Your devices may be revealing a lot more about your life than you realize. During the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last month, we set out to find just how much data is floating around in the digital ether all around us. Armed with a fanny pack filled with radios—including …
Read More »YubiKeys Are a Security Gold Standard—but They Can Be Cloned
The YubiKey 5, the most widely used hardware token for two-factor authentication based on the FIDO standard, contains a cryptographic flaw that makes the finger-sized device vulnerable to cloning when an attacker gains temporary physical access to it, researchers said Tuesday. The cryptographic flaw, known as a side channel, resides …
Read More »Russia’s Most Notorious Special Forces Unit Now Has Its Own Cyber Warfare Team
Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU, has long had a reputation as one of the world's most aggressive practitioners of sabotage, assassination, and cyber warfare, with hackers who take pride in working under the same banner as violent special forces operators. But one new group within that agency shows how …
Read More »Taylor Swift Concert Terror Plot Was Thwarted by Key CIA Tip
Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of the communication app Telegram, was arrested in France on Saturday as part of an investigation into his and Telegram’s alleged failure to moderate illegal content on the platform, among other allegations. After being detained for four days, he was charged on Wednesday evening, …
Read More »Powerful Spyware Exploits Enable a New String of ‘Watering Hole’ Attacks
In recent years, elite commercial spyware vendors like Intellexa and NSO Group have developed an array of powerful hacking tools that exploit rare and unpatched “zero-day” software vulnerabilities to compromise victim devices. And increasingly, governments around the world have emerged as the prime customers for these tools, compromising the smartphones …
Read More »Notorious Iranian Hackers Have Been Targeting the Space Industry With a New Backdoor
The Iranian government-backed hacking group known as APT 33 has been active for more than 10 years, conducting aggressive espionage operations against a diverse array of public and private sector victims around the world, including critical infrastructure targets. And while the group is particularly known for strategic but technically simple …
Read More »The US Navy Has Run Out of Pants
The United States Defense Department has ideas about a dramatic strategy for defending Taiwan against a Chinese military offensive that would involve deploying an “unmanned hellscape" consisting of thousands of drones buzzing around the island nation. Meanwhile, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology announced a red-team hacking competition …
Read More »The US Government Wants You—Yes, You—to Hunt Down Generative AI Flaws
At the 2023 Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas, prominent AI tech companies partnered with algorithmic integrity and transparency groups to sic thousands of attendees on generative AI platforms and find weaknesses in these critical systems. This “red-teaming” exercise, which also had support from the US government, took a step …
Read More »An AWS Configuration Issue Could Expose Thousands of Web Apps
A vulnerability related to Amazon Web Service's traffic-routing service known as Application Load Balancer could have been exploited by an attacker to bypass access controls and compromise web applications, according to new research. The flaw stems from a customer implementation issue, meaning it isn't caused by a software bug. Instead, …
Read More »The Slow-Burn Nightmare of the National Public Data Breach
Data breaches are a seemingly endless scourge with no simple answer, but the breach in recent months of the background-check service National Public Data illustrates just how dangerous and intractable they have become. And after four months of ambiguity, the situation is only now beginning to come into focus with …
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