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The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 4,333 posts.

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783

The Web Is Broken – Botnet Part 2

I guess you have all heard about the growing problem of AI companies trying to aggressively collect whatever data they can get their hands on to train their models. This has caused an explosive surge in web crawlers relentlessly hitting servers big and small. But who runs these crawlers? Turns out — it could be you!

786

Who Hacked Ashley Madison?

AshleyMadison.com , a site that helps married people cheat and whose slogan is “Life is Short, have an Affair,” recently put up a half million (Canadian) dollar bounty for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of the Impact Team — the name chosen by the hacker(s) who recently leaked data on more than 30…

793

Ghrc.io appears to be malicious

A simple typo of ghcr.io to ghrc.io would normally be a small goof. You’d typically get a 404 or similar error, finally work out the issue, fix it, and move along. But in this case, that typo appears to be doing something very malicious, stealing GitHub credentials. What’s ghcr.io? First, a quick bit of background…

796

Memory safe ‘curl’ for a more secure internet

tldr: work has started to make Hyper work as a backend in curl for HTTP. curl and its data transfer core, libcurl, is all written in C. The language C is known and infamous for not being memory safe and for being easy to mess up and as a result accidentally cause security problems. At … Continue reading rust in curl…

797

“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” →

798

Please scan my towel

My friend Scott pointed out the towels in most hotels now have RFID tags to help with inventory control: I also knew that my RSA Conference badge would have an RFID tag in it so it could be scanne…

802

Dangerous domain corp.com goes up for sale

As an early domain name investor, Mike O’Connor had by 1994 snatched up several choice online destinations, including bar.com, cafes.com, grill.com, place.com, pub.com and television.com. Some he sold over the years, but for the past 26 years O’Connor refused to auction perhaps the most sensitive domain in his stable…

803

The most dangerous code in the world

Abstract: SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is the de facto standard for secure Internet communications. Security of SSL connections against an active network attacker depends on correctly validating public-key certificates presented when the connection is established. We demonstrate that SSL certificate validation is…

809

This is why people fear the Internet of Things

Imagine buying an internet-enabled surveillance camera, network attached storage device, or home automation gizmo, only to find that it secretly and constantly phones home to a vast peer-to-peer (P2P) network run by the Chinese manufacturer of the hardware. Now imagine that the geek gear you bought doesn’t actually…

810

Curl’s backdoor threat

-- "Have you ever detected anyone trying to add a backdoor to curl?" -- "Have you ever been pressured by an organization or a person to add suspicious code to curl that you wouldn't otherwise accept?" -- "If a crime syndicate would kidnap your family to force you to comply, what backdoor would you be … Continue…