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Security & Privacy

The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 8,776 posts.

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8613

Twitter Exploit Still Works

I bet 10 years ago none of us thought that 140 characters would change the landscape of Social Media quite so much. However, with close to 289,000,000 active users sending around 6,000 tweets every second Twitter has proven its critics wrong. Obviously, having gotten over …

8616

Corrupted Word Files for Sale

On one hand, this is clever: We offer a wide array of corrupted Word files that are guaranteed not to open on a Mac or PC. A corrupted file is a file that contains scrambled and unrecoverable data due to hardware or software failure. Files may become corrupted when something goes wrong while a file is being saved e.g…

8624

The qmail security guarantee

Of course, ``security hole in qmail'' does not include problems outside of qmail: for example, NFS security problems, TCP/IP security problems, DNS security problems, bugs in scripts run from .forward files, and operating system bugs generally. It's silly to blame a problem on qmail if the system was already…

8625

Lessons from the Debian/OpenSSL Fiasco (2008)

Last week, Debian announced that in September 2006 they accidentally broke the OpenSSL pseudo-random number generator while trying to silence a Valgrind warning. One effect this had is that the ssh-keygen program installed on recent Debian systems (and Debian-derived systems like Ubuntu) could only generate 32,767…

8626

Datacenter Security: A Cautionary Tale from Last.fm

Last.fm has presence in three datacenters in the London area - this is currently more because of necessity than redundancy; datacenter space is at a real premium in the UK and we can’t fulfill our power growth needs at just one site. We operate our own 20 gigabit fibre ring between these, which means we can basically…

8632

Complexity is insecurity

Complexity can be thought of as a type of code smell : It doesn't necessarily imply that there is a problem, but the presence of complexity is very strongly correlated with the presence of security vulnerabilities. In the design and construction of secure systems, it is important to not only consider mistakes which…

8635

Media Temple Hacked

I don’t normally do negative posts about another person or company, but I feel this needs to get out there. A few hours ago I received an email from MediaTemple , where I host several of my clients. It was an automated message informing me that: