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Security & Privacy

The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 579 posts.

2019
364

Ransomware-ing a DSLR Camera

Research by: Eyal Itkin TL;DR Cameras. We take them to every important life event, we bring them on our vacations, and we store them in a protective case to keep them safe during transit. Cameras are more than just a tool or toy; we entrust them with our very memories, and so they are very important […]

366

NY Payroll Company Vanishes with $35M

MyPayrollHR , a now defunct cloud-based payroll processing firm based in upstate New York, abruptly ceased operations this past week after stiffing employees at thousands of companies. The ongoing debacle, which allegedly involves malfeasance on the part of the payroll company’s CEO, resulted in countless people…

367

64 bits ought to be enough for anybody

How quickly can we use brute force to guess a 64-bit number? The short answer is, it all depends on what resources are available. So we’re going to examine this problem starting with the most naive approach and then expand to other techniques involving parallelization. We’ll discuss parallelization at the CPU level…

369

Extended Validation Certificates Are Really Dead

Almost one year ago now, I declared extended validation certificates dead [https://www.troyhunt.com/extended-validation-certificates-are-dead/]. The entity name had just been removed from Safari on iOS, it was about to be removed from Safari on Mojave and there were indications that Chrome would remove it

375

SWATters Target Dozens of Journalists

Nearly three dozen journalists at a broad range of major publications have been targeted by a far-right group that maintains a Deep Web database listing the personal information of people who threaten their views. This group specializes in encouraging others to harass those targeted by their ire, and has claimed…

381

Technology Preview for secure value recovery

At Signal, we want to make privacy simple. From the beginning, we’ve designed Signal so that your information is in your hands rather than ours. Technologies like Signal Protocol secure your messages so that they are never visible by anyone but you and the intended recipients. Technologies like p...

388

Better Encrypted Group Chat

Broadly, an end-to-end encrypted messaging protocol is one that ensures that only the participants in a conversation, and no intermediate servers, routers, or relay systems, can read and write messages. An end-to-end encrypted group messaging protocol is one that ensures this for all participants in a conversation of…

390

Phone Numbers Stink as Identity Proof

Phone numbers stink for security and authentication. They stink because most of us have so much invested in these digits that they’ve become de facto identities. At the same time, when you lose control over a phone number — maybe it’s hijacked by fraudsters, you got separated or divorced, or you were way late on your…