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The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 312 posts.
The internet is held together with spit and baling wire
A visualization of the Internet made using network routing data. Image: Barrett Lyon, opte.org.
Testing Phone-Sized Faraday Bags
Complex software is, to put it mildly, hard to get right (for details, see almost any other posting on this or any other security blog). Especially for gadgets that are rich with microphones, cameras, location and environmental sensors, and communication links (such as, you know, smartphones), errors and security…
The Microsoft MFA system almost brought me to a nervous breakdown
Update 12/10/21, 10:15 UTC: I never imagined this post would reach the front page on Hacker News and gather so much support. Thank you all…
Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them
Facebook unfriended me. Why? So far as I can tell, it’s because I’ve been using Facebook to advocate for decentralization of social media. And apparently th ...
Backdooring Rust crates for fun and profit
Supply chains attacks are all the rage these days, whether to deliver RATs, cryptocurrencies miners, or credential stealers. In Rust, packages are called crates and are (most of the time) hosted on a central repository: https://crates.io for better discoverability. We are going to study 8 techniques to achieve Remote…
How I re–over-engineered my home network for privacy and security
How I used Docker Compose, Ansible, and Caddy to re-over-engineer my network setup for easier maintenance, treating my Raspberry Pi like cattle, not a pet.
Authenticated Boot and Disk Encryption on Linux
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
Aaron Swartz, Vindicated
Almost without exception, people who invest in businesses do so without personally inspecting the business, overlooking its processes, seeing its bank statements, meeting its managers and going on the road with its sales-force.
JWT should not be your default for sessions
When designing web applications, (especially the traditional HTML kind), you will at one point have to figure out how to log a user in and keep them logged in between requests.
Remote code execution in cdnjs of Cloudflare
Preface (日本語版も公開されています。) Cloudflare, which runs cdnjs, is running a “Vulnerability Disclosure Program” on HackerOne, which allows hackers to perform vulnerability assessments. This article describes vulnerabilities reported through this program and published with the permission of the Cloudflare security team. So this…
I made 50k calls to explore the telephone network
Post describing my research wardialing Finnish freephones.
What Do You Agree to When You Accept All Cookies
I have been writing software for exactly twenty years now. In the course of this I have learnt very many things, which I hope to journal over time.
T-Mobile: Breach Exposed SSN/DOB of 40M+ People
T-Mobile is warning that a data breach has exposed the names, date of birth, Social Security number and driver’s license/ID information of more than 40 million current, former or prospective customers who applied for credit with the company. The acknowledgment came less than 48 hours after millions of the stolen…
RCE in Visual Studio Code's Remote WSL for Fun and Negative Profit
The Visual Studio Code server in Windows Subsystem for Linux uses a local WebSocket WebSocket connection to communicate with the Remote WSL extension. JavaScript in websites can connect to this server and execute arbitrary commands on the target system. Assigned CVE-2021-43907 and zero bounty. I paid 5 USD for the EC2…
Apple AirTag Bug Enables ‘Good Samaritan’ Attack
The new $30 AirTag tracking device from Apple has a feature that allows anyone who finds one of these tiny location beacons to scan it with a mobile phone and discover its owner’s phone number if the AirTag has been set to lost mode. But according to new research, this same feature can be abused to redirect the Good…
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…
Pwned passwords, open source in the .NET foundation and working with the FBI
I've got 2 massive things to announce today that have been a long time in the works and by pure coincidence, have aligned such that I can share them together here today. One you would have been waiting for and one totally out of left field. Both these announcements
That's not how 2FA works
Another day, another high-profile website cloned to phish credentials. Tess Rinearson@_tessrIs this a phishing attempt? Goes to "githubverification.com" and asks for username and pw (if so, it nearly got me!) /cc @github pic.x.com/jgt4oNvjF2❤️ 2,243💬 111🔁 016:12 - Sat 16 January 2021 In the replies, you’ll see lots of…
Users are losing out against Big Sur’s sealed System
macOS 11.2, 11.2.1 and 11.2.2 have come in quick succession. What do they tell us about how difficult it is to update Big Sur’s sealed System volume? Is this the way to go?
How did LastPass master passwords get compromised?
LastPass accounts are under attack. I look into how user’s master passwords might have leaked.
Freenom, the free domains website, is a scam
Self-taught developer. Go, Rust, Python and Javascript. - hackermondev
Reverse engineering software licensing from early-2000s abandonware
This series concerns a software licensing system used in a proprietary software application from circa 2004. The software was available in an unregistered trial mode with limited functionality. A free licence could be obtained by registering online with the software vendor. The software became abandonware circa 2009…
Using Ghidra to Reverse Engineer Super Monkey Ball for GameCube
In Part 1, we used Dolphin’s debugger to find the location of Player 1’s score in RAM . In this article, our goal is to hack the score calculation routine so that the bonus goals do not award so many points.
Google Joins Apple to Opt-out of Mobile Advertising IDs
Android 12 makes interest-based advertising obsolete to set off an irreversible collapse in Facebook’s ad ecosystem