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Security & Privacy

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

2019
242

Zero-knowledge attestation

U2F/FIDO tokens (a.k.a. “Security Keys”) are a solid contender for doing something about the effectiveness of phishing and so I believe they're pretty important. I've written a fairly lengthy introduction to them previously and, as mentioned there, one concerning aspect of their design is that they permit attestation…

246

The Information Apocalypse (2018)

My friend Aviv was recently the subject of a popular Buzzfeed article about the possibility of an impending “information apocalypse”. tl;dr: Aviv extrapolates from the fake news crisis that started in 2016 to a world in which anyone can create AI-assisted misinformation campaigns indistinguishable from reality to the…

248

BPF port-based firewall for systemd services

The first post introduced the IPIngressFilterPath and IPEgressFilterPath feature for the upcoming systemd release 243 to support custom BPF programs as firewall for services. There was a simple example for a minimal BPF program written in C and how to load it for a systemd service. Then there was a standalone program…

255

Hidden Cam Above Bluetooth Pump Skimmer

Tiny hidden spy cameras are a common sight at ATMs that have been tampered with by crooks who specialize in retrofitting the machines with card skimmers. But until this past week I’d never heard of hidden cameras being used at gas pumps in tandem with Bluetooth-based card skimming devices.

260

Cybersecurity Checklist for Political Campaigns

Short-lived political campaigns rarely build formal security programs and often assume they're too small to attract serious attackers, but campaigns across the United States have been targeted by document theft and credential phishing. Six observed attacker tactics map to a short list of defensive priorities, starting…

261

Keyringless GnuPG

My favorite music player is Audacious . It follows the Winamp Classic tradition of not trying to manage my music library. Instead it waits patiently for me to throw files and directories at it. These selections will be informally grouped into transient, disposable playlists of whatever I fancy that day.

263

On Covering Webcams

The problem isn’t your camera, it’s malware. Don’t install any software from unknown or sketchy sources, keep your OS up to date, and you should be fine. And if you do have malware on your Mac, the webcam is likely the least of your problems.