Tag Archives: defcon

Thousands of electronic lockers found in gyms, offices, and schools could be vulnerable to attacks by criminals using cheap hacking tools to access administrator keys, according to new research. At the Defcon security conference on Sunday, security researchers Dennis Giese and “braelynn” demonstrated a proof-of-concept attack showing how digital management …

Speedrunning video games, the competitive field of playing through digital games as quickly as possible, has in recent years been elevated into something between a virtuosic form of fingers-and-thumbs athletics and a highly technical science. The best speedruns reduce epic games meant to take dozens of hours to single-digit minutes …

If you know where to look, plenty of secrets can be found online. Since the fall of 2021, independent security researcher Bill Demirkapi has been building ways to tap into huge data sources, which are often overlooked by researchers, to find masses of security problems. This includes automatically finding developer …

It's probably been a while since anyone thought about Apple's router and network storage combo called Time Capsule. Released in 2008 and discontinued in 2018, the product has mostly receded into the sands of gadget time. So when independent security researcher Matthew Bryant recently bought a Time Capsule from the …

Demand for graphics processing units or GPUs has exploded in recent years as video rendering and artificial intelligence systems have expanded the need for processing power. And while most of the most visible shortages (and soaring stock prices) relate to top-tier PC and server chips, mobile graphics processors are the …

There is a grand tradition at the annual Defcon security conference in Las Vegas of hacking ATMs. Unlocking them with safecracking techniques, rigging them to steal users' personal data and PINs, crafting and refining ATM malware and, of course, hacking them to spit out all their cash. Many of these …

Security flaws in your computer's firmware, the deep-seated code that loads first when you turn the machine on and controls even how its operating system boots up, have long been a target for hackers looking for a stealthy foothold. But only rarely does that kind of vulnerability appear not in …

HID Global's keycards—the company's radio-frequency-enabled plastic rectangles that are inside hundreds of millions of pockets and purses—serve as the front line of physical security for hundreds of companies and government agencies. They can also be spoofed, it turns out, by any hacker clever enough to read one of those cards …

Microsoft raced to put generative AI at the heart of its systems. Ask a question about an upcoming meeting and the company’s Copilot AI system can pull answers from your emails, Teams chats, and files—a potential productivity boon. But these exact processes can also be abused by hackers. Today at …

Researchers have long known that they can glean hidden information about the inner workings of a website by measuring the amount of time different requests take to be fulfilled and extrapolating information—and potential weaknesses—from slight variations. Such “web timing attacks” have been described for years, but they would often be …