Law professor Dan Solove has a new article on privacy regulation. In his email to me, he writes: “I’ve been pondering privacy consent for more than a decade, and I think I finally made a breakthrough with this article.” His…
Category: Schneier on Security
Microsoft and Security Incentives
Former senior White House cyber policy director A. J. Grotto talks about the economic incentives for companies to improve their security—in particular, Microsoft: Grotto told us Microsoft had to be “dragged kicking and screaming” to provide logging capabilities to the…
Using Legitimate GitHub URLs for Malware
Interesting social-engineering attack vector: McAfee released a report on a new LUA malware loader distributed through what appeared to be a legitimate Microsoft GitHub repository for the “C++ Library Manager for Windows, Linux, and MacOS,” known as vcpkg. The attacker…
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Trackers
A new bioadhesive makes it easier to attach trackers to squid. Note: the article does not discuss squid privacy rights. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I…
Other Attempts to Take Over Open Source Projects
After the XZ Utils discovery, people have been examining other open-source projects. Surprising no one, the incident is not unique: The OpenJS Foundation Cross Project Council received a suspicious series of emails with similar messages, bearing different names and overlapping…
X.com Automatically Changing Link Text but Not URLs
Brian Krebs reported that X (formerly known as Twitter) started automatically changing twitter.com links to x.com links. The problem is: (1) it changed any domain name that ended with “twitter.com,” and (2) it only changed the link’s appearance (anchortext), not…
New Lattice Cryptanalytic Technique
A new paper presents a polynomial-time quantum algorithm for solving certain hard lattice problems. This could be a big deal for post-quantum cryptographic algorithms, since many of them base their security on hard lattice problems. A few things to note.…
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking twice at RSA Conference 2024 in San Francisco. I’ll be on a panel on software liability on May 6, 2024 at 8:30 AM, and…
Smuggling Gold by Disguising it as Machine Parts
Someone got caught trying to smuggle 322 pounds of gold (that’s about 1/4 of a cubic foot) out of Hong Kong. It was disguised as machine parts: On March 27, customs officials x-rayed two air compressors and discovered that they…
Backdoor in XZ Utils That Almost Happened
Last week, the internet dodged a major nation-state attack that would have had catastrophic cybersecurity repercussions worldwide. It’s a catastrophe that didn’t happen, so it won’t get much attention—but it should. There’s an important moral to the story of the…