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Security & Privacy

The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 8,770 posts.

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5973

Twitter accounts are being hijacked for spam

It seems that Twitter has lost control of its advertising system. This blog post will show you why it is dangerous to click on any Twitter advertising. Twitter ads have always been a bit crap, but I've seen a recent influx in outright scams. Let me step you through a couple of examples. A typical click-bait headline…

5978

Bruce Schneier: Refuse to be terrorized

On Aug. 16, two men were escorted off a plane headed for Manchester, England, because some passengers thought they looked either Asian or Middle Eastern, might have been talking Arabic, wore leather jackets, and looked at their watches—and the passengers refused to fly with them on board. The men were questioned for…

5980

Half of curl’s vulnerabilities are C mistakes

I spent a lot of time and effort digging up the numbers and facts for this post! Lots of people keep referring to the awesome summary put together by a friendly pseudonymous "Tim" which says that "53 out of 95" (55.7%) security flaws in curl could've been prevented if curl had been written in Rust. … Continue reading…

5984

A Call of Duty exploit

A few years ago, I became aware of a security issue in most Call of Duty games. Although I did not discover it myself, I thought it might be interesting to see what it could be used for. Without going into detail, this security issue allows users playing a Call of Duty match to cause a buffer overflow on the host’s…

5986

IntelliJ GitHub Plugin leaking credentials

A new security issue was discovered that affects the JetBrains GitHub plugin on the IntelliJ platform, which could lead to disclosure of access tokens to third-party sites. The issue affects all IntelliJ-based IDEs as of 2023.1 onwards that have the JetBrains GitHub plugin enabled and configured/in-use.

5990

Are blockchains decentralized?

A new Trail of Bits research report examines unintended centralities in distributed ledgers Blockchains can help push the boundaries of current technology in useful ways. However, to make good risk decisions involving exciting and innovative technologies, people need demonstrable facts that are arrived at through…

5999

How to build an NPM worm

npm is a registry and package manager for JavaScript that ships as part of Node.js . It's used by tens of millions of people to install hundreds of thousands of packages billions of times every week.