Ross Anderson blogged about his new paper on security and safety concerns about the Internet of Things. (See also this short video.) It’s very much along the lines of what I’ve been writing. Powered by WPeMatico
Month: June 2017
Interesting law-journal article: “Surveillance Intermediaries,” by Alan Z. Rozenshtein. Abstract:Apple’s 2016 fight against a court order commanding it to help the FBI unlock the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino terrorists exemplifies how central the question of regulating government surveillance has become in American politics and law. But scholarly attempts to answer this question … Read More “Surveillance Intermediaries” »
Really interesting research: “Unpacking Spear Phishing Susceptibility,” by Zinaida Benenson, Freya Gassmann, and Robert Landwirth. Abstract: We report the results of a field experiment where we sent to over 1200 university students an email or a Facebook message with a link to (non-existing) party pictures from a non-existing person, and later asked them about the … Read More “Spear Phishing Attacks” »
WikiLeaks is still dumping CIA cyberweapons on the Internet. Its latest dump is something called “Pandemic”: The Pandemic leak does not explain what the CIA’s initial infection vector is, but does describe it as a persistent implant. “As the name suggests, a single computer on a local network with shared drives that is infected with … Read More “CIA’s Pandemic Toolkit” »
There’s lots of video of squid as undersea predators. This is one of the few instances of squid as prey (from a deep submersible in the Pacific): “We saw brittle stars capturing a squid from the water column while it was swimming. I didn’t know that was possible. And then there was a tussle among … Read More “Friday Squid Blogging: Squid as Prey” »
There is plenty of blame to go around for the WannaCry ransomware that spread throughout the Internet earlier this month, disrupting work at hospitals, factories, businesses, and universities. First, there are the writers of the malicious software, which blocks victims’ access to their computers until they pay a fee. Then there are the users who … Read More “WannaCry and Vulnerabilities” »
The password-manager 1Password has just implemented a travel mode that tries to protect users while crossing borders. It doesn’t make much sense. To enable it, you have to create a list of passwords you feel safe traveling with, and then you can turn on the mode that only gives you access to those passwords. But … Read More “Passwords at the Border” »