Topics /
Security & Privacy
The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 8,770 posts.
Zero-knowledge proofs, encoding Sudoku and Mario speedruns without semantic leak
We published our video on zero-knowledge proofs! Surprisingly, making this video took a lot of work. Zero-knowledge proofs for coloring are one of those algorithms that, in hindsight, seem beautifu…
Mullvad Privacy Companion is now open source
Mullvad Privacy Companion, a free Firefox extension helping to improve your online privacy – is now open source.
Your phone may soon replace many of your passwords
Apple , Google and Microsoft announced this week they will soon support an approach to authentication that avoids passwords altogether, and instead requires users to merely unlock their smartphones to sign in to websites or online services. Experts say the changes should help defeat many types of phishing attacks and…
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…
Guidance to developers affected by effort to block less secure browsers, apps
We are always working to improve security protections of Google accounts. Our security systems automatically detect, alert and help protect our users against a range of security threats. One form of phishing, known as “ man-in-the-middle ”, is hard to detect when an embedded browser framework (e.g., Chromium Embedded…
Triple Flaw in Nest's Dropcam
Secure your Internet-connected home and family devices with advanced IoT solutions from Bitdefender Smart Home Cybersecurity.
A 100k Botnet Turns Home Routers to Email Spammers
This article was co-authored by Hui Wang and RootKiter. Since September 2018, 360Netlab Scanmon has detected multiple scan spikes on TCP port 5431, each time the system logged more than 100k scan sources, a pretty large number compared with most other botnets we have covered before. The interaction between the
The Infosec Apocalypse
The rise of tooling for vulnerability detection combined with pressure driven by Vendor Due Diligence is causing a massive enterprise freezeout for non-mainstream technologies across the board. Of particular concern is the impact this will have on the adoption of functional programming in enterprise and small business…
Security concerns with the e-Tugra certificate authority
Certificate authorities (CAs) are a critical backbone of internet security; when they are compromised, users lose the ability to securely connect to websites without fear of interception. Websites cannot insulate themselves against a fully-compromised CA, even if they normally use other CAs.
Supporting Let’s Encrypt, the nonprofit making HTTPS free for all
Today, we’re thrilled to be partnering with Let’s Encrypt, the world’s largest certificate authority.
Drone hijacked by UT hackers with $1,000 spoofer
The Sophos Blog
Bahamas Company Registry Leaked
The people are the best thing about a life in science fiction – eclectic, bright, opinionated, talented – people like Elise Mathson: writer, jeweller, and all-round brilliant person (she's up for a Hugo this year).
Decrypting Amber Rudd
1 Aug, 2017 Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube (Google/Alphabet, Inc) have formed the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism and Amber Rudd is asking them to quietly drop end-to-end encryption from their products. You should not believe a single word any of those companies tells you about end-to-end…
Sunsetting Tor Messenger
In 2015, we introduced Tor Messenger, a cross-platform chat program that aimed to be secure by...
Top Mental Health and Prayer Apps Fail at Privacy, Security (2022)
Despite dealing with issues like depression, suicide, domestic violence, and PTSD, these apps share data freely and raise many security concerns
Curl audit: How a joke led to significant findings
In fall 2022, Trail of Bits audited cURL, a widely-used command-line utility that transfers data between a server and supports various protocols. The project coincided with a Trail of Bits maker week, which meant that we had more manpower than we usually do, allowing us to take a nonstandard approach to the […]
The weaponization of travel blacklists
[A Federal Air Marshal (FAM) tasked with surveillance of an airline passenger targeted by Quiet Skies lists and/or rules followed the traveler out to the curb and recorded the license plate number of the vehicle in which she left the airport, so that her airline reservations could be integrated with license plate…
The Linux Backdoor Attempt of 2003
Josh wrote recently about a serious security bug that appeared in Debian Linux back in 2006, and whether it was really a backdoor inserted by the NSA. (He concluded that it probably was not.) Today I want to write about another incident, in 2003, in which someone tried to backdoor the Linux kernel. This one […]
A riddle wrapped in a curve
If you’re looking for a nice dose of crypto conspiracy theorizing and want to read a paper by some very knowledgeable cryptographers, I have just the paper for you. Titled “A Riddle Wrapped in an E…
I found 39 Algolia admin keys exposed across open source documentation sites
A systematic audit of Algolia DocSearch found 39 admin API keys exposed across projects like Home Assistant, KEDA, and vcluster.