Security

Read This Letter That Bradley Manning Is Sending to the President

Yesterday, Bradley Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for crimes related to stealing government documents and sharing them with WikiLeaks. Now, you can read the letter he’s sending to the President to state his case. https://gizmodo.com/bradley-manning-sentenced-to-35-years-in-prison-1177370126 The letter was read by defense attorney David Coombs following Manning’s sentencing yesterday, but the Associated Press…

Facebook Denies Zuck Wall Hacker $500 Reward, Internet Gives Him $10K

Remember our friendly white hat hacker, Khalil Shreateh, who got stiffed on his just reward after identifying a Facebook bug that let him post on Zuckerberg’s wall? Well, looks like the hacker community has no intention of letting their buddy’s bank account fall to the wayside. After setting up a fundraising campaign on GoFundMe, security…

Why Kolab Might Be the Best Secure Email Service Still Standing

The digital carnage continues as yet another online service shuts down rather than face NSA scrutiny. Fearing for its email security, the legal site Groklaw shut its doors on Tuesday, but not before offering a very valuable recommendation: An email service that’s out of reach of government goons. https://gizmodo.com/essential-legal-site-groklaw-shuts-down-rather-than-fac-1171125087 If you’re worried about the spooks…

Legal Site Groklaw Shuts Down Rather Than Face NSA in Heartrending Post

For the last 10 years, if you wanted to understand a complex legal issue in the news, your first stop was Groklaw. A free, open source exchange of theories and ideas, Groklaw has been an invaluable resource for lawyers and laymen alike. Last night, its owner pulled the plug. It was a matter of privacy.…

A Guy Hacked Zuck’s Wall After Facebook Ignored His Bug Report

Khalil, a Palestinian white hat hacker, submitted bug reports to Facebook about a vulnerability that allowed him to post on anyone’s wall. But Facebook’s security team didn’t do anything. So Khalil wrote on Mark Zuckerberg’s wall about it and was generally a badass. Khalil explains on his blog that he submitted a full description of…

It’s Easy To Seem Popular When A Virus Gives You Instagram Followers

There are always those greedy people who would wish for more wishes from a genie. They’re what’s wrong with this whole internet fairy tale. And now they’re using malware developed for pilfering credit card numbers to give out likes and followers on Instagram. For a price, of course. According to RSA, the security division of…

A “Glitch” Made All the Doors in a Max. Security Prison Open at Once

A Florida prison says that a computer “glitch” is to blame after all of the doors in the maximum security wing opened without warning. Wired has news for them, though. Sometimes, these kinds of glitches are caused by sneaky characters called hackers. And this situation looks pretty suspect. The incident happened back in June at…

The NSA Oversteps Its Legal Authority and the Court Can’t Stop It

The Washington Post dropped two reports that exposes the recklessness of the NSA’s spying program. The first report is insane: the NSA has “broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority” thousands of times a year and the second report explains the insanity: the FISC court that’s supposed to be in charge of government spying…

7 Security Measures That Were Doomed From The Start

Some security measures, no matter how high-tech and futuristic, are doomed to fail. Governments and corporations spend billions of dollars on these systems, but never actually protect any of their assets. Here are seven of the worst security fails in human history. 1. Enigma codes used for Axis communication during World War II This is…

Another Secure Email Service, Silent Circle, Is Shutting Down

Silent Circle, an email provider which guarantees end-to-end secure email, has announced that it’s going the same way as Edward Snowden’s beloved Lavabit and shuttering over concerns of external pressures. https://gizmodo.com/somebody-read-government-goons-shut-down-edward-snow-1070103469 In a blog post, Silent Circle’s CTO Jon Callas explained that the move is a result of *cough* outside *cough* pressures that prompted Lavabit…

Google Chrome’s Insanely Open Password Security Strategy

Chrome does something interesting when you first run it. The other day, I was using Chrome in development for an Ember.js app. I use Safari for day-to-day browsing, but it has a habit of aggressively caching files when I least expect it, so from time to time I switch to Chrome. I decided to hit…

How to Safely Continue Using TOR on Windows

An attack against Tor Browser users on Windows machines was discovered this Sunday, and there is speculation that the uncovered malware was used by a law enforcement agency to harvest the IP addresses of users of several hidden services hosted by Freedom Hosting. The malware exploits a serious JavaScript security vulnerability affecting Firefox and other…

Twitter’s Two-Step Verification Just Got as Good as Google’s

We spent a long time begging Twitter for two-step verification, and we were pumped to finally get it. Now, an update to the service’s Android and iOS apps are taking it a step further, and making it even better. https://gizmodo.com/the-super-easy-way-twitter-could-make-all-this-account-5985093 The improvements include in-app authentication that doesn’t require to wait for an SMS. It’s sort…

The TOR Project Tells Everyone to Stop Using Windows

After startling news that someone—probably a government agency—was exploiting a vulnerability in Firefox to spy on its supposedly anonymous users, the TOR Project is now asking everyone to take a step back and stop using Windows. It’s not just this latest episode of snooping, though. Windows just isn’t a great operating system in terms of…

NSA Appears to Be Tracking the Anonymous Internet

That custom-built malware that’s tracking down Tor network users? Turns out it might not be the FBI behind it after all. It looks like it might be the NSA. After the Firefox JavaScript exploit was uncovered, there was a rush to figure out who was behind it. At first, that looked like the FBI. The…

Android’s One-Click Google Auth Is a Buffet for Hackers

If you’ve got an Android device, you’ve probably used Google’s handy one-click authentication shortcut, that handy little button that lets you sign into various Google service sites without having to enter your password. It’s super convenient! For you and for hackers. Craig Young, a researcher at security firm Tripwire, did some digging into how the…

Can You Solve the Encryption Puzzle In the EFF’s Def Con T-Shirt? (Updated)

The annual hackers’ conference, DEF CON, wrapped up yesterday, but one of the weekend’s many great mysteries still persists. The images above are an encryption puzzle (“Encryption is Key”) that was printed on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s fundraising t-shirts from the event. As of Sunday morning, no one had solved it, so here’s a hint,…

Disposable Spy Computers Are Disturbingly Easy and Cheap to Make

Be honest, how often do you use unsecured Wi-Fi for something you shouldn’t? You know, just a quick Facebook login at Starbucks. If you’ve done it even once, that’s too much, because making a secret spy computer that can steal all that data is dumb easy. And cheap to boot. Brendan O’Connor, security researcher, founder…

The 10 Dumbest ATM PINs Are Even Dumber Than You’d Think

In an age of mandatory password complexity and burgeoning biosensory protection, the idea of a four-number PIN for the ATM seems almost quaint. That doesn’t excuse the fact that the most popular PIN is still, yes, 1234. Come on, people. The following list of most-used ATM PINs comes compliments of a company called DataGenetics, and…

Facebook has announced that it’s switching to using https connections for everyone browsing the social network—which should provide an extra layer of security when you’re doing, well, whatever you do on Facebook.