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Security & Privacy

The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 8,768 posts.

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2947

Anatomy of a Scam

There is a lot of material about the not-so-nice VCs who take advantage of young and inexperienced founders. But the reverse also happens, founders that try to get money out of VCs for projects that have zero chance of every coming to fruit. Or worse still, founders that pretend to have something on the go when they…

2949

The woes of sanitizing SVGs

Scratch has a long history of SVG-related vulnerabilities. The source of these is that Scratch parses user-generated (ie. attacker-controlled) content into an <svg> element and appends it into the main document for various operations (eg. measuring SVG bounding box in a more reliable way than viewbox or width/height).

2951

Norton 360 Now Comes with a Cryptominer

Norton 360 , one of the most popular antivirus products on the market today, has installed a cryptocurrency mining program on its customers’ computers. Norton’s parent firm says the cloud-based service that activates the program and allows customers to profit from the scheme — in which the company keeps 15 percent of…

2952

How hard can generating 1024-bit primes be?

On the one hand they are easy to explain, they are just numbers that have no factors other than one and themselves, but on the other hand they contain endless complexity. They show up in numerous places, ranging from mathematical concepts and conjectures to interesting looking visualizations and cryptography…

2956

CPU Backdoors

It's generally accepted that any piece of software could be compromised with a backdoor. Prominent examples include the Sony/BMG installer , which had a backdoor built-in to allow Sony to keep users from copying the CD, which also allowed malicious third-parties to take over any machine with the software installed…

2958

In Memoriam: John L. Young, Cryptome Co-Founder

John L. Young, who died March 28 at age 89 in New York City, was among the first people to see the need for an online library of official secrets, a place where the public could find out things that governments and corporations didn’t want them to know. He made real the idea – revolutionary in its...

2970

CISA tries to contain data leak

Lawmakers in both houses of Congress are demanding answers from the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) after KrebsOnSecurity reported this week that a CISA contractor intentionally published AWS GovCloud keys and a vast trove of other agency secrets on a public GitHub account. The inquiry comes…