Best of 2018

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2018. 240 posts.

Security & Privacy
223

How to Block Stingray Devices

Disable 2G On Android To Block Stingray Devices 1) Pull up the phone dialer and dial *#*#4636#*#* (that spells INFO) 2) This brings you to the testing screen, select "Phone/Device information". 3) Scroll down a little to "preferred network type", select the arrow. 4) Change it to LTE/WCDMA Only. It…

237

Reversing a MacOS Kernel Extension

In my last post I covered the basics of kernel debugging in macOS. In this post we will put some of that to use and work through the process of reversing a macOS kernel module. As I said in my last post, in macOS there is a kernel module named “Don’t Steal Mac OS X” (DSMOS) which registers a function with the Mach-O…

240

Tracking Firm LocationSmart Leaked Location Data for Customers of All Major U.S. Mobile Carriers Without Consent in Real Time Via Its Web Site

LocationSmart , a U.S. based company that acts as an aggregator of real-time data about the precise location of mobile phone devices, has been leaking this information to anyone via a buggy component of its Web site — without the need for any password or other form of authentication or authorization — KrebsOnSecurity…