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Security & Privacy

The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 8,762 posts.

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424

When in doubt: hang up, look up, and call back

Many security-conscious people probably think they’d never fall for a phone-based phishing scam. But if your response to such a scam involves anything other than hanging up and calling back the entity that claims to be calling, you may be in for a rude awakening. Here’s how one security and tech-savvy reader got taken…

432

I've locked myself out of my digital life

Imagine… Last night, lightning struck our house and burned it down. I escaped wearing only my nightclothes. In an instant, everything was vaporised. Laptop? Cinders. Phone? Ashes. Home server? A smouldering wreck. Yubikey? A charred chunk of gristle. This presents something of a problem. In order to recover my digital…

433

What happened to the Snowden archive

The last document from the Snowden archive was published on 29 May 2019. The Guardian stopped publishing documents in February 2014, Der Spiegel in January 2015, and The New York Times and ProPublica in August 2015. After that, only The Intercept was still publishing documents, with only a few exceptions, until it…

436

SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop?

The JFrog security research team recently identified a supply chain attack targeting the `xinference` package on PyPI. Versions 2.6.0, 2.6.1, and 2.6.2 were compromised and yanked by maintainers after users reported suspicious behavior. If you installed or imported these versions, you must assume your environment is…

440

Swing VPN app is a DDoS botnet

tldr: Swing VPN is using its user base to DDOS sites using its users as a an attack botnet. Introduction It all started with a friend of mine complaining that his phone was doing a request to a specific app every few seconds. Initial assumption was that the phone was infected with a virus but a 2 minute investigation…

445

Don't touch my clipboard

Looking for an em dash I was recently trying to find an em dash character to use in a piece of writing. Since I don’t have the shortcut memorized—for future reference, shift+option+minus on Mac—I did a quick search for it. I didn’t see one on the search results page to copy, so I clicked into the first result: “The…