: “The Heartbleed bug allows anyone on the Internet to read the memory of the systems protected by the vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL software. This compromises the secret keys used to identify the service providers and to encrypt the traffic, the names and passwords of…

46

Google Calendar Unexpectedly Leaks Private Information

My wife likes to set reminders for herself in Google Calendar. Recently, she added a note to her personal Google Calendar reading "Email alice@example.com to discuss pay rise" and set the date for a few months from now. She'd had a discussion with her boss, Alice, and they'd agreed to talk about salary later in the…

49

How the NSA Threatens National Security

Secret NSA eavesdropping is still in the news. Details about once secret programs continue to leak. The Director of National Intelligence has recently declassified additional information, and the President’s Review Group has just released its report and recommendations. With all this going on, it’s easy to become…

60

Pervasive Monitoring Is an Attack

That’s the title of RFC 7258 , also known as BCP 188 (where BCP stands for “Best Current Practice”); it represents Internet Engineering Task Force consensus on the fact that many powerful well-funded entities feel it is appropriate to monitor people’s use of the Net, without telling those people. The consensus is…