Wow. It seems they all exploded simultaneously, which means they were triggered. Were they each tampered with physically, or did someone figure out how to trigger a thermal runaway remotely? Supply chain attack? Malicious code update, or natural vulnerability? I have no idea, but I expect we will all learn over the next few days. … Read More “Remotely Exploding Pagers” »
Category: terrorism
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Today is the second day of the fifteenth Workshop on Security and Human Behavior, hosted by Ross Anderson and Alice Hutchings at the University of Cambridge. After two years of having this conference remotely on Zoom, it’s nice to be back together in person. SHB is a small, annual, invitational workshop of people studying various … Read More “Security and Human Behavior (SHB) 2022” »
I feel sorry for the accused: The “security incident” that forced a New-York bound flight to make an emergency landing at LaGuardia Airport on Saturday turned out to be a misunderstanding — after an airline passenger mistook another traveler’s camera for a bomb, sources said Sunday. American Airlines Flight 4817 from Indianapolis — operated by … Read More “Airline Passenger Mistakes Vintage Camera for a Bomb” »
The Washington Post has published a long story on the unlocking of the San Bernardino Terrorist’s iPhone 5C in 2016. We all thought it was an Israeli company called Cellebrite. It was actually an Australian company called Azimuth Security. Azimuth specialized in finding significant vulnerabilities. Dowd, a former IBM X-Force researcher whom one peer called … Read More “Details on the Unlocking of the San Bernardino Terrorist’s iPhone” »
Google’s Project Zero discovered, and caused to be patched, eleven zero-day exploits against Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Windows, and iOS. This seems to have been exploited by “Western government operatives actively conducting a counterterrorism operation”: The exploits, which went back to early 2020 and used never-before-seen techniques, were “watering hole” attacks that used infected websites to … Read More “Google’s Project Zero Finds a Nation-State Zero-Day Operation” »
This is good news: Whenever you visit a website — even if it’s HTTPS enabled — the DNS query that converts the web address into an IP address that computers can read is usually unencrypted. DNS-over-HTTPS, or DoH, encrypts the request so that it can’t be intercepted or hijacked in order to send a user … Read More “Firefox Enables DNS over HTTPS” »
Interesting analysis: “Examining the Anomalies, Explaining the Value: Should the USA FREEDOM Act’s Metadata Program be Extended?” by Susan Landau and Asaf Lubin. Abstract: The telephony metadata program which was authorized under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, remains one of the most controversial programs launched by the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) in the wake … Read More “Evaluating the NSA’s Telephony Metadata Program” »
The French army is going to put together a team of science fiction writers to help imagine future threats. Leaving aside the question of whether science fiction writers are better or worse at envisioning nonfictional futures, this isn’t new. The US Department of Homeland Security did the same thing over a decade ago, and I … Read More “Science Fiction Writers Helping Imagine Future Threats” »
When the next pandemic strikes, we’ll be fighting it on two fronts. The first is the one you immediately think about: understanding the disease, researching a cure and inoculating the population. The second is new, and one you might not have thought much about: fighting the deluge of rumors, misinformation and flat-out lies that will … Read More “Fake News and Pandemics” »
From a G7 meeting of interior ministers in Paris this month, an “outcome document“: Encourage Internet companies to establish lawful access solutions for their products and services, including data that is encrypted, for law enforcement and competent authorities to access digital evidence, when it is removed or hosted on IT servers located abroad or encrypted, … Read More “G7 Comes Out in Favor of Encryption Backdoors” »