“Nation states take on a strategic positioning,” says George Barnes, a former deputy director at the National Security Agency, who spent 36 years at the NSA and now acts as a senior advisor and investor in Hunted Labs. Barnes says that hackers within Russia’s intelligence agencies could see easyjson as …
Read More »Mike Waltz Has Somehow Gotten Even Worse at Using Signal
On ThursdaY, Reuters published a photo depicting then-United States national security adviser Mike Waltz checking his phone during a cabinet meeting held by President Trump in the White House. If you enlarge the portion of the image that captures Waltz’s screen, it seems to show him using the end-to-end encrypted …
Read More »North Korea Stole Your Job
Even security experts can be fooled. In July 2024, Knowbe4, a Florida-based company that offers security training, discovered that a new hire known as “Kyle” was actually a foreign agent. “He interviewed great,” says Brian Jack, KnowBe4’s chief information security officer. “He was on camera, his résumé was right, his …
Read More »AI Code Hallucinations Increase the Risk of ‘Package Confusion’ Attacks
AI-generated computer code is rife with references to non-existent third-party libraries, creating a golden opportunity for supply-chain attacks that poison legitimate programs with malicious packages that can steal data, plant backdoors, and carry out other nefarious actions, newly published research shows. The study, which used 16 of the most widely …
Read More »WhatsApp Is Walking a Tightrope Between AI Features and Privacy
Last year, Apple debuted a similar scheme, known as Private Cloud Compute, for its Apple Intelligence AI platform. And users can turn the service on in Apple’s end-to-end encrypted communication app, Messages, to generate message summaries and compose “Smart Reply” messages on both iPhones and Macs. Looking at Private Cloud …
Read More »Millions of Apple Airplay-Enabled Devices Can Be Hacked via Wi-Fi
Below is a video of the Oligo researchers demonstrating their AirBorne hacking technique to take over an AirPlay-enabled Bose speaker to show their company’s logo for AirBorne. (The researchers say they didn’t intend to single out Bose, but just happened to have one of the company’s speakers on hand for …
Read More »Pete Hegseth’s Signal Scandal Spirals Out of Control
As the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration policy ramps up, people have started to seriously consider their privacy and security when crossing into the United States. That’s especially true when it comes to searches of travelers’ phones and other devices, which US Customs and Border Protection agents have broad authority to …
Read More »Gmail’s New Encrypted Messages Feature Opens a Door for Scams
Google announced at the beginning of April that it is launching a streamlined tool that will allow business users to easily send “end-to-end encrypted” emails—an effort to address the longstanding challenge of adding additional security protections to email messages. The feature is currently in beta for enterprise users to try …
Read More »4chan Is Dead. Its Toxic Legacy Is Everywhere
Many of the 4chan users that called me mid-Battletoad attack left messages. I listened to all of them. A pattern quickly emerged: young men, clearly nervous to even leave a message, trying to harass a stranger for, seemingly, the hell of it. Those voice mails have never left me in …
Read More »Florida Man Enters the Encryption Wars
Just three months into the Trump administration’s promised crackdown on immigration to the United States, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement now has a $30 million contract with Palantir to build a “near-real time” surveillance platform called ImmigrationOS that would track information about people self-deporting (electing to leave the US). Meanwhile, the …
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