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Security & Privacy

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

2019
181

‘Land Lordz’ Service Powers Airbnb Scams

Scammers who make a living swindling Airbnb.com customers have a powerful new tool at their disposal: A software-as-a-service offering called “ Land Lordz ,” which helps automate the creation and management of fake Airbnb Web sites and the sending of messages to advertise the fraudulent listings.

185

I revoked $1M worth of EV certificates

Personal like or dislike of EV aside for a moment, we can all agree on what the name of EV certs implies. Organisations get their company details in the certificate and CAs have to do some extended validation of that data compared to a normal certificate. Turns out, that doesn'

187

Twitter accounts are being hijacked for spam

It seems that Twitter has lost control of its advertising system. This blog post will show you why it is dangerous to click on any Twitter advertising. Twitter ads have always been a bit crap, but I've seen a recent influx in outright scams. Let me step you through a couple of examples. A typical click-bait headline…

194

Fingerprinting iPhones

This clever attack allows someone to uniquely identify a phone when you visit a website, based on data from the accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer sensors. We have developed a new type of fingerprinting attack, the calibration fingerprinting attack. Our attack uses data gathered from the accelerometer…

195

China Spying on Undersea Internet Cables

Supply chain security is an insurmountably hard problem. The recent focus is on Chinese 5G equipment, but the problem is much broader. This opinion piece looks at undersea communications cables: But now the Chinese conglomerate Huawei Technologies, the leading firm working to deliver 5G telephony networks globally…

203

Write Fuzzable Code

“An obvious way to deal with embedded interpreters — which someone must have thought of and tried, but I don’t have any pointers — would be to have an API for teaching the fuzzer how to see coverage of the language being interpreted.”

204

Should Failing Phish Tests Be a Fireable Offense?

Would your average Internet user be any more vigilant against phishing scams if he or she faced the real possibility of losing their job after falling for one too many of these emails? Recently, I met someone at a conference who said his employer had in fact terminated employees for such repeated infractions. As this…

208

DNS Security: Threat Modeling DNSSEC, DoT, and DoH

There's been a lot of talk about DNS-over-HTTPS aka DoH lately, primarily due to Mozilla's and Google's respective plans to move forward with enabling it in their browsers. There's also a lot of misunderstanding and conflation of speculated plans for world domination with practical benefits of the technology; it…