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Security & Privacy

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

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666

Setting up a home VPN server with WireGuard

Motivation For a moderately security conscious geek like myself, there can be a number of reasons to want to set up a home VPN server: Accessing your home computer via screen sharing without exposing it to the Internet (and thereby to potential evil-doers). Accessing servers with IP white lists (common case for…

667

Sinkholed

On 26 Nov 2019 at 14:55 UTC, I logged into my server that hosts my website to perform a simple maintenance activity. Merely three minutes later, at 14:58 UTC, the domain name susam.in used to host this website was transferred to another registrant without any authorisation by me or without any notification sent to me…

675

Hidden Networks in TP-Link Routers

I was debugging my WiFi settings this week when I noticed something strange. WiFi Analyzer was showing two hidden networks coming from my router, one for each frequency: 2.4GHz and 5GHz. Networks which I haven't configured and didn't appear in my router's admin interface. WTF?

676

Mullvad exit IPs are surprisingly identifying

Update 5/29: Mullvad has begun rolling out a mitigation feature on their servers that scrambles exit IP positions, thereby fixing this issue. IPs are still deterministically selected based on the pubkey. Mullvad is one of the few VPN providers that offers multiple exit IPs for its servers. If two people connect to the…

680

Face ID, Touch ID, No ID, PINs and Pragmatic Security

I was wondering recently after poring through yet another data breach how many people actually use multi-step verification. I mean here we have a construct where even if the attacker has the victim's credentials, they're rendered useless once challenged for the authenticator code or SMS which is

681

CAN Injection: Keyless car theft

This is a detective story about how a car was stolen - and how it uncovered an epidemic of high-tech car theft. It begins with a tweet. In April 2022, my friend Ian Tabor tweeted that vandals had been at his car, pulling apart the headlight and unplugging the cables.

686

Stupid security things

My mate Lars Klint shared this tweet the other day: > Your password is not unique. pic.twitter.com/ga4GwxtzrQ [https://t.co/ga4GwxtzrQ] — Lars Klint (@larsklint) April 16, 2017 [https://twitter.com/larsklint/status/853507749488975873] Naturally, I passed it on [https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/853517036131041280]…