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The target=“_blank” vulnerability by example
Instagram leaves its users open to a simple phishing attack
Topics /
Security & Privacy
The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 279 posts.
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Frequent Password Changes Is a Bad Security Idea
I’ve been saying for years that it’s bad security advice, that it encourages poor passwords. Lorrie Cranor, now the FTC’s chief technologist, agrees: By studying the data, the researchers identified common techniques account holders used when they were required to change passwords. A password like “tarheels#1”, for…
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High frequency security bug hunting: 120 days, 120 bugs
1) Intro & Motivations At the start of of this year, I set myself a personal goal of finding 365 bugs in 365 days. This was entirely motivated by wanting to challenge myself to find more security issues as I felt I'd been slacking off. I thought back to things
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Stealing Facebook access_tokens using CSRF in device login flow
I enjoy breaking websites.
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“Why do you work in security instead of something more lasting?”
This post grew out of a friend on Facebook asking (I paraphrase) "why do you spend your time on security instead of using your brainpower f...
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Malware in the browser: how you might get hacked by a Chrome extension
A case study of a Chrome extension that turned out to be some nasty botnet malware.
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MitM Attack against KeePass 2’s Update Check
This post is about a Man in the Middle (MitM) vulnerability in KeePass 2’s automatic update check. KeePass – the free and open source password manager – uses, in all versions up to the current 2.33, unencrypted HTTP requests to check for new software versions. An attacker can abuse this automatic update check – if…
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Usenet Tradecraft: Survival in an Extremely Adversarial Environment (2013)
Survival in an Extremely Adversarial Environment If your secure communications platform isn’t being used by terrorists and pedophiles, you&# …
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What are malicious USB keys and how to create a realistic one?
This blog post shows how to create a reliable and realistic-looking malicious USB key that can be used in a drop attack.
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The FBI can almost certainly crack the San Bernardino iPhone without Apple
The title kind of says it all. How do I know? Because of this photo : That's a picture of the logic board of an iPhone 5C, the same mod...
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OpenSSL Key Recovery Attack on DH small subgroups (CVE-2016-0701)
Usual Mandatory Disclaimer: IANAC (I am not a cryptographer) so I might likely end up writing a bunch of mistakes in this blog post... ...
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“Guccifer2”'s second release from DNC hack
This’s time to keep my word and here’re the docs I promised you. It’s not a report in one file, it’s a big folder of docs devoted to Hillary Clinton that I found on the DNC …
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Reverse engineering Android from binary to source
Dmitry.GR: Full sources for Android on zWatch
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The 3DS Cryptosystem
I think one of the biggest challenge for system engineers is designing security. Recently, at the 32c3 conference, plutoo, derrek, and smea presented a series of hacks that completely defeated the security of the 3DS. As a result, people have implemented boot-time unsigned code execution (called “arm9loaderhax” in the…
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I'm Writing a Book on Security
I’m writing a book on security in the highly connected Internet-of-Things world. Tentative title: Click Here to Kill Everybody Peril and Promise in a Hyper-Connected World There are two underlying metaphors in the book. The first is what I have called the World-Sized Web, which is that combination of mobile, cloud…
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Roughtime: a protocol for secure, auditable time synchronisation
Security protocols often assume an accurate, local clock (e.g. TLS, Kerberos, DNSSEC and more). It's a widely accepted assumption when designing protocols but, for a lot of people, it just isn't true. We find good evidence that at least 25% of all certificate errors in Chrome are due to a bad local clock.
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Race conditions on the web
I enjoy breaking websites.
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MitM-ing Postgres
I recently had to set up a new postgres instance at work. While we’re already using Heroku Postgres for production loads, we had some requirements for this one that couldn’t be solved without being database admin, and thus had to go self-hosted. That...
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Automatically inferring file syntax with afl-analyze
The nice thing about the control flow instrumentation used by American Fuzzy Lop is that it allows you to do much more than just, well, f...
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HTTP GZIP Compression remote date and time leak
Tor is a service run by a network of volunteers to allow people to use internet anonymously. Normally tor is used to browse the web without being tracked or identified.
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How I got tech support scammers infected with Locky
There’s been this debate for a while now, about AI being either the greatest or the worst or maybe the least interesting thing to happen to humanity so far. I have to say I’m not 100% sure where I land on this one myself. AI has empowered me to do things I had been putting off forever, multiplied my productivity and…
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The Orphaned Internet – Taking Over 120K Domains via a DNS Vulnerability
A Hacker's Blog of Unintended Use and Insomnia.
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Security Risks of TSA PreCheck
Former TSA Administrator Kip Hawley wrote an op-ed pointing out the security vulnerabilities in the TSA’s PreCheck program: The first vulnerability in the system is its enrollment process, which seeks to verify an applicant’s identity. We know verification is a challenge: A 2011 Government Accountability Office report…
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