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Security & Privacy

The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 292 posts.

2022
65

A Kernel Hacker Meets Fuchsia OS

Fuchsia is a general-purpose open-source operating system created by Google. It is based on the Zircon microkernel written in C++ and is currently under active development. The developers say that Fuchsia is designed with a focus on security, updatability, and performance. As a Linux kernel hacker, I decided to take a…

66

Sending spammers to password purgatory

How best to punish spammers? I give this topic a lot of thought because I spend a lot of time sifting through the endless rubbish they send me. And that's when it dawned on me: the punishment should fit the crime - robbing me of my time - which means that

67

Oh, the Places Your Apple ID Will Go

Here is a short and curious Twitter thread from app developers and security researchers Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry: Apple’s analytics data include an ID called “dsId”. We were able to verify that “dsId” is the “Directory Services Identifier”, an ID that uniquely identifies an iCloud account. Meaning, Apple’s…

74

LogJ4 Security Inquiry – Response Required

On Friday January 21, 2022 I received this email. I tweeted about it and it took off like crazy. The email comes from a fortune-500 multi-billion dollar company that apparently might be using a product that contains my code, or maybe they have customers who do. Who knows? My guess is that they do this … Continue…

76

PayPal phishing scam uses invoices sent via PayPal

Scammers are using invoices sent through PayPal.com to trick recipients into calling a number to dispute a pending charge. The missives — which come from Paypal.com and include a link at Paypal.com that displays an invoice for the supposed transaction — state that the user’s account is about to be charged hundreds of…

77

RaidForums gets raided, alleged admin arrested

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said today it seized the website and user database for RaidForums , an extremely popular English-language cybercrime forum that sold access to more than 10 billion consumer records stolen in some of the world’s largest data breaches since 2015. The DOJ also charged the alleged…

79

IRS Will Soon Require Selfies for Online Access

If you created an online account to manage your tax records with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), those login credentials will cease to work later this year. The agency says that by the summer of 2022, the only way to log in to irs.gov will be through ID.me , an online identity verification service that…

84

Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

It’s an established fact on the internet that we have ran out of IP(v4) addresses , and we are starting to see the pressure on obtaining IPv4 space. For example if you want to get a /24 block from RIPE NCC when you sign up as a member, then you are currently looking at a 2 month wait for a recycled IPv4 /24 block .

86

Psychic Signatures in Java

The long-running BBC sci-fi show Doctor Who has a recurring plot device where the Doctor manages to get out of trouble by showing an identity card which is actually completely blank. Of course, thi…

89

Privacy is ok

I hate to write a piece just saying Someone Is Wrong On The Internet. But Reid Blackman’s The Signal App and the Danger of Privacy at All Costs (in the NYTimes , forsooth) is not just wrong but dangerously misleading. I haven’t seen a compact explainer on why, so here goes.