Topics /

Security & Privacy

The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 4,335 posts.

Any year
2882

Undeletable Cookies

A couple of weeks ago Wired reported the discovery of a new, undeletable, web cookie: Researchers at U.C. Berkeley have discovered that some of the net’s most popular sites are using a tracking service that can’t be evaded—even when users block cookies, turn off storage in Flash, or use browsers’ “incognito”…

2889

The Naz.API Credential Stuffing List

It feels like not a week goes by without someone sending me yet another credential stuffing list. It's usually something to the effect of "hey, have you seen the Spotify breach", to which I politely reply with a link to my old No, Spotify Wasn't Hacked blog post

2894

Crates.io phishing attempt

Earlier this week, an npm supply chain attack. It’s turn for crates.io, the main public repository for Rust crates (packages). The phishing e-mail looks like this: And it leads to a GitHub login pa...

2897

Malicious Use of the HTML5 Vibrate API

There is a new API in town! HTML5 will (soon) let you make the user's device vibrate. What fun! Obviously, it's useful for triggering alerts, improved immersivness during gameplay, and all sorts of other fun things like sending Morse Code messages via vibration. At the moment, Chrome (and other Android browsers) ask…

2898

Fake ad blockers in Chrome Web Store

People searching for a Google Chrome ad blocking extension have to choose from dozens of similarly named extensions. Only few of these are legitimate, most are forks of open source ad blockers trying to attract users with misleading extension names and descriptions. What are these up to? Thanks to Andrey Meshkov we…

2899

The Trouble with Politicians Sharing Passwords

Yesterday I had a bunch of people point me at a tweet from a politician in the UK named Nadine Dorries [https://twitter.com/NadineDorries]. As it turns out, some folks were rather alarmed about her position on sharing what we would normally consider to be a secret. In this

2901

Self-Enforcing Protocols

There are several ways two people can divide a piece of cake in half. One way is to find someone impartial to do it for them. This works, but it requires another person. Another way is for one person to divide the piece, and the other person to complain (to the police, a judge, or his parents) if he doesn’t think it’s…

2902

Yubikey/Smartcard backed TLS servers

It has become clear that storing secrets in computers is hard. The best demo to the world that storing secrets on “online” computers is hard and sometimes devastating, is the large amounts of cryptocurrency theft due to critical keys being in memory of systems directly or indirectly connected to the internet.

2905

Hacking the call records of millions of Americans

Imagine if anyone could punch in a phone number from the largest U.S. cell carrier and instantly retrieve a list of its recent incoming calls—complete with timestamps—without compromising the device, guessing a password, or alerting the user. Now imagine that number belongs to a journalist, a police officer, a…