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Security & Privacy

The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 263 posts.

2019
91

Modern Alternatives to PGP

Did your last Yubikey just break? Perhaps you forgot an offline backup password. Maybe you’re just tired of living like a spy and never using smartphones. Whatever it is, you’re here, and you’re finally ready to give up on PGP. That’s great! We’re here to help! No one was sending you encrypted emails anyway, so that’s…

92

CSRF is really dead

A little while back I wrote a blog post about how "CSRF is dead". It focused on SameSite cookies, a powerful yet simple feature to protect your website against CSRF attacks. As powerful as it was, and as much as it will kill CSRF, you had to enable it on

94

The State of Software Security in 2019

My goal in this post is to skim my observations on the state of software design and development over the past year, and to try to find a meaningful way forward for myself for 2019. My perspective is limited by the fact that I have worked exclusively in client-side software security for the past 7.5 years. Still, I…

105

How I Could Have Hacked Any Instagram Account

This article is about how I found a vulnerability on Instagram that allowed me to hack any Instagram account without consent permission. Facebook and Instagram security team fixed the issue and rewarded me $30000 as a part of their bounty program. Facebook is working constantly to improve its security controls on all…

108

Spam in Your Calendar? Here’s What to Do

Many spam trends are cyclical: Spammers tend to switch tactics when one method of hijacking your time and attention stops working. But periodically they circle back to old tricks, and few spam trends are as perennial as calendar spam, in which invitations to click on dodgy links show up unbidden in your digital…

113

Spying on HTTPS

When I launched Chrome on Thursday, I saw something unexpected: While most users probably would have no idea what to make of this, I happened to know what it means– Chrome is warning me that …

119

Abuses show Assange case was never about law

It is astonishing how often one still hears well-informed, otherwise reasonable people say about Julian Assange: “But he ran away from Swedish rape charges by hiding in Ecuador’s embassy in London.” That short sentence includes at least three factual errors. In fact, to repeat it, as so many people do, you would