Sad story of someone whose computer became owned by a griefer: The trouble began last year when he noticed strange things happening: files went missing from his computer; his Facebook picture was changed; and texts from his daughter didn’t reach him or arrived changed. “Nobody believed me,” says Gary. “My wife and my brother thought … Read More “Separating the Paranoid from the Hacked” »
Category: passwords
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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” »
A decade ago, I wrote about the death of ephemeral conversation. As computers were becoming ubiquitous, some unintended changes happened, too. Before computers, what we said disappeared once we’d said it. Neither face-to-face conversations nor telephone conversations were routinely recorded. A permanent communication was something different and special; we called it correspondence. The Internet changed … Read More “Defense Against Doxing” »
In this impressive social-engineering display, a hacker convinces a cell phone tech-support person to change an account password without being verified in any way. Powered by WPeMatico
According to a Harris poll, 39% of Americans would give up sex for a year in exchange for perfect computer security: According to an online survey among over 2,000 U.S. adults conducted by Harris Poll on behalf of Dashlane, the leader in online identity and password management, nearly four in ten Americans (39%) would sacrifice … Read More “Dumb Security Survey Questions” »
This is impressive research: “When CSI Meets Public WiFi: Inferring Your Mobile Phone Password via WiFi Signals“: Abstract: In this study, we present WindTalker, a novel and practical keystroke inference framework that allows an attacker to infer the sensitive keystrokes on a mobile device through WiFi-based side-channel information. WindTalker is motivated from the observation that … Read More “Using Wi-Fi to Detect Hand Motions and Steal Passwords” »
Interesting data and analysis. Powered by WPeMatico
Every few years, a researcher replicates a security study by littering USB sticks around an organization’s grounds and waiting to see how many people pick them up and plug them in, causing the autorun function to install innocuous malware on their computers. These studies are great for making security professionals feel superior. The researchers get … Read More “Security Design: Stop Trying to Fix the User” »
Remember the San Bernardino killer’s iPhone, and how the FBI maintained that they couldn’t get the encryption key without Apple providing them with a universal backdoor? Many of us computer-security experts said that they were wrong, and there were several possible techniques they could use. One of them was manually removing the flash chip from … Read More “Recovering an iPhone 5c Passcode” »
This is interesting research: “Keystroke Recognition Using WiFi Signals.” Basically, the user’s hand positions as they type distorts the Wi-Fi signal in predictable ways. Abstract: Keystroke privacy is critical for ensuring the security of computer systems and the privacy of human users as what being typed could be passwords or privacy sensitive information. In this … Read More “Keystroke Recognition from Wi-Fi Distortion” »