Back in October, Bloomberg reported that China has managed to install backdoors into server equipment that ended up in networks belonging to — among others — Apple and Amazon. Pretty much everybody has denied it (including the US DHS and the UK NCSC). Bloomberg has stood by its story — and is still standing by … Read More “That Bloomberg Supply-Chain-Hack Story” »
Category: hacking
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Back in January, we learned about a class of vulnerabilities against microprocessors that leverages various performance and efficiency shortcuts for attack. I wrote that the first two attacks would be just the start: It shouldn’t be surprising that microprocessor designers have been building insecure hardware for 20 years. What’s surprising is that it took 20 … Read More “More Spectre/Meltdown-Like Attacks” »
Interesting policy paper by Third Way: “To Catch a Hacker: Toward a comprehensive strategy to identify, pursue, and punish malicious cyber actors“: In this paper, we argue that the United States currently lacks a comprehensive overarching strategic approach to identify, stop and punish cyberattackers. We show that: There is a burgeoning cybercrime wave: A rising … Read More “How to Punish Cybercriminals” »
This is a long — and somewhat technical — paper by Chris C. Demchak and Yuval Shavitt about China’s repeated hacking of the Internet Border Gateway Protocol (BGP): “China’s Maxim Leave No Access Point Unexploited: The Hidden Story of China Telecom’s BGP Hijacking.” BGP hacking is how large intelligence agencies manipulate Internet routing to … Read More “China’s Hacking of the Border Gateway Protocol” »
Bloomberg has another story about hardware surveillance implants in equipment made in China. This implant is different from the one Bloomberg reported on last week. That story has been denied by pretty much everyone else, but Bloomberg is sticking by its story and its sources. (I linked to other commentary and analysis here.) Again, I … Read More “Another Bloomberg Story about Supply-Chain Hardware Attacks from China” »
If someone has physical access to your locked — but still running — computer, they can probably break the hard drive’s encryption. This is a “cold boot” attack, and one we thought solved. We have not: To carry out the attack, the F-Secure researchers first sought a way to defeat the the industry-standard cold boot … Read More “New Variants of Cold-Boot Attack” »
Some of us — myself included — have proposed lawful government hacking as an alternative to backdoors. A new report from the Center of Internet and Society looks at the security risks of allowing government hacking. They include: Disincentive for vulnerability disclosure Cultivation of a market for surveillance tools Attackers co-opt hacking tools over which … Read More “Security Risks of Government Hacking” »
This is really interesting research: “BlackIoT: IoT Botnet of High Wattage Devices Can Disrupt the Power Grid“: Abstract: We demonstrate that an Internet of Things (IoT) botnet of high wattage devices — such as air conditioners and heaters — gives a unique ability to adversaries to launch large-scale coordinated attacks on the power grid. In … Read More “Using Hacked IoT Devices to Disrupt the Power Grid” »
It’s amazing that this is even possible: “SonarSnoop: Active Acoustic Side-Channel Attacks“: Abstract: We report the first active acoustic side-channel attack. Speakers are used to emit human inaudible acoustic signals and the echo is recorded via microphones, turning the acoustic system of a smart phone into a sonar system. The echo signal can be used … Read More “Using a Smartphone’s Microphone and Speakers to Eavesdrop on Passwords” »
Suprising no one, the security of police bodycams is terrible. Mitchell even realized that because he can remotely access device storage on models like the Fire Cam OnCall, an attacker could potentially plant malware on some of the cameras. Then, when the camera connects to a PC for syncing, it could deliver all sorts of … Read More “Hacking Police Bodycams” »