News

Booter Boss Busted By Bacon Pizza Buy

A Pennsylvania man who operated one of the Internet’s longest-running online attack-for-hire or “booter” services was sentenced to five years probation today. While the young man’s punishment was heavily tempered by his current poor health, the defendant’s dietary choices may have contributed to both his capture and the lenient sentencing: Investigators say the onetime booter boss’s identity became clear after he ordered a bacon and chicken pizza delivered to his home using the same email address he originally used to register his criminal attack service.

New Research on the Adtech Industry

The Norwegian Consumer Council has published an extensive report about how the adtech industry violates consumer privacy. At the same time, it is filing three legal complaints against six companies in this space. From a Twitter summary: 1. [thread] We are filing legal complaints against six companies based on our research, revealing systematic breaches to privacy, by shadowy #OutOfControl #adtech…

Attacking Driverless Cars with Projected Images

Interesting research — "Phantom Attacks Against Advanced Driving Assistance Systems": Abstract: The absence of deployed vehicular communication systems, which prevents the advanced driving assistance systems (ADASs) and autopilots of semi/fully autonomous cars to validate their virtual perception regarding the physical environment surrounding the car with a third party, has been exploited in various attacks suggested by researchers. Since the application…

Iowa Prosecutors Drop Charges Against Men Hired to Test Their Security

On Sept. 11, 2019, two security experts at a company that had been hired by the state of Iowa to test the physical and network security of its judicial system were arrested while probing the security of an Iowa county courthouse, jailed in orange jumpsuits, charged with burglary, and held on $100,000 bail. On Thursday Jan. 30, prosecutors in Iowa announced they had dropped the criminal charges. The news came while KrebsOnSecurity was conducting a video interview with the two accused (featured below).

NSA Security Awareness Posters

From a FOIA request, over a hundred old NSA security awareness posters. Here are the BBC’s favorites. Here are Motherboard’s favorites. I have a related personal story. Back in 1993, during the first Crypto Wars, I and a handful of other academic cryptographers visited the NSA for some meeting or another. These sorts of security awareness posters were everywhere, but…

U.S. Department of Interior Grounding All Drones

The Department of Interior is grounding all non-emergency drones due to security concerns: The order comes amid a spate of warnings and bans at multiple government agencies, including the Department of Defense, about possible vulnerabilities in Chinese-made drone systems that could be allowing Beijing to conduct espionage. The Army banned the use of Chinese-made DJI drones three years ago following…

Collating Hacked Data Sets

Two Harvard undergraduates completed a project where they went out on the Dark Web and found a bunch of stolen datasets. Then they correlated all the information, and then combined it with additional, publicly available information. No surprise: the result was much more detailed and personal. "What we were able to do is alarming because we can now find vulnerabilities…

Customer Tracking at Ralphs Grocery Store

To comply with California’s new data privacy law, companies that collect information on consumers and users are forced to be more transparent about it. Sometimes the results are creepy. Here’s an article about Ralphs, a California supermarket chain owned by Kroger: …the form proceeds to state that, as part of signing up for a rewards card, Ralphs "may collect" information…