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Security & Privacy

The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 300 posts.

2023
122

How Equifax Was Breached in 2017

On a Saturday night, a security engineer at Equifax was updating an SSL certificate on a Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS). Immediately after, suspicious connections were detected. After a more in-depth investigation, it became evident that the situation was far graver than anticipated. A service had to be…

125

Tainting the CSAM client-side scanning database

The proposal of the European Commission for a regulation on preventing and combatting the sexual abuse and sexual exploitation of children is currently discussed in Dutch parliament. I recently wrote about some concerns and the risk of a DDoS attack . It turns out it is also possible to taint the database of images of…

131

The fake browser update scam gets a makeover

One of the oldest malware tricks in the book — hacked websites claiming visitors need to update their Web browser before they can view any content — has roared back to life in the past few months. New research shows the attackers behind one such scheme have developed an ingenious way of keeping their malware from…

133

Private and Public Mastodon

Here’s how to get into a lot of trouble: Suppose you (like me) love the intellectual wealth found in free-form text on the Internet. And (like me) are a reasonably competent programmer. And (like me) have derived value and pleasure searching Twitter. And (like me) you look at this nifty new Fediverse thing and see…

138

Unauthenticated RCE on a RIGOL oscilloscope

I work in a company that uses custom electronic boards, so there are plenty of instruments floating around that electrical engineers employ to debug faulty connections and solderings. One kind of tools used are the oscilloscopes, tools that measure signals and plot them in a graphically understandable way. We have a…

139

Passkeys: A Loss of User Control?

This blog post doesn't have the answers. I'm trying to learn about passkeys, but I don't claim to be an expert. I do have a lot of questions, especially for Apple, because I'm an Apple user and developer. According to Betteridge's law of headlines , "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the…

140

Evading JavaScript anti-debugging techniques

Debuggers serve as invaluable tools that empower developers to halt code execution and thoroughly analyze its behavior at any given moment. By utilizing debuggers, developers can efficiently identify and resolve issues within their code, making it an indispensable part of their toolkit.

142

Capturing the Flag with GPT-4

This weekend I went to BSides SF 2023 and had a blast. I went to some really interesting talks (including an excellent one about adversarial machine learning), but mostly I spent my time solving CTF hacking challenges. And this time, I did it with the help of GPT-4, the

145

CVE-2020-19909 is everything that is wrong with CVEs

This is a story consisting of several little building blocks and they occurred spread out in time and in different places. It is a story that shows with clarity how our current system with CVE Ids and lots of power given to NVD is a completely broken system. CVE-2020-19909 On August 25 2023, we got … Continue reading…