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Topics /
Security & Privacy
The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 293 posts.
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Microsoft Uses Trademark Law to Disrupt Trickbot Botnet
Microsoft Corp. has executed a coordinated legal sneak attack in a bid to disrupt the malware-as-a-service botnet Trickbot , a global menace that has infected millions of computers and is used to spread ransomware. A court in Virginia granted Microsoft control over many Internet servers Trickbot uses to plunder…
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Stop adding email tracking links to phone numbers
My Chinese takeaway delivery was late. Very late. I flipped open the confirmation email sent by Just-Eat to double-check I had all the details correct. At the bottom was a "click to call" link. Hurrah! I clicked dial, and this is what filled my screen: An absurdly long phone number. Bemused, I went to inspect the link…
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Dissecting an SSL Certificate (2017)
Dissecting an SSL certificate
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Thinking of a Cybersecurity Career?
Thousands of people graduate from colleges and universities each year with cybersecurity or computer science degrees only to find employers are less than thrilled about their hands-on, foundational skills. Here’s a look at a recent survey that identified some of the bigger skills gaps, and some thoughts about how…
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DKIM: Show Your Privates
If you’re like most people, there’s a good chance that it’s been years since you’ve sent an email that wasn’t cryptographically signed. You don’t use PGP, you say? Well, even if you are…
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Revisiting Apple Notes (6): The Protobuf
TL;DR : This post explains portions of two protobufs used by Apple, one for the Note format itself and another for embedded objects. More importantly, it explains how you can figure out the structure of protobufs.
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TikTok: Logs, Logs, Logs
We are in 2020 and the US president is about to ban TikTok, a video-sharing social network mobile app, because “it poses a risk to US…
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The browsers are probably running the TLS show now
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…
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A 96 Bitcoin ransom payment ends up on Bitfinex
"Hello, to get your data back you have to pay for the decryption tool, the price is $1,200,000... You have to make the payment in Bitcoin...
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Would You Have Fallen for This Phone Scam?
You may have heard that today’s phone fraudsters like to use caller ID spoofing services to make their scam calls seem more believable. But you probably didn’t know that these fraudsters also can use caller ID spoofing to trick your bank into giving up information about recent transactions on your account — data that…
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Understanding how AES encryption works
Deepen your understanding of AES implementation using golang.
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Reverse Engineering the Comtech AHA363 PCIe Gzip Accelerator Board
All this work was done in November last year. I haven’t worked on it since, but others have shown interest in picking this up, so it’s about time this gets thrown out in the open.
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How does a TCP Reset Attack work?
A TCP reset attack is executed using a single packet of data, no more than a few bytes in size. A spoofed TCP segment, crafted and sent by an attacker, tricks two victims into abandoning a TCP connection, interrupting possibly vital communications between them.
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White hat social engineering: How to become an admin of a system
Warning: Half-satire, half-truth
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Lamphone: Real-Time Passive Sound Recovery from Light Bulb Vibrations
Recent studies have suggested various side-channel attacks for eavesdropping sound by analyzing the side effects of sound waves on nearby objects (e.g., a bag of chips and window) and devices (e.g., motion sensors). These methods pose a great threat to privacy, however they are limited in one of the
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Reverse Engineer Amazon's Whispersync
I am a big fan of my Kindle. This is the device I’d bring over to a desert island. I am also a fairly frequent user of the highlight feature where you can select a bit of text you like and save it. One thing is bothering me though: the lack of open API on the Kindle to retrieve the data about me. Amazon provides the…
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How Rainbow Tables Work
I found the creator of Rainbow Table's paper, aimed at cryptanalysts, was pretty inaccessible considering the simplicity and elegance of Rainbow Tables, so this is an overview of it for a layman.
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Linux Security Hardening and Other Tweaks
A collection of kernel and userland settings one can change to improve the security and usability of a Linux system. Targeted at Arch, but should work for other distros too.
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Why I’m Willing to Pay a Premium for Security, Privacy, and Peace of Mind
Miguel de Icaza's Blog
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The GDPR as accidentally explained by people in the US
Bashing the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) seems to have become one of American activists’ favourite hobbies in the tech field. Some criticism is entirely justified. But many claims that the GDPR is “counterproductive” or “misses the point” are based on misconceptions, rather than an…
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Finding McAfee: a case study on geoprofiling and imagery analysis
Identify past, current, and possible future locations through the geolocation and chronolocation of media provided by a specific user.
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Linux kernel heap quarantine versus use-after-free exploits
It's 2020. Quarantines are everywhere – and here I'm writing about one, too. But this quarantine is of a different kind. In this article I'll describe the Linux Kernel Heap Quarantine that I developed for mitigating kernel use-after-free exploitation.
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Body found in Canada identified as neo-nazi spam king
The body of a man found shot inside a burned out vehicle in Canada three years ago has been identified as that of Davis Wolfgang Hawke , a prolific spammer and neo-Nazi who led a failed anti-government march on Washington, D.C. in 1999, according to news reports.