Another Side-Channel Attack on PC Encryption

New paper: "Physical Key Extraction Attacks on PCs," by Daniel Genkin, Lev Pachmanov, Itamar Pipman, Adi Shamir, and Eran Tromer.

How Cerber's Hash Factory Works

Recently I saw a story on SecurityWeek about how the Cerber ransomware morphs every 15 seconds (each download results in a file with a new has)…

How Cerber’s Hash Factory Works

Recently I saw a story on SecurityWeek about how the Cerber ransomware morphs every 15 seconds (each download results in a file with a new hash)…

Hijacking the PC Update Process

There's a new report on security vulnerabilities in the PC initialization/update process, allowing someone to hijack it to install malware: One of…

Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Mechanical Squid

It's beautiful, from the Maker Faire Bay Area 2016....

Security and Human Behavior (SHB 2016)

Earlier this week, I was at the ninth Workshop on Security and Human Behavior, hosted at Harvard University.

Stuxnet-Like Malware Discovered

There's a new piece of malware called Irongate, which is obviously inspired by Stuxnet. We don't know who is responsible for it. Slashdot thread....

Lockpicking Competitions in the 1950s

Stealth Falcon: New Malware from (Probably) the UAE

Citizen Lab has the details: This report describes a campaign of targeted spyware attacks carried out by a sophisticated operator, which we call…

The Fallibility of DNA Evidence

This is a good summary article on the fallibility of DNA evidence.

Infosec Without a Degree

I've seen plenty blogs from people who got into infosec through the academic route, so i figured I'd cover the other side and try to answer the three…

Arresting People for Walking Away from Airport Security

A proposed law in Albany, NY, would make it a crime to walk away from airport screening.

Digital Forensics – NTFS INDX and Journaling

Let’s continue our digital forensics journey and start where we left off.

Identifying People from their Driving Patterns

People can be identified from their "driver fingerprint": ...

Friday Squid Blogging: More Squids

This research paper shows that the number of squids, and the number of cephalopods in general, has been steadily increasing over the past 60 years…

Skein in FreeBSD

The Skein hash function is now part of FreeBSD....

The Unfalsifiability of Security Claims

Interesting research paper: Cormac Herley, "Unfalsifiability of security claims: There is an inherent asymmetry in computer security: things can be…

Suckfly

Suckfly seems to be another Chinese nation-state espionage tool, first stealing South Korean certificates and now attacking Indian networks.

Companies Not Saving Your Data

There's a new trend in Silicon Valley startups; companies are not collecting and saving data on their customers: In Silicon Valley, there's a new…

Should You Be Allowed to Prevent Drones from Flying Over Your Property?

Good debate in the Wall Street Journal. This isn't an obvious one; there are good arguments on both sides....

Digital Forensics – DLL Search Order

Following our series of posts on Digital Forensics we will continue our journey about analyzing our compromised system.

GCHQ Discloses Two OS X Vulnerabilities to Apple

This is good news: Communications and Electronics Security Group (CESG), the information security arm of GCHQ, was credited with the discovery of two…

Google Moving Forward on Automatic Logins

Google is trying to bring this to Android developers by the end of the year: Today, secure logins -- like those used by banks or in the enterprise…

State of Online Tracking

Really interesting research: "Online tracking: A 1-million-site measurement and analysis," by Steven Englehardt and Arvind Narayanan: Abstract: We…

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Kite

Video. Plus an octopus kite, with another squid kite in the background.

Detecting Explosives

Really interesting article on the difficulties involved with explosive detection at airport security checkpoints.

Dridex Updates Payload Distribution

Dridex spreads mainly using Office documents containing malicious macros, initially the primary stage would involve using VBA (Visual Basic for…

Identifying People from Their Metadata

Jonathan Mayer, Patrick Mutchler, and John C. Mitchell, "Evaluating the privacy properties of telephone metadata": Abstract: Since 2013, a stream of…

Digital Forensics – ShimCache Artifacts

Following our last article about the Prefetch artifacts we will now move into the Windows Registry.

Primitive Food Crops and Security

Economists argue that the security needs of various crops are the cause of civilization size: The argument depends on the differences between how…

More NSA Documents from the Snowden Archive

The Intercept is starting to publish a lot more documents. Yesterday they published the first year of an internal newsletter called SIDtoday, along…

Unforeseen Costs of Security Training

At the last match of the year for Manchester United, someone found a bomb in a toilet, and security evacuated all 75,000 people and canceled the…

Digital Forensics – Prefetch Artifacts

It has been a while since my last post on digital forensics about an investigation on a Windows host. But it’s never too late to start where we left.

Defeating a Tamper-Proof Bottle

Here's an interesting case of doctored urine-test samples from the Sochi Olympics.

Friday Squid Blogging: Counterfeit Squid

Goya is facing a $5 million lawsuit; the plaintiff is claiming its canned octopus is really squid.

Scam or Satire?