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Secure Boot and the 2018 MacBook Pro
the vent for my mind
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Three Charged in Fatal Kansas ‘Swatting’ Attack
Federal prosecutors have charged three men with carrying out a deadly hoax known as “swatting,” in which perpetrators call or message a target’s local 911 operators claiming a fake hostage situation or a bomb threat in progress at the target’s address — with the expectation that local police may respond to the scene…
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Finding and exploiting hidden features of Animal Crossing's NES emulator
While looking for ways to activate the developer menus left over in Animal Crossing, including the NES emulator game selection menu, I found an interesting feature that exists in the original game that was always active, but never used by Nintendo. In addition to the NES/Famicom games that can be obtained in-game, it…
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Pwned Passwords in Practice: Real World Examples of Blocking the Worst Passwords
Back in August, I pushed out a service as part of Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) to help organisations block bad passwords from their online things. I called it "Pwned Passwords" and released 320M of them from real-world data breaches [https://www.troyhunt.com/introducing-306-
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Microsoft disables Windows Update when Meltdown/Spectre registry key isn't set
Last week, Microsoft issued January’s cumulative security fixes for January 2018. Although the media focus has been around “Meltdown” and…
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The 600+ Companies PayPal Shares Your Data With
One of the effects of GDPR—the new EU General Data Protection Regulation—is that we’re all going to be learning a lot more about who collects our data and what they do with it. Consider PayPal, that just released a list of over 600 companies they share customer data with. Here’s a good visualization of that data. Is…
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Extended Validation Certificates Are Dead
That's it - I'm calling it - extended validation certificates are dead. Sure, you can still buy them (and there are companies out there that would just love to sell them to you!), but their usefulness has now descended from "barely there" to "as good as non-existent". This change
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How Ethereum can be stolen through DNS rebinding
The Post has been moved here
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OkCupid's “Removed” Visitor API
A blog about programming, the tech industry, and tech education.
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Vectorized Emulation: fuzzing at 2 trillion instructions per second
This is the introduction of a multipart series. It is to give a high level overview without really deeply diving into any individual component.
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Reverse engineering Animal Crossing's developer mode
Last summer I began reverse engineering Animal Crossing for the GameCube to explore the possibility of creating mods for the game. I also wanted to document the process to create tutorials for people interested in ROM hacking and reverse engineering. In this post I explore the developer debugging features that are…
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Vendors, Disclosure, and a bit of WebUSB Madness
Update 2018-06-19: Yubico updated their statement on 2018-06-18, apologizing and crediting us: https://twitter.com/Yubico/status/1008816076610625536
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Making Light of the “Dark Web”
I'll start this post where I start many of my talks - what does a hacker look like? Or perhaps more specifically, what do people think a hacker looks like? It's probably a scary image, one that's a bit mysterious, a shady character lurking in the hidden depths
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The Power to Revoke Lies with the Certificate Authority
For those that read my blog often you may have seen me talk about EV certificates before. From a technical perspective there are many things that I don't agree with about EV certificates and from a non-technical perspective there are many things I don't like about the
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APFS encrypted plaintext password found in another log file
UPDATE: PLEASE HELP ME TEST At some point you just need to stop looking and be blissfully ignorant...this was not one of those days. In and update to my previously updated blog article , I have found another instance where the plaintext password was written to system logs. Thi
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Someone used my IPFS gateway for phishing
At 02:43 this morning, I received an abuse complaint email. It was sent by PhishLabs to DigitalOcean, and DigitalOcean forwarded it to me.
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Half of All Phishing Sites Now Have the Padlock
Maybe you were once advised to “look for the padlock” as a means of telling legitimate e-commerce sites from phishing or malware traps. Unfortunately, this has never been more useless advice. New research indicates that half of all phishing scams are now hosted on Web sites whose Internet address includes the padlock…
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E-Mail Leaves an Evidence Trail
If you’re going to commit an illegal act, it’s best not to discuss it in e-mail. It’s also best to Google tech instructions rather than asking someone else to do it: One new detail from the indictment, however, points to just how unsophisticated Manafort seems to have been. Here’s the relevant passage from the…
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Spectre Mitigations in Microsoft's C/C++ Compiler
This form of Spectre can be used to attack a broad range of software -- operating systems, device drivers, web APIs, database systems, and almost anything else that receives untrusted input and may run on the same computer as untrusted code. Because large programs can contain literally millions of conditional branches…
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HTTPS in the real world
In cryptography, trust is mathematically provable. Everything else is just faith.
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Dropbear SSH, a lightweight alternative to OpenSSH
Dropbear is a small and lightweight SSH server and client that can replace OpenSSH on any POSIX platform such as GNU / Linux, * BSD, Cygwin … Dropbear is free software since it is released under MIT-style licenses.
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Attack of the Week: Group Messaging in WhatsApp and Signal
If you’ve read this blog before, you know that secure messaging is one of my favorite topics. However, recently I’ve been a bit disappointed. My sadness comes from the fact that lately …
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