A Peek into the Fake Review Marketplace

A personal account of someone who was paid to buy products on Amazon and leave fake reviews. Fake reviews are one of the problems that everyone knows about, and no one knows what to do about -- so we all try to pretend doesn't exist.

7h

China Closing Its Squid Spawning Grounds

China is prohibiting squid fishing in two areas -- both in international waters -- for two seasons, to give squid time to recover and reproduce. This is the first time China has voluntarily imposed a closed season on the high seas. Some experts regard it as an important step forward in China's management of distant-water fishing (DWF), and crucial...

2d

EFF's 30th Anniversary Livestream

It's the EFF's 30th birthday, and the organization is having a celebratory livestream today from 3:00 to 10:00 pm PDT. There are a lot of interesting discussions and things. I am having a fireside chat at 4:10 pm PDT to talk about the Crypto Wars and more. Stop by. And thank you for supporting EFF.

3d

Business Email Compromise (BEC) Criminal Ring

A criminal group called Cosmic Lynx seems to be based in Russia: Dubbed Cosmic Lynx, the group has carried out more than 200 BEC campaigns since July 2019, according to researchers from the email security firm Agari, particularly targeting senior executives at large organizations and corporations in 46 countries. Cosmic Lynx specializes in topical,...

3d

Traffic Analysis of Home Security Cameras

Interesting research on home security cameras with cloud storage. Basically, attackers can learn very basic information about what's going on in front of the camera, and infer when there is someone home. News article. Slashdot thread.

4d

Half a Million IoT Passwords Leaked

It is amazing that this sort of thing can still happen: ...the list was compiled by scanning the entire internet for devices that were exposing their Telnet port. The hacker then tried using (1) factory-set default usernames and passwords, or (2) custom, but easy-to-guess password combinations. Telnet? Default passwords? In 2020? We have a...

5d

IoT Security Principles

The BSA -- also known as the Software Alliance, formerly the Business Software Alliance (which explains the acronym) -- is an industry lobbying group. They just published "Policy Principles for Building a Secure and Trustworthy Internet of Things." They call for: Distinguishing between consumer and industrial IoT. Offering incentives for integrating...

6d

ThiefQuest Ransomware for the Mac

There's a new ransomware for the Mac called ThiefQuest or EvilQuest. It's hard to get infected: For your Mac to become infected, you would need to torrent a compromised installer and then dismiss a series of warnings from Apple in order to run it. It's a good reminder to get your software from trustworthy sources, like developers whose code is "signed"...

1w

Friday Squid Blogging: Strawberry Squid

Pretty. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here.

2w

Hacked by Police

French police hacked EncroChat secure phones, which are widely used by criminals: Encrochat's phones are essentially modified Android devices, with some models using the "BQ Aquaris X2," an Android handset released in 2018 by a Spanish electronics company, according to the leaked documents. Encrochat took the base unit, installed its own encrypted...

2w