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Lukasz Olejnik has a good essay on hacking weapons systems.
Basically, there is no reason to believe that software in weapons systems is any more vulnerability free than any other software. So now the question is whether the software can be accessed ov…

It’s not yet very accurate or practical, but under ideal conditions it is possible to figure out the shape of a house key by listening to it being used.

Listen to Your Key: Towards Acoustics-based Physical Key Inference

Abstract: Physical locks are one of the most prevalent mechanisms for securing objects such as doors. While many of these locks are vulnerable to lock-picking, they are still widely used as lock-picking requires specific training with tailored instruments, and easily raises suspicion. In this paper, we propose SpiKey, a novel attack that significantly lowers the bar for an attacker as opposed to the lock-picking attack, by requiring only the use of a smartphone microphone to infer the shape of victim’s key, namely bittings(or cut depths) which form the secret of a key. When a victim inserts his/her key into the lock, the emitted sound is captured by the attacker’s microphone…

A vulnerability in the Accellion file-transfer program is being used by criminal groups to hack networks worldwide.

There’s much in the article about when Accellion knew about the vulnerability, when it alerted its customers, and when it patched its software.

The governor of New Zealand’s central bank, Adrian Orr, says Accellion failed to warn it after first learning in mid-December that the nearly 20-year-old FTA application — using antiquated technology and set for retirement — had been breached.

Despite having a patch available on Dec. 20, Accellion did not notify the bank in time to prevent its appliance from being breached five days later, …

This is a longish video that describes a profitable computer banking scam that’s run out of call centers in places like India. There’s a lot of fluff about glitterbombs and the like, but the details are interesting. The scammers convince the victims to give them remote access to their computers, and then that they’ve mistyped a dollar amount and have received a large refund that they didn’t deserve. Then they convince the victims to send cash to a drop site, where a money mule retrieves it and forwards it to the scammers.

I found it interesting for several reasons. One, it illustrates the complex business nature of the scam: there are a lot of people doing specialized jobs in order for it to work. Two, it clearly shows the psychological manipulation involved, and how it preys on the unsophisticated and vulnerable. And three, it’s an evolving tactic that gets around banks increasingly flagging blocking suspicious electronic transfers…