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Hacking a cheap fitness tracker bracelet
A blog post on reverse engineering and customizing the firmware of a cheap fitness tracker bracelet.
Topics /
Security & Privacy
The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 8,770 posts.
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DDoSCoin: Cryptocurrency with malicious proof of work
Eric Wustrow, University of Colorado Boulder; Benjamin VanderSloot, University of Michigan
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Ethereum Adoption of Zk-SNARK Technology
The Ethereum Metropolis (Byzantium) upgrade adds a new cryptographic tool (zk-SNARKs) that was pioneered by Zcash. The addition of zk-SNARK technology into Ethereum is another validation…
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Farm equipment security at DEF CON 29
At DEF CON 29, a security researcher exposed the vulnerabilities of farm equipment manufacturers.
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Unraveling NSA's TURBULENCE Programs
The NSA TURBULENCE program was first revealed in 2007 by the Baltimore Sun for being over-budget and poorly-managed 1 2 . Many documents from the Snowden trove from the past two years reference parts of this program, but no coherent story or overview of how these programs operate together has been described. This is…
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Let’s build a high-performance fuzzer with GPUs
TL;DR: Can we use GPUs to get 10x performance/dollar when fuzzing embedded software in the cloud? Based on our preliminary work, we think the answer is yes! Fuzzing is a software testing technique that supplies programs with many randomized inputs in an attempt to cause unexpected behavior. It’s an important, […]
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NY Man Pleads Guilty in $20M SIM Swap Theft
A 24-year-old New York man who bragged about helping to steal more than $20 million worth of cryptocurrency from a technology executive has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Nicholas Truglia was part of a group alleged to have stolen more than $100 million from cryptocurrency investors using…
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Free Download Manager backdoored – a possible supply chain attack on Linux
Kaspersky researchers analyzed a Linux backdoor disguised as Free Download Manager software that remained under the radar for at least three years.
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The "Take It Down" Act
We've opposed the Take It Down Act because it could be easily manipulated to take down lawful content that powerful people simply don't like. Last night, President Trump demonstrated he has a similar view on the bill. He wants to sign the bill into law, then use it to remove content about — him....
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PixieFail: Nine Vulnerabilities UEFI Implementations
This blog post provides details about nine vulnerabilities affecting the IPv6 network protocol stack of EDK II, TianoCore's open source reference implementation of UEFI.
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Think You’ve Got Your Credit Freezes Covered? Think Again
I spent a few days last week speaking at and attending a conference on responding to identity theft. The forum was held in Florida, one of the major epicenters for identity fraud complaints in United States. One gripe I heard from several presenters was that identity thieves increasingly are finding ways to open new…
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Cloudflare automatically fixes Polyfill.io for free sites
polyfill.io, a popular JavaScript library service, can no longer be trusted and should be removed from websites
5957
The case of the 9 bit AES key
Several PDF implementations advertise AES-256, but generate the 256-bit key from either a very small state space, or from insecure random sources.
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How the United Arab Emirates Intelligence Tried to Hire Me to Spy on Its People
Recently, we’ve been overwhelmed with news of horrors, attacks, monsters who murder the innocent in the name of a faith they don’t truly know. I’m publishing t…
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ECJ finds IAB Europe responsible for TCF consent spam popups across the Internet
Europe's top court rules that IAB Europe is responsible under the GDPR for the "TCF" consent system, which authorities have already found to be in violation of the GDPR.
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The Untouchables – Apple’s new OS “activation” for Touch Bar MacBook Pros
Last week Joe Chilcote discovered an interesting message when imaging a Late 2016 MacBook Pro TouchBar (from here on out referred to as TBP): A critical software update is required for your Mac. To…
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Penetration testing and low-cost freelancing
Penetration testing is complex. For it to be successful, the tester needs to possess a variety of different abilities and skills. Some testers rely only on automated tools, while others focus more on manual analysis. While a creative and unconventional way of thinking is necessary, it is also important for the tester…
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The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’
The term script kiddie probably originated around 1994, but the first public record is from 1996.
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Coreboot Blocked from Recent Thinkpads by Intel Boot Guard
So some innocent post on the coreboot mailing list managed to make some waves. The problem Intel tries to solve… Intel Boot Guard is the latest effort in a long series by Intel and others to allow computers to provide some reliable information about the state a computer is in. They’re working on it since at least…
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German Data Privacy Commissioner Says Article 13 Inevitably Leads to Filters
German Data Privacy Commissioner Ulrich Kelber is also a computer scientist, which makes him uniquely qualified to comment on the potential consequences of the proposed new EU Copyright Directive. The Directive will be voted on at the end of this month, and its Article 13 requires that online...
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ESIM Security
In a result of its research investigation efforts, Security Explorations, a research lab of AG Security Research company, conducted security analysis of eSIM technology.
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Protecting Mozilla’s GitHub Repositories from Malicious Modification
At Mozilla, we’ve been working to ensure our repositories hosted on GitHub are protected from malicious modification. As the recent Gentoo incident demonstrated, such attacks are possible. Mozilla’s original usage ...
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