Topics /

Security & Privacy

The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 240 posts.

2018
214

Making art with SSH key randomart

SSH is everywhere in the development or operations world now. For development it’s what allows you to push to GitHub. For operations it’s what allows you to reasonably securely log into Linux servers.

217

Notorious ‘Hijack Factory’ Shunned from Web

Score one for the good guys: Bitcanal , a Portuguese Web hosting firm long accused of helping spammers hijack large swaths of dormant Internet address space over the years, was summarily kicked off the Internet this week after a half-dozen of the company’s bandwidth providers chose to sever ties with the company.

221

“Stylish” is back, and you still shouldn't use it

2 days after I published ‘“Stylish” browser extension steals all your internet history’, Stylish was pulled from the Chrome and Firefox stores. The story echoed around parts of the internet for a few days, my name was misspelled on several right-wing British news websites, and I felt that I’d helped make the world a…

223

How to Block Stingray Devices

Disable 2G On Android To Block Stingray Devices 1) Pull up the phone dialer and dial *#*#4636#*#* (that spells INFO) 2) This brings you to the testing screen, select "Phone/Device information". 3) Scroll down a little to "preferred network type", select the arrow. 4) Change it to LTE/WCDMA Only. It…

224

Beware of strncpy and strncat

Most C programmers also know to avoid the legacy strcpy() and strcat() functions, as these commonly introduce buffer-overflow problems. Instead, C programmers should use the newer strncpy() and strncat() functions, which check the size of the buffer they're copying data into.

225

About rel=noopener (2016)

2021 update: Browsers now implicitly set rel=noopener for any target=_blank link, following a spec change . If the demo on this page no longer seems scary, congratulations — you’re using a modern browser!

226

Domain hacks with unusual Unicode characters

Unicode contains a range of symbols which don't get much use. For example, there are separate symbols for TradeMark - ™, Service Mark - ℠, and Prescriptions - ℞. Nestling among the "Letterlike Symbols" are two curious entries. Both of these are single characters: Telephone symbol - ℡ Numero Sign - № What's interesting…

230

Securing your users' authentication

A few days ago, I saw an article about someone’s Playstation Network account getting stolen . The problem wasn’t so much that the account got stolen, as this apparently happens more often than not, but that Sony has created a system so convoluted that it’s possible for the thief to keep your account, without you…

236

Systemd's DynamicUser feature is currently dangerous

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…

237

Reversing a MacOS Kernel Extension

In my last post I covered the basics of kernel debugging in macOS. In this post we will put some of that to use and work through the process of reversing a macOS kernel module. As I said in my last post, in macOS there is a kernel module named “Don’t Steal Mac OS X” (DSMOS) which registers a function with the Mach-O…

240

Tracking Firm LocationSmart Leaked Location Data for Customers of All Major U.S. Mobile Carriers Without Consent in Real Time Via Its Web Site

LocationSmart , a U.S. based company that acts as an aggregator of real-time data about the precise location of mobile phone devices, has been leaking this information to anyone via a buggy component of its Web site — without the need for any password or other form of authentication or authorization — KrebsOnSecurity…