Understanding the ginormous Philippines data breach
Remember when OPM got breached last year [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management_data_breach]? There was a lot of excitement in various parts of the world (namely the US) because here we had a government department (Office of Personnel Management), and they’d just lost 21.
An Open Letter to Members of the W3C Advisory Committee
Dear member of the World Wide Web Consortium's Advisory Committee, You may have heard that over the past year we've been trying to insert legal safeguards into the Encrypted Media Extensions project at the W3C, which standardizes streaming video DRM. We've previously been opposed to the W3C...
Obtaining Wildcard SSL Certificates from Comodo via Dangling Markup Injection
A Hacker's Blog of Unintended Use and Insomnia.
EC2's most dangerous feature
A review for readers unfamiliar with this feature: Amazon IAM ( Identity and Access Management ) is a service which allows for the creation of access credentials which are limited in scope; for example, you can have keys which can read objects from Amazon S3 but cannot write any objects. IAM Roles for EC2 are a…
Secret Court Takes Another Bite Out of the Fourth Amendment
Defenders of the NSA's mass spying have lost an important talking point: that the erosion of our privacy and associational rights is justified given the focus of surveillance efforts on combating terrorism and protecting the national security. That argument has always been dubious for a number of...
My Priorities for the Next Four Years
Like many, I was surprised and shocked by the election of Donald Trump as president. I believe his ideas, temperament, and inexperience represent a grave threat to our country and world. Suddenly, all the things I had planned to work on seemed trivial in comparison. Although Internet security and privacy are not the…
HIPAA 101 for Software Development Teams
Everything you need to know about HIPAA compliance, from the basics to infrastructure requirements to building with AI.
Counterfeit Macbook charger teardown: convincing outside but dangerous inside
What's inside a counterfeit Macbook charger? After my Macbook charger teardown , a reader sent me a charger he suspected was counterfeit. ...
Why Forcing Apple to Write and Sign Code Violates the First Amendment
EFF filed an amicus brief today in support of Apple's fight against a court order compelling the company to create specific software to enable the government to break into an iPhone. The brief is written on behalf of 46 prominent technologists, security researchers, and cryptographers who develop...
StartEncrypt considered harmful today
Inzichten over cybersecurity trends, threat intelligence, compliance-updates en technische verdiepingen van het DEFION-team.
Launching Our Crowdfunding Campaign
Today we kicked off our first crowdfunding campaign with the goal of raising enough funds to cover about one month of our operations - $200,000. That amount covers the operational and engineering staff, the hardware and the software, and general operating expenses needed to securely and reliably issue and manage many…
How to Generate Secure Random Numbers in Various Programming Languages
This blog post will maintain the industry best practices for securely generating random data in Ruby, Node.js, Java, etc.
Why NSA Surveillance Scares Me
Nothing To Hide explains why you should care about surveillance even though you have nothing to hide. But it missed the point that most con...
AWS Organizations: Centrally Manage Multiple AWS Accounts
Today, AWS launched AWS Organizations: a new way for you to centrally manage all the AWS accounts your organization owns. Now you can arrange your AWS accounts into groups called organizational units (OUs) and apply policies to OUs or directly to accounts. For example, you can organize your accounts by application…
How Police Officers Seize Cash from Innocent Americans
Under civil forfeiture laws, police officers can take money from people with no proof of any wrongdoing, and without filing criminal charges. How does this work, and what happens to the money?
Cracking the Adventure Time cipher
I recently read “Adventure Time: Volume 1”, a comic book based on the smart animated series of the same name. In the comic, I found some odd looking messages at the …
To Know If the Election Was Hacked, Look at the Ballots
You may have read at NYMag that I’ve been in discussions with the Clinton campaign about whether it might wish to seek recounts in critical…
European Union dedicated questionnaire on the Encryption of Data
On both sides of Atlantic the debate around strong cryptography frequently resurfaces. Proponents of weakening cryptography or introduction of backdoors (or "golden keys") cite national security. Technologists and activists oppose such proposals, citing freedoms and cybersecurity. Regulating cryptography is of course…
ZCash (formerly Zerocash/Zerocoin) technology preview
I’m extremely happy to announce the Zcash project. Zcash (formerly “Zerocash”/“Zerocoin”) is a project to create a new currency for the Internet, inspired by Bitcoin. Bitcoin is an amazing and complex…
Alert: NPM modules hijacked
<p><strong>EDIT : User @nj48 appears to <a href="https://twitter.com/seldo/status/712673227630313472">have no malicious intentions</a>.</strong></p>
NSA Hacked French President’s House
“Keith Alexander (Director of the NSA) told me he was disappointed because he never thought we would detect them and he even added: You guys are good.” Bernard Barbier French newspaper …
Reducing Adobe Flash Usage in Firefox
Browser plugins, especially Flash, have enabled some of our favorite experiences on the Web, including videos and interactive content. But plugins often introduce stability, performance, and security issues for browsers. ...