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Internet of Snitches
Purism makes premium phones, laptops, mini PCs and servers running free software on PureOS. Purism products respect people's privacy and freedom while protecting their security.
Topics /
Security & Privacy
The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 678 posts.
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Gentoo Freenode channels have been hijacked
News and information from Gentoo Linux
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Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship
UPDATE: Apple announced it will provide fully encrypted iCloud backups, meeting a longstanding demand by EFF and other privacy-focused organizations, and it has officially dropped its plans to install photo-scanning software on its devices, which would have inspected users’ private photos in iCloud...
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Brave, the false sensation of privacy
ebin.city is a short 4-character .city domain available for buy. Listed at $100 — secure it before someone else does.
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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?
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Ubiquiti all but confirms breach response iniquity
Last year, I posted a series of articles about a purported “breach” at Ubiquiti. My sole source for that reporting was the person who has since been indicted by federal prosecutors for his alleged wrongdoing – which includes providing false information to the press.
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Try This One Weird Trick Russian Hackers Hate
In a Twitter discussion last week on ransomware attacks, KrebsOnSecurity noted that virtually all ransomware strains have a built-in failsafe designed to cover the backsides of the malware purveyors: They simply will not install on a Microsoft Windows computer that already has one of many types of virtual keyboards…
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Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea
Update, April 9, 2021 : We've launched Am I FLoCed, a new site that will tell you whether your Chrome browser has been turned into a guinea pig for Federated Learning of Cohorts or FLoC, Google’s latest targeted advertising experiment. The third-party cookie is dying, and Google is trying to create...
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ProctorU is dystopian spyware
As part of my MSc, I have to take an online exam. Obviously, this means I am highly likely to cheat by looking up things on Wikipedia or by having a bit of paper with notes on it. EVIL! So, the exam body requires me to install ProctorU. It's a service which lets someone watch you through your laptop camera while you…
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Don’t Wanna Pay Ransom Gangs? Test Your Backups
Browse the comments on virtually any story about a ransomware attack and you will almost surely encounter the view that the victim organization could have avoided paying their extortionists if only they’d had proper data backups. But the ugly truth is there are many non-obvious reasons why victims end up paying even…
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Police can’t demand you reveal your phone passcode then tell a jury you refused
The Utah Supreme Court is the latest stop in EFF’s roving campaign to establish your Fifth Amendment right to refuse to provide your password to law enforcement. Yesterday, along with the ACLU, we filed an amicus brief in State v. Valdez, arguing that the constitutional privilege against self-...
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Opting Your Website Out of Google's FLoC Network
Google recently announced the rollout of their Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), a new advertising-surveillance initiative that seeks to replace third-party cookies with a new user profiling technique that garners data generated by the browser itself.
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We found and fixed a rare race condition in our session handling
On March 8, out of an abundance of caution, we logged all users out of GitHub.com. In this post we share technical details of the vulnerability and steps we're taking to ensure it doesn't happen again.
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What Happened to Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp?
Facebook and its sister properties Instagram and WhatsApp are suffering from ongoing, global outages. We don’t yet know why this happened, but the how is clear: Earlier this morning, something inside Facebook caused the company to revoke key digital records that tell computers and other Internet-enabled devices how to…
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Luca App: CCC calls for a moratorium
Dubious business model, defective software, irregularities in the awarding of contracts: The Chaos Computer Club (CCC) demands an immediate end to states' alimentation of Smudo's million-dollar tax...
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The Invisible JavaScript Backdoor
A few months ago we saw a post on the r/programminghorror subreddit: A developer describes the struggle of identifying a syntax error resulting from an invisible Unicode character hidden in JavaScript source code. This post inspired an idea: What if a backdoor literally cannot be seen and thus evades detection even…
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BitLocker Lockscreen Bypass
BitLocker is a modern data protection feature that is deeply integrated in the Windows kernel. It is used by many corporations as a means of protecting company secrets in case of theft. Microsoft recommends that you have a Trusted Platform Module which can do some of the heavy cryptographic lifting for you.
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The S in IoT is for Security
Purism makes premium phones, laptops, mini PCs and servers running free software on PureOS. Purism products respect people's privacy and freedom while protecting their security.
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The Facebook phone numbers are now searchable in Have I Been Pwned
The headline is pretty self-explanatory so in the interest of time, let me just jump directly into the details of how this all works. There's been huge interest in this incident, and I've seen near-unprecedented traffic to Have I Been Pwned [https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/
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Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses with Equifax
Financial services giant Intuit this week informed 1.4 million small businesses using its QuickBooks Online Payroll and Intuit Online Payroll products that their payroll information will be shared with big-three consumer credit bureau Equifax starting later this year unless customers opt out by the end of this month.
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I hate password rules
The other day, I was creating a new account on the web. It was financial in nature, which means it gets one of my most secure passwords. I used Password Safe to generate this 16-character alphanumeric password: :s^Twd.J;3hzg=Q~ Which was rejected by the site, because it didn’t meet its password security rules. It took…
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An iframe from googlesyndication.com tries to access the camera and microphone
The last thing we want is for an advertising network to access the Camera or Microphone on our computer. But, while looking for something else, I stumbled upon messages in the Safari JavaScript console saying that an iframe loaded from safeframe.googlesyndication.com tried to do exactly that.
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Proposal: Treat FLoC as a security concern
Google is rolling out Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) for the Chrome browser. TL;DR: FLoC places people in groups based on their browsing habits to target advertising. Why is this bad? As the …
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Google results for PHP tutorials contain SQL injection vulnerabilities
Today, out of curiosity, I googled for php mysql email register . This returns tutorials, how-tos, code snippets. Most results include flawed DB statements. This usually means something like
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GitHub blocks FLoC across all of GitHub Pages
All GitHub Pages sites served from the github.io domain will now have a Permissions-Policy: interest-cohort=() header set. Pages sites using a custom domain will not be impacted. Learn more about…
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A Docker footgun led to a vandal deleting NewsBlur's MongoDB database
tl;dr: A vandal deleted NewsBlur’s MongoDB database during a migration. No data was stolen or lost.