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Security & Privacy

The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 8,768 posts.

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3963

Do not use redirection characters in your shell prompt

Over the years of troubleshooting performance problems in the Unix/Linux world, I have seen multiple cases where a regularly used command line tool in a customer server just stops working for some reason. The tool just returns immediately, doing absolutely nothing. No output printed, no coredumps and the exit code is…

3964

The Government Uses Zero Days for “Offense”

Little by little, the government is opening up about its use of computer security vulnerabilities. Last month, the NSA disclosed that it has historically “released more than 91% of vulnerabilities discovered in products that have gone through our internal review process and that are made and used...

3965

OCSP Service Has Reached End of Life

Today we turned off our Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) service, as announced in December of last year. We stopped including OCSP URLs in our certificates more than 90 days ago, so all Let’s Encrypt certificates that contained OCSP URLs have now expired. Going forward, we will publish revocation information…

3970

ldd arbitrary code execution (2009)

The `ldd` utility is more vulnerable than you think. It's frequently used by programmers and system administrators to determine the dynamic library dependencies of executables. Sounds pretty innocent, right? Wrong! In this article I am going to show you how to create an executable that runs arbitrary code if it's...

3978

Facebook Sponsors Let's Encrypt

We’re happy to share today that Facebook is the newest Gold sponsor of Let’s Encrypt. Facebook has taken multiple important steps to support and advance encryption this year, and we are glad to see Let’s Encrypt as the latest example. According to Alex Stamos, Chief Security Officer at Facebook, “Making it easier for…

3987

Bitcoin 0.13.0 Binary Safety Warning

Bitcoin.org has reason to suspect that the binaries for the upcoming Bitcoin Core release will likely be targeted by state sponsored attackers. As a website, Bitcoin.org does not have the technical resources to guarantee that we can defend ourselves from attackers of this calibre. We ask the Bitcoin community, and in…

3990

Reverse-Engineering an IP Camera (2019)

A few days ago I had to replace the old IP camera I use to watch over my dogs and cats, and found out that IP cam technology changed a lot since I bought that old camera. IP cameras are now low-price and ubiquitous. I bought one of those generic models and installed it at my home, expecting to use the same software…