Lukasz Olejnik writes about device fingerprinting, and why Google’s policy change to allow it in 2025 is a major privacy setback. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Google Is Allowing Device Fingerprinting
Category: Schneier on Security
Gift Card Fraud
It’s becoming an organized crime tactic: Card draining is when criminals remove gift cards from a store display, open them in a separate location, and either record the card numbers and PINs or replace them with a new barcode. The…
Salt Typhoon’s Reach Continues to Grow
The US government has identified a ninth telecom that was successfully hacked by Salt Typhoon. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Salt Typhoon’s Reach Continues to Grow
Casino Players Using Hidden Cameras for Cheating
The basic strategy is to place a device with a hidden camera in a position to capture normally hidden card values, which are interpreted by an accomplice off-site and fed back to the player via a hidden microphone. Miniaturization is…
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid on Pizza
Pizza Hut in Taiwan has a history of weird pizzas, including a “2022 scalloped pizza with Oreos around the edge, and deep-fried chicken and calamari studded throughout the middle.” Blog moderation policy. This article has been indexed from Schneier on…
Scams Based on Fake Google Emails
Scammers are hacking Google Forms to send email to victims that come from google.com. Brian Krebs reports on the effects. Boing Boing post. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Scams Based on Fake…
Spyware Maker NSO Group Found Liable for Hacking WhatsApp
A judge has found that NSO Group, maker of the Pegasus spyware, has violated the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by hacking WhatsApp in order to spy on people using it. Jon Penney and I wrote a legal paper…
Criminal Complaint against LockBit Ransomware Writer
The Justice Department has published the criminal complaint against Dmitry Khoroshev, for building and maintaining the LockBit ransomware. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Criminal Complaint against LockBit Ransomware Writer
Mailbox Insecurity
It turns out that all cluster mailboxes in the Denver area have the same master key. So if someone robs a postal carrier, they can open any mailbox. I get that a single master key makes the whole system easier,…
New Advances in the Understanding of Prime Numbers
Really interesting research into the structure of prime numbers. Not immediately related to the cryptanalysis of prime-number-based public-key algorithms, but every little bit matters. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: New Advances in…
Hacking Digital License Plates
Not everything needs to be digital and “smart.” License plates, for example: Josep Rodriguez, a researcher at security firm IOActive, has revealed a technique to “jailbreak” digital license plates sold by Reviver, the leading vendor of those plates in the…
Short-Lived Certificates Coming to Let’s Encrypt
Starting next year: Our longstanding offering won’t fundamentally change next year, but we are going to introduce a new offering that’s a big shift from anything we’ve done before—short-lived certificates. Specifically, certificates with a lifetime of six days. This is…
Upcoming Speaking Events
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at a joint meeting of the Boston Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM, in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, at 7:00 PM ET on…
Ultralytics Supply-Chain Attack
Last week, we saw a supply-chain attack against the Ultralytics AI library on GitHub. A quick summary: On December 4, a malicious version 8.3.41 of the popular AI library ultralytics —which has almost 60 million downloads—was published to the Python…
Jailbreaking LLM-Controlled Robots
Surprising no one, it’s easy to trick an LLM-controlled robot into ignoring its safety instructions. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Jailbreaking LLM-Controlled Robots
Full-Face Masks to Frustrate Identification
This is going to be interesting. It’s a video of someone trying on a variety of printed full-face masks. They won’t fool anyone for long, but will survive casual scrutiny. And they’re cheap and easy to swap. This article has…
Trust Issues in AI
For a technology that seems startling in its modernity, AI sure has a long history. Google Translate, OpenAI chatbots, and Meta AI image generators are built on decades of advancements in linguistics, signal processing, statistics, and other fields going back…
Friday Squid Blogging: Safe Quick Undercarriage Immobilization Device
Fifteen years ago I blogged about a different SQUID. Here’s an update: Fleeing drivers are a common problem for law enforcement. They just won’t stop unless persuaded—persuaded by bullets, barriers, spikes, or snares. Each option is risky business. Shooting up…
Detecting Pegasus Infections
This tool seems to do a pretty good job. The company’s Mobile Threat Hunting feature uses a combination of malware signature-based detection, heuristics, and machine learning to look for anomalies in iOS and Android device activity or telltale signs of…
AI and the 2024 Elections
It’s been the biggest year for elections in human history: 2024 is a “super-cycle” year in which 3.7 billion eligible voters in 72 countries had the chance to go the polls. These are also the first AI elections, where many…