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The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 4,333 posts.
Lawmakers in both houses of Congress are demanding answers from the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) after KrebsOnSecurity reported this week that a CISA contractor intentionally published AWS GovCloud keys and a vast trove of other agency secrets on a public GitHub account. The inquiry comes…
I’m sorry, but I can’t help with that. We acheived AGI. The clankers died on Christmas. This post is scheduled to automatically publish: 2025-12-25. Editors note: erroneously leaked this personal commentary blog early due to typoed year. Since it's erroneous early publication, this leak has remained on the hackernews…
My personal site has zero pages indexed by DuckDuckGo and Bing and even searches for my URL return zero results. This post is a description of the problem and the start of my journey to fix it.
A year ago, KrebsOnSecurity warned that “Informed Delivery,” a new offering from the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) that lets residents view scanned images of all incoming mail, was likely to be abused by identity thieves and other fraudsters unless the USPS beefed up security around the program and made it easier for…
I found myself going down a previously unexplored rabbit hole recently, or more specifically, what I thought was "a" rabbit hole but in actual fact was an ever-expanding series of them that led me to what I refer to in the title of this post as "6 rabbits deep"
Recently I came across a fantastic new paper by a group of NYU and Cornell researchers entitled “How to think about end-to-end encryption and AI.” I’m extremely grateful to see th…
UPDATE March 28, 2013: Many people have commented here and emailed me that it no longer works for you. I have made an update to fix the bookmarklet for those with Facebook Graph Search. You can get…
While we were visiting the University of Maryland, we came across a fleet of electric scooters scattered across the campus and couldn't resist poking at the scooter's mobile app. To our surprise, our actions caused the horns and headlights on all of the scooters to turn on and stay on for 15 minutes straight.
On September 22, 2016, this site was forced offline for nearly four days after it was hit with “ Mirai ,” a malware strain that enslaves poorly secured Internet of Things (IoT) devices like wireless routers and security cameras into a botnet for use in large cyberattacks. Roughly a week after that assault, the…
Police are already using self-driving car footage as video evidence: While security cameras are commonplace in American cities, self-driving cars represent a new level of access for law enforcement and a new method for encroachment on privacy, advocates say. Crisscrossing the city on their routes, self-driving cars…
Bluenoroff or APT38, more commonly referred to as Lazarus Group is a threat group which has been tied to the North Korean government since as early as 2009 primarily being financially motivated utilizing malware custom built for each target.
This is the story of a bug that was discovered and fixed in Telegram’s self-rolled cryptographic protocol about seven years ago. The bug didn’t get any press, and no one seems to know about it, probably because it was only published in Russian.
When I ssh into a server for the first time, I’m confronted with a dialog which asks me to verify I’m actually talking to the machine I expect to be talking to. $ ssh -l jp 192.0.2.65 The authenti...
Last week, CIA director John Brennan told a Senate committee that there wasn’t any strong cryptography outside of the US. CIA director John Brennan told US senators they shouldn’t worry about mandatory encryption backdoors hurting American businesses. And that’s because, according to Brennan, there’s no one else for…
This script uses a pregenerated foundation lookup table to find local IP address for ICE candidates that render local mDNS hostnames seen as xx-xxx-xxx-xx.local .
I was recently rewarded a total of $107,500 by Google for responsibly disclosing security issues in the Google Home smart speaker that allowed an attacker within wireless proximity to install a "backdoor" account on the device, enabling them to send commands to it remotely over the Internet, access its microphone…
There's lots of innovation going on in security - we're inundated with a steady stream of new stuff and it all sounds like it works just great. Every couple of months I'm invited to a new computer security conference, or I'm asked to write a foreword for a new computer security book. And, thanks to the fact that it's…
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
The other day I rode on a Class 800 train in the UK. This is the “Intercity Express” train designed to replace the venerable HST (Intercity 125 with Mark 3 coaches, a train of which I have many memories and which I will dearly miss).
Vulnerability discovery has always been gated by elite attention. Elite attention is now abundant. What happens next?
On 2/2/2022, I reported a critical security issue to Optimism—an "L2 scaling solution" for Ethereum—that would allow an attacker to replicate money on any chain using their "OVM 2.0" fork of go-ethereum (which they call l2geth).
A checklist for configuring Mozilla Firefox for a more private browsing experience.
(A play in 4 acts. Please feel free to exit along with the stage character that best represents you. Take intermissions as you see fit. Click on the stage if...
Microsoft Corp. today took the unusual step of issuing security updates to address flaws in older, unsupported versions of Windows — including Windows XP and Windows 8 . The move is a bid to slow the spread of the WanaCrypt ransomware strain that infected tens of thousands of Windows computers virtually overnight this…
UPDATE: February 14, 2019: Since writing this article in late 2017, Microsoft seems to have made a change that makes it a bit harder to reverse
