Trusted research on email, mobile, web, and DNS security.
As I reported in a previous post, the hacked SnapChat collection known as the Snappening contains very few nude photos, and most of those do not show an identifiable face. I was asked to quantify this, so I took a random sample of 1,000 photos from the collection and categorized them. To respect the privacy […]
The media are full of reports of a vast leak of private photos and videos that were sent using the SnapChat application. However, it’s looking increasingly likely that they have been taken in by a scammer, and that the actual leak consists of a handful of videos, very few of them compromising. Starting on Thursday, […]
During the course of a recent analysis of DNS traffic at a customer site, I noticed a high volume of requests had been made for a relatively small set of domains. As it turned out, the traffic was part of an attack on the customer’s DNS infrastructure; however, the point of these requests was initially […]
What does running the DNS infrastructure of a major ISP have in common with operating an online gambling site based in China? If you are running DNS operations of any scale then you are almost certainly participating in a world wide racketeering campaign specifically targeting online gambling sites, many of which operate out of China […]
Abuse of global DNS infrastructure for the purpose of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on various Internet services has been a hot topic in the news for some time now. But there is another unintended use of DNS that can be exploited for a wide range of purposes: DNS tunneling. These purposes can range from benign […]
As a fourth wave of stolen celebrity nude photos and videos is being distributed on the Internet, lawyers for some of the affected celebrities are suing Google for making it too easy to find their stolen images. However, the more savvy voyeurs are not using Google to search for the latest leaks, they are simply […]
As received by: Transceiver Relay03 at Relay Language path: Firetongue->Cloudmark->Triskweline, SjK units [Firetongue and Cloudmark are High Beyond trade languages. Only core meaning is rendered by this translation.] From: Arbitration Arts Corporation at Firecloud Nebula [A High Beyond military[?] organization. Known age ~100 years] Subject: Reason for concern Cloudmark took its name from a language […]
Quantify yourself much? Candid Wüest of Symantec gave a fascinating presentation on the lax security in various wearable devices at the 2014 Virus Bulletin conference in Seattle. The so-called “quantifiable self” is a trend in gadgetry that most people will be aware of, if not necessarily by name. Probably the most famous example is the […]
Shellshock has been getting a lot of press as the worst security bug ever, but while it is terribly embarrassing for the open source movement, I believe the real world impact will be fairly limited. The bug is a fundamental flaw in bash, the command line interface on most Linux and Mac machines. (For once […]
A long established porn spammer who uses compromised web servers to host his landing pages has modified his pitch to include copies of the recently released stolen photographs of naked celebrities, including a picture of McKayla Maroney which according to her lawyers was taken before she was eighteen years old, and so could be illegal […]
