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Facebook Announces Messenger Security Features that Don’t Compromise Privacy

May 29, 2020 Ed Gardner 0

Note that this is "announced," so we don’t know when it’s actually going to be implemented. Facebook today announced new features for Messenger that will alert you when messages appear to come from financial scammers or potential child abusers, displaying warnings in the Messenger app that provide tips and suggest you block the offenders. The feature, which Facebook started rolling…

Ramsey Malware

May 18, 2020 Ed Gardner 0

A new malware, called Ramsey, can jump air gaps: ESET said they’ve been able to track down three different versions of the Ramsay malware, one compiled in September 2019 (Ramsay v1), and two others in early and late March 2020 (Ramsay v2.a and v2.b). Each version was different and infected victims through different methods, but at its core, the malware’s…

Malware in Google Apps

May 5, 2020 Ed Gardner 0

Interesting story of malware hidden in Google Apps. This particular campaign is tied to the government of Vietnam. At a remote virtual version of its annual Security Analyst Summit, researchers from the Russian security firm Kaspersky today plan to present research about a hacking campaign they call PhantomLance, in which spies hid malware in the Play Store to target users…

Another Story of Bad 1970s Encryption

April 21, 2020 Ed Gardner 0

This one is from the Netherlands. It seems to be clever cryptanalysis rather than a backdoor. The Dutch intelligence service has been able to read encrypted communications from dozens of countries since the late 1970s thanks to a microchip, according to research by de Volkskrant on Thursday. The Netherlands could eavesdrop on confidential communication from countries such as Iran, Egypt…

On Cyber Warranties

March 26, 2020 Ed Gardner 0

Interesting article discussing cyber-warranties, and whether they are an effective way to transfer risk (as envisioned by Ackerlof’s "market for lemons") or a marketing trick. The conclusion: Warranties must transfer non-negligible amounts of liability to vendors in order to meaningfully overcome the market for lemons. Our preliminary analysis suggests the majority of cyber warranties cover the cost of repairing the…

TSA Admits Liquid Ban Is Security Theater

March 16, 2020 Ed Gardner 0

The TSA is allowing people to bring larger bottles of hand sanitizer with them on airplanes: Passengers will now be allowed to travel with containers of liquid hand sanitizer up to 12 ounces. However, the agency cautioned that the shift could mean slightly longer waits at checkpoint because the containers may have to be screened separately when going through security….

Collating Hacked Data Sets

January 30, 2020 Ed Gardner 0

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…

Google Receives Geofence Warrants

January 28, 2020 Ed Gardner 0

Sometimes it’s hard to tell the corporate surveillance operations from the government ones: Google reportedly has a database called Sensorvault in which it stores location data for millions of devices going back almost a decade. The article is about geofence warrants, where the police go to companies like Google and ask for information about every device in a particular geographic…

Half a Million IoT Device Passwords Published

January 22, 2020 Ed Gardner 0

It’s a list of easy-to-guess passwords for IoT devices on the Internet as recently as last October and November. Useful for anyone putting together a bot network: A hacker has published this week a massive list of Telnet credentials for more than 515,000 servers, home routers, and IoT (Internet of Things) "smart" devices. The list, which was published on a…