I attended the National Restaurant Association exposition in Chicago earlier this year, and looked at all the ways modern restaurant IT is spying on people. But there’s also a fundamentally creepy aspect to much of this. One of the prime ways to increase value for your brand is to use the Internet to practice surveillance … Read More “Me on Restaurant Surveillance Technology” »
In April, the Shadow Brokers — presumably Russia — released a batch of Windows exploits from what is presumably the NSA. Included in that release were eight different Windows vulnerabilities. Given a presumed theft date of the data as sometime between 2012 and 2013 — based on timestamps of the documents and the limited Windows … Read More “Zero-Day Vulnerabilities against Windows in the NSA Tools Released by the Shadow Brokers” »
The Armatix IP1 “smart gun” can only be fired by someone who is wearing a special watch. Unfortunately, this security measure is easily hackable. Powered by WPeMatico
The company that sells the Roomba autonomous vacuum wants to sell the data about your home that it collects. Some questions: What happens if a Roomba user consents to the data collection and later sells his or her home — especially furnished — and now the buyers of the data have a map of a … Read More “Roombas will Spy on You” »
Policy essay: “Encryption Substitutes,” by Andrew Keane Woods: In this short essay, I make a few simple assumptions that bear mentioning at the outset. First, I assume that governments have good and legitimate reasons for getting access to personal data. These include things like controlling crime, fighting terrorism, and regulating territorial borders. Second, I assume … Read More “Alternatives to Government-Mandated Encryption Backdoors” »
The US Army Research Agency is funding research into autonomous bot swarms. From the announcement: The objective of this CRA is to perform enabling basic and applied research to extend the reach, situational awareness, and operational effectiveness of large heterogeneous teams of intelligent systems and Soldiers against dynamic threats in complex and contested environments and … Read More “US Army Researching Bot Swarms” »
The press is reporting a $32M theft of the cryptocurrency Ethereum. Like all such thefts, they’re not a result of a cryptographic failure in the currencies, but instead a software vulnerability in the software surrounding the currency — in this case, digital wallets. This is the second Ethereum hack this week. The first tricked people … Read More “Ethereum Hacks” »
Slashdot asks if password masking — replacing password characters with asterisks as you type them — is on the way out. I don’t know if that’s true, but I would be happy to see it go. Shoulder surfing, the threat is defends against, is largely nonexistent. And it is becoming harder to type in passwords … Read More “Password Masking” »
Humble Bundle is selling a bunch of cybersecurity books very cheaply. You can get copies of Applied Cryptography, Secrets and Lies, and Cryptography Engineering — and also Ross Anderson’s Security Engineering, Adam Shostack’s Threat Modeling, and many others. This is the cheapest you’ll ever see these books. And they’re all DRM-free. Powered by WPeMatico
News from Australia: Under the law, internet companies would have the same obligations telephone companies do to help law enforcement agencies, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said. Law enforcement agencies would need warrants to access the communications. “We’ve got a real problem in that the law enforcement agencies are increasingly unable to find out what terrorists … Read More “Australia Considering New Law Weakening Encryption” »