News

Joker’s Stash, by some accounts the largest underground shop for selling stolen credit card and identity data, says it’s closing up shop effective mid-February 2021. The announcement came on the heels of a turbulent year for the major cybercrime store, and just weeks after U.S. and European authorities seized a number of its servers.

For a limited time, I am selling signed copies of Click Here to Kill Everybody in hardcover for just $6, plus shipping.

Note that I have had occasional problems with international shipping. The book just disappears somewhere in the process. At this price, international orders are at the buyer’s risk. Also, the USPS keeps reminding us that shipping — both US and international — may be delayed during the pandemic.

I have 500 copies of the book available. When they’re gone, the sale is over and the price will revert to normal.

Order here.

EDITED TO ADD: I was able to get another 500 from the publisher, since the first 500 sold out so quickly…

We all know that our cell phones constantly give our location away to our mobile network operators; that’s how they work. A group of researchers has figured out a way to fix that. “Pretty Good Phone Privacy” (PGPP) protects both user identity and user location using the existing cellular networks. It protects users from fake cell phone towers (IMSI-catchers) and surveillance by cell providers.

It’s a clever system. The players are the user, a traditional mobile network operator (MNO) like AT&T or Verizon, and a new mobile virtual network operator (MVNO). MVNOs aren’t new. They’re intermediaries like Cricket and Boost…

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

• I’m speaking (online) as part of Western Washington University’s Internet Studies Lecture Series on January 20, 2021.
• I’m speaking at ITY Denmark on February 2, 2021. Details to come.
• I’m being interviewed by Keith Cronin as part of The Center for Innovation, Security, and New Technology’s CSINT Conversations series, February 10, 2021 from 11:00 AM – 11:30 AM CST.
• I’ll be speaking at an Informa event on February 28, 2021. Details to come.

The list is maintained on this page…

Security researcher Ahmed Hassan has shown that spoofing the Android’s “People Nearby” feature allows him to pinpoint the physical location of Telegram users:

Using readily available software and a rooted Android device, he’s able to spoof the location his device reports to Telegram servers. By using just three different locations and measuring the corresponding distance reported by People Nearby, he is able to pinpoint a user’s precise location.

[…]

A proof-of-concept video the researcher sent to Telegram showed how he could discern the address of a People Nearby user when he used a free GPS spoofing app to make his phone report just three different locations. He then drew a circle around each of the three locations with a radius of the distance reported by Telegram. The user’s precise location was where all three intersected…