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Security & Privacy

The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 312 posts.

2021
211

Reverse Engineering a Docker Image

This started with a consulting snafu: Government organisation A got government organisation B to develop a web application. Government organisation B subcontracted part of the work to somebody. Hosting and maintenance of the project was later contracted out to a private-sector company C. Company C discovered that the…

216

Porn Spam on Google Maps

User Generated Content is great, innit? As a company, I want users to submit photos, so I don't have to do any content curation. Moderation? Nah mate, stick some AI on there to filter out anything offensive and we're golden. *sigh* James Whatley (inactive)@WhatleydudeSurprised Loch Ness isn't trending tbqh.❤️ 7💬 0🔁…

218

$ sudo rm -rf / === NPM install

🔎I authored this blog post whilst I was an employee of Gitpod for Gitpod. I no longer work at Gitpod. In what seems like a long time ago, in part because it is, I learned the catastrophic capabilities of this command the hard way, and I'm sure folks my

219

DoS attacks against my online game

DDraceNetwork is an open source online game I’ve been running since 2013 with a community of volunteers. The game is available for free, I’m hosting servers for it in many countries around the world so that we have trusted official ranks . The servers are paid for by donations , which I stop collecting once the cost…

220

Black Hat USA 2021 Review

中文 First of all, thank Orange Tsai for giving me the opportunity to participate in Black Hat USA 2021 in Las Vegas. This article would not exist without this ticket. I am going to share my thoughts and some technical topics on the two days of Black Hat USA 2021 in this article. The hotel and the conference venue are…

221

The Drunken Bishop Algorithm

There’s a tradition in my family that everyone takes a turn stirring a secret wish into the yearly christmas pudding . It’s important that the wishes remain secret to the wisher or the pudding magics wont work so since moving to America I’ve implemented a new way of hashing my wish so it can be stirred in via text…

225

Alexa leaks private wishlists

This morning, my wife noticed that Alexa was insistently flashing its little blue lights. "Alexa... Notifications?" "You have one notification. An item on your wishlist has dropped in price. The … is now only £…" And that's how my wife found out what I planned to get her for her birthday! What happened to cause this?…

235

Cybersecurity and the curse of binary thinking

Working in information/cybersecurity and technology risk is a fascinating and challenging career, as I’ve covered here. There is, mostly, a great spirit of sharing and collaboration among security professionals. However, I’ve observed one disturbing and growing trend in the past few years that might be characterized…

237

NY Man Pleads Guilty in $20M SIM Swap Theft

A 24-year-old New York man who bragged about helping to steal more than $20 million worth of cryptocurrency from a technology executive has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Nicholas Truglia was part of a group alleged to have stolen more than $100 million from cryptocurrency investors using…

238

Half of curl’s vulnerabilities are C mistakes

I spent a lot of time and effort digging up the numbers and facts for this post! Lots of people keep referring to the awesome summary put together by a friendly pseudonymous "Tim" which says that "53 out of 95" (55.7%) security flaws in curl could've been prevented if curl had been written in Rust. … Continue reading…