Hacking ATMs to spit out money, demonstrated at the Black Hat conference: The two systems he hacked on stage were made by Triton and Tranax. The Tranax hack was conducted using an authentication bypass vulnerability that Jack found in the system’s remote monitoring feature, which can be accessed over the Internet or dial-up, depending on how the owner configured the…  Read More →

“Who controls the off switch?” by Ross Anderson and Shailendra Fuloria. Abstract: We’re about to acquire a significant new cybervulnerability. The world’s energy utilities are starting to install hundreds of millions of ’smart meters’ which contain a remote off switch. Its main purpose is to ensure that customers who default on their payments can be switched remotely to a prepay…  Read More →

The DNSSEC root key has been divided among seven people: Part of ICANN’s security scheme is the Domain Name System Security, a security protocol that ensures Web sites are registered and “signed” (this is the security measure built into the Web that ensures when you go to a URL you arrive at a real site and not an identical pirate…  Read More →

Okay, this is just weird: Mark S. Price, a specialist in public security, and his privately held company, Paradise Lost Antiterrorism Network of America (www.plan-a.us), have recently applied to the United States Patent and Trademark Office for a Utility Patent on their Suicide Bomb Deterrent, a security device designed, manufactured and distributed by PLAN-A. This device has been designed to…  Read More →

It’s a service: The mechanism used involves captured network traffic, which is uploaded to the WPA Cracker service and subjected to an intensive brute force cracking effort. As advertised on the site, what would be a five-day task on a dual-core PC is reduced to a job of about twenty minutes on average. For the more “premium” price of $35,…  Read More →

Here’s a book from 1921 on how to profile people….  Read More →

An article from The Economist makes a point that I have been thinking about for a while: the modern technology makes life harder for spies, not easier. It used to be the technology favored spycraft — think James Bond gadgets — but more and more, technology favors spycatchers. The ubiquitous collection of personal data makes it harder to maintain a…  Read More →

Where do these TV shows come from? Follows the adventures of the Cuylers, an impoverished and dysfunctional family of anthropomorphic, air-breathing, redneck squids who live in a rural Appalachian community in the US state of Georgia….  Read More →

The Washington Post has published a phenomenal piece of investigative journalism: a long, detailed, and very interesting expose on the U.S. intelligence industry (overall website; parts 1, 2, and 3; blog; Washington reactions; top 10 revelations; many many many blog comments and reactions; and so on). It’s a truly excellent piece of investigative journalism. Pity people don’t care much about…  Read More →

Stuxnet is a new Internet worm that specifically targets Siemens WinCC SCADA systems: used to control production at industrial plants such as oil rigs, refineries, electronics production, and so on. The worm seems to uploads plant info (schematics and production information) to an external website. Moreover, owners of these SCADA systems cannot change the default password because it would cause…  Read More →

Interesting: The use of profiling by ethnicity or nationality to trigger secondary security screening is a controversial social and political issue. Overlooked is the question of whether such actuarial methods are in fact mathematically justified, even under the most idealized assumptions of completely accurate prior probabilities, and secondary screenings concentrated on the highest-probablity individuals. We show here that strong profiling…... 

A book on GCHQ, and two reviews….  Read More →

Interesting journal article evaluating the EU’s counterterrorism efforts….  Read More →

From the U.S. Government Accountability Office: “Cybersecurity: Key Challenges Need to Be Addressed to Improve Research and Development.” Thirty-six pages; I haven’t read it….  Read More →

From Wired News: The four Wiseguy defendants, who also operated other ticket-reselling businesses, allegedly used sophisticated programming and inside information to bypass technological measures — including CAPTCHA — at Ticketmaster and other sites that were intended to prevent such bulk automated purchases. This violated the sites’ terms of service, and according to prosecutors constituted unauthorized computer access under the...