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Security & Privacy

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

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1144

Modern C++ Won't Save Us

I’m a frequent critic of memory unsafe languages, principally C and C++, and how they induce an exceptional number of security vulnerabilities. My conclusion, based on reviewing evidence from numerous large software projects using C and C++, is that we need to be migrating our industry to memory safe by default…

1146

UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption

In an open letter, seven secure messaging apps—including Signal and WhatsApp—point out that the UK’s Online Safety Bill could destroy end-to-end encryption: As currently drafted, the Bill could break end-to-end encryption,opening the door to routine, general and indiscriminate surveillance of personal messages of…

1147

Living with HTTPS

( These are my notes from the first half of my talk at HOPE9 last weekend. I write notes like these not as a script, but so that I have at least some words ready in my head when I'm speaking. They are more conversational and less organised than a usual blog post, so please forgive me the rough edges. )

1148

WireGuard: Beyond the most basic configuration

Last week I wanted to replace my OpenVPN setup with WireGuard. The basics were well-documented, going beyond the basics was a bit trickier. Let me teach you want I learned. The basics But first, let’s summarize the basics. I have a server with a hosting provider that I want to use as a VPN server. I won’t delve into…

1160

Gift card gang extracts cash from 100k inboxes daily

Some of the most successful and lucrative online scams employ a “low-and-slow” approach — avoiding detection or interference from researchers and law enforcement agencies by stealing small bits of cash from many people over an extended period. Here’s the story of a cybercrime group that compromises up to 100,000 email…

1164

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 ;).

1166

SSH for Fun and Profit

In May last year, a new attack on the Diffie Hellman algorithm was released, called Logjam . At the time, I was working on a security team, so it was our responsiblity to check that none of our servers would be affected. We ran through our TLS config and decided it was safe, but also needed to check that our SSH…

1168

Stripe is friendly to “friendly fraud”

Update: this post generated some interesting discussion on Hacker News. Friendly fraud is the laundered name for something that the payment system is not really able to prevent. Even though I’m pretty sure they can do way better. Particularly big and sophisticated payment providers like Stripe, with a mountain of…

1169

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…