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NSO Group Hacked
NSO Group, the Israeli cyberweapons arms manufacturer behind the Pegasus spyware—used by authoritarian regimes around the world to spy on dissidents, journalists, human rights workers, and others—was hacked. Or, at least, an enormous trove of documents was leaked to journalists. There’s a lot to read out there…
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Microsoft Patches Six Zero-Day Security Holes
Microsoft today released another round of security updates for Windows operating systems and supported software, including fixes for six zero-day bugs that malicious hackers already are exploiting in active attacks.
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How does one get hired by a top cybercrime gang?
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) last week announced the arrest of a 55-year-old Latvian woman who’s alleged to have worked as a programmer for Trickbot , a malware-as-a-service platform responsible for infecting millions of computers and seeding many of those systems with ransomware.
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Scanning your iPhone for Pegasus
Scan your iPhone for NSO Group's Pegasus malware using Mobile Verification Toolkit (MVT) by Amnesty International
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The Fraud Supply Chain
Fraud is largely conducted by professionals operating in specialized firms, which have their own ecosystem of evil.
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Avoid Consumer Routers
Consumer Routers are not secure
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Your face is not a bar code: arguments against automatic face recognition (2001)
An abridged version of this article appeared in Whole Earth 106, Winter 2001, pages 74-77.
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Autofill in password managers can allow login credentials to be stolen
Security Researcher | Ethical Hacker | Web Application Security
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Guide to Firefox Containers (2018)
Containers allow for cookies (a small file used for storing information) as well as other relevant files to be isolated either independently or collectively as a group (for example you could have a finance container). Isolating cookies inside of containers prevents other sites from being able to access them, thus…
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Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA replacement with FIDO2/WebAuthn is a bad idea
Disclaimer: Thoughts expressed here are my own, and not of my employers.
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Building a Curve25519 Hardware Accelerator
Note: this post uses a $\LaTeX$ plugin to render math symbols. It may require a desktop browser for the full experience…
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Tracking the WhatsApp habits of random smartphones
Scaling the WhatsApp online-status hack from a single contact to 5000 random phone numbers — what the data says about phone usage habits.
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macOS Zero-Day Used Against Hong-Kong Activists
Google researchers discovered a MacOS zero-day exploit being used against Hong Kong activists. It was a “watering hole” attack, which means the malware was hidden in a legitimate website. Users visiting that website would get infected. From an article: Google’s researchers were able to trigger the exploits and study…
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Can We Stop Pretending SMS Is Secure Now?
SMS text messages were already the weakest link securing just about anything online, mainly because there are tens of thousands of employees at mobile stores who can be tricked or bribed into swapping control over a mobile phone number to someone else. Now we’re learning about an entire ecosystem of companies that…
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Remote Code Execution Found in CocoaPods
tl;dr CocoaPods is a popular package manager used by lots of iOS apps (among other Swift and Objective-C Cocoa applications). I found a remote code execution...
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Gab Has Been Breached
I've investigated hundreds of data breaches over the years (there are 514 of them in Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] as I write this), and for the most part, the situation with Gab is just another day on the internet. But Gab is also different, having grown
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Do not use redirection characters in your shell prompt
Over the years of troubleshooting performance problems in the Unix/Linux world, I have seen multiple cases where a regularly used command line tool in a customer server just stops working for some reason. The tool just returns immediately, doing absolutely nothing. No output printed, no coredumps and the exit code is…
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Abusing the Chromium Devtools Scope Pane
tl;dr — Abusing the Chromium Devtools Scope Pane to track debugging of specific javascript functions
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Encrypted Backup Shootout
Recently I have been spending time on improving the performance of bupstash (my encrypted backup tool), and wanted to compare it to some existing tools to try and find its relative performance in the backup tool landscape.
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European Parliament Voted to Ban Remote Biometric Surveillance
It’s not actually banned in the EU yet—the legislative process is much more complicated than that—but it’s a step: a total ban on biometric mass surveillance. To respect “privacy and human dignity,” MEPs said that EU lawmakers should pass a permanent ban on the automated recognition of individuals in public spaces…
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WhatsApp and most alternatives share the same problem
Shall I migrate to Signal, Threema or Telegram? No, because they all have — WhatsApp included — the same problem: They are walled gardens. Imagine a world where for each mail recipient using a separate domain, I would need separate mail client? Or in other words: Gmail users can only communicate with Gmail users…
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Black Hat Exploits of the Stupid-Easy 80s
I'm not saying there was no computer security in the 1980's but, wait... Yes. Yes I am.