We are living in 1984 (ETERNALBLUE)
In the book 1984, the protagonist questions his sanity, because his memory differs from what appears to be everybody else's memory.The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had...
Review: Perlroth’s book on the cyberarms market
New York Times reporter Nicole Perlroth has written a book on zero-days and nation-state hacking entitled “This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends”. Here is my review.I’m not sure what the book intends to be. The blurbs...
No, 1,000 engineers were not needed for SolarWinds
Microsoft estimates it would take 1,000 to carry out the famous SolarWinds hacker attacks. This means in reality that it was probably fewer than 100 skilled engineers. I base this claim on the following Tweet:<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none" data-dnt="true"><p lang="en"...
The deal with DMCA 1201 reform
There are two fights in Congress now against the DMCA, the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act". One is over Section 512 covering "takedowns" on the web. The other is over Section 1201 covering "reverse engineering", which weakens cybersecurity.Even before digital...
Why Biden: Principle over Party
There exist many #NeverTrump Republicans who agree that while Trump would best achieve their Party's policies, that he must nonetheless be opposed on Principle. The Principle at question isn't that Trump is a liar, a misogynist, a racist, or...
No, that’s not how warrantee expiration works
The NYPost Hunter Biden story has triggered a lot of sleuths obsessing on technical details trying to prove it's a hoax. So far, these claims are wrong. The story is certainly bad journalism aiming to misinform readers, but it...
No, font errors mean nothing in that NYPost article
The NYPost has an article on Hunter Biden emails. Critics claim that these don't look like emails, and that there are errors with the fonts, thus showing they are forgeries. This is false. This is how Apple's "Mail" app...
Yes, we can validate leaked emails
When emails leak, we can know whether they are authenticate or forged. It's the first question we should ask of today's leak of emails of Hunter Biden. It has a definitive answer.Today's emails have "cryptographic signatures" inside the metadata. Such signatures...
Factcheck: Regeneron’s use of embryonic stem cells
This week, Trump's opponents misunderstood a Regeneron press release to conclude that the REG-COV2 treatment (which may have saved his life) was created from stem cells. When that was proven false, his opponents nonetheless deliberately misinterpreted events to conclude...
Cliché: Security through obscurity (yet again)
Infosec is a largely non-technical field. People learn a topic only as far as they need to regurgitate the right answer on a certification test. Over time, they start to believe misconceptions about that topic that they never learned....
How CEOs think
Recently, Twitter was hacked. CEOs who read about this in the news ask how they can protect themselves from similar threats. The following tweet expresses our frustration with CEOs, that they don't listen to their own people, but instead...
In defense of open debate
Recently, Harper's published a Letter on Justice and Open Debate. It's a rather boring defense of liberalism and the norm of tolerating differing points of view. Mike Masnick wrote rebuttal on Techdirt. In this post, I'm going to rebut his rebuttal,...
Apple ARM Mac rumors
The latest rumor is that Apple is going to announce Macintoshes based on ARM processors at their developer conference. I thought I'd write up some perspectives on this.It's different this timeThis would be Apple's fourth transition. Their original Macintoshes...
What is Boolean?
My mother asks the following question, so I'm writing up a blogpost in response.I am watching a George Boole bio on Prime but still don’t get it.I started watching the first few minutes of the "Genius of George Boole"...
Securing work-at-home apps
In today's post, I answer the following question:Our customer's employees are now using our corporate application while working from home. They are concerned about security, protecting their trade secrets. What security feature can we add for these customers?The tl;dr...
Search crimes – how the Gootkit gang poisons Google searches
When a search result looks too good to be true - it IS too good to be true!
Dairy Giant Lactalis Targeted by Hackers
France-based dairy giant Lactalis revealed last week that it was targeted by hackers, but claimed that it had found no evidence of a data breach.
The company said a malicious third party attempted to breach its computer network, but it...
Crypto firm Tether says it won’t pay $24 million ransom after being threatened with document leak
Controversial cryptocurrency developer Tether says it will not give in to extortionists who are demanding a 500 Bitcoin ransom payment (currently worth approximately US $24 million).
Mysterious Macintosh Malware
This is weird:
Once an hour, infected Macs check a control server to see if there are any new commands the malware should run or binaries to execute. So far, however, researchers have yet to observe delivery of any payload...
What Did I Just Read? A Conversation With the Authors of '2034'
Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis discuss their inspirations, personal experiences, and what keeps them up at night.
