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The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 4,333 posts.
A few weeks ago an ordinary security assessment turned into an incident response whirlwind. It was definitely a first for me, and I was kindly granted permission to outline the events in this blog post. This investigation started scary but turned out be quite fun, and I hope reading it will be informative to you too…
Back in 2013, I was beginning to get the sense that data breaches were becoming a big thing. The prevalence of them seemed to be really ramping up as was the impact they were having on those of us that found ourselves in them, myself included. Increasingly, I was writing
Abusing an unauthenticated Bluetooth protocol to turn a PC speaker into a Rubber Ducky.
Am I now committing civil disobedience... just by keeping my personal literary website up as is?
Apple will delete your data if you don’t use an app for seven days. This effectively kills offline web apps.
The governments of Australia, Germany, the UK and the US are destroying your privacy. Some people don't see the problem...
When I was a small child, I took an IQ test. One of the first questions I stumbled on was "A piece of candy costs 25¢. Jonny has a dime. How many nickels does he need to buy the candy?" My 7-year old brain popped. WTAF is a nickel? Or a dime for that matter? We don't have those coins in my country! We don't spend in ¢…
When logged into a web application, the session does not remain valid forever. Typically, the session expires after a fixed time after login, or after the user has been idle for some time. How long should these times be?
Bug Bounty Hunter & Researcher
You surely know this: You're looking at some website with some useful shell commands. However, those commands are long as hell and you know you're probably not gonna need them for a few years or so (so there's no need to memorize them). So, what do you do? You copy-paste them. Here's an example:
Pretty much every day, I get a reminder from someone about how little people know about their exposure in data breaches. Often, it's after someone has searched Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) and found themselves pwned somewhere or other. Frequently, it's some long-forgotten site
Note: As of 2022/10/25 the information in this series is slightly outdated. See Part 5 for more up to date information. The Car Last summer I bought a 2021 Hyundai Ioniq SEL. It is a nice fuel-efficient hybrid with a decent amount of features like wireless Android Auto/Apple CarPlay, wireless phone charging, heated…
How an expired nameserver let me take over e164.arpa zones for multiple territories, and why I probably should have checked my logs sooner.
I have recordings and emails showing attacks months before Coinbase's 'discovery'. Timeline, headers, and audio evidence.
The controversial mass surveillance of private messages in Europe is coming to an end. After the European Parliament had already rejected the indiscriminate and blanket Chat Control by US tech companies on 13 March, conservative forces attempted a democratically highly questionable maneuver yesterda
TikTok has a reputation for its aggressive data collection. The platform has implemented various methods to make it difficult for reverse-engineers to understand exactly what data is being collected and how it is being used.
Firstyear's blog
It is surprisingly difficult to find realistic, interesting and creative privacy case studies. It is perhaps even more difficult in the case of major software. There are no proper motivations for making this kind of work public (employees often paid to do some kind of work in-house; their compensation
Before you can write an exploit, you need a bug. When there are no bugs, we have to get creative—that's where Fault Injection comes in. Fault injection can take many forms, including software-controlled data corruption, power glitching, clock glitching, electromagnetic pulses, lasers, and more.
This post got *a lot* of attention. I’m super happy about that because I had been afraid that we had reached a point where we collectively didn’t care about cameras or meaningful disclosure. Although, to that point here’s a comment someone posted: "I just assume that there will be camera constantly recording when I…
The European Commission wants to turn digital communication apps, such as WhatsApp, iMessage, Instagram, TikTok and X, into mass surveillance tools so that digital communications of all EU citizens, including their live conversations, photos and videos, can be automatically scanned for criminal offences.[1] Even of…
A post called Passkeys are a trap. Do not use them. has been doing the rounds over the last few days, making it pretty high on Hacker News, and I've had it sent to me many times with an 'is this true?' kind of vibe. It's written for
A decade ago to the day, I published a tweet launching what would surely become yet another pet project that scratched an itch, was kinda useful to a few people but other than that, would shortly fade away into the same obscurity as all the other ones I'd launched
A well-organized Nigerian crime ring is exploiting the COVID-19 crisis by committing large-scale fraud against multiple state unemployment insurance programs, with potential losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars, according to a new alert issued by the U.S. Secret Service .
How I tricked Claude into leaking your deepest, darkest secrets
A weblog about Signals Intelligence, Communications Security and top level telecommunications equipment
