Wired security reporter Andy Greenberg's latest book is Sandworm (previously), a true-life technothriller that tells the stories of the cybersecurity experts who analyzed and attributed as series of ghastly cyberwar attacks that brought down parts of the Ukrainian power grid, and then escaped the attackers' control and spread all over the world.
• U.S. State Department blames Russia for cyberattacks that hit neighboring Georgia in October 2019 • By identifying Russia's digital assaults on neighbors, US hopes to raise awareness of ongoing GRU attacks on US
Cliff Stoll (previously) is a computing legend: his 1989 book The Cuckoo's Egg tells the story of how he was drafted to help run Lawrence Berkeley Lab's computers (he was a physicist who knew a lot about Unix systems), and then discovered a $0.75 billing discrepancy that set him on the trail of East German…
For years, I've followed Andy Greenberg's excellent reporting on "Sandworm," a set of infrastructure-targeted cyberattacks against Ukraine widely presumed to be of Russian origin, some of which escaped their targeted zone and damaged systems around the world.
Wired has published another long excerpt from Sandworm, reporter Andy Greenberg's (previously) forthcoming book on the advanced Russian hacking team who took the US-Israeli Stuxnet program to the next level, attacking Ukrainian power infrastructure, literally blowing up key components of the country's power grid by attacking the embedded code in their microcontrollers.
A little over a year ago, Bloomberg stunned the world with a report that claimed that Chinese intelligence services had figured out how to put undetectable, rice-grain-sized hardware implants into servers headed for the biggest US cloud and enterprise IT firms, and that when some of the victims discovered this fact, they quietly ripped out…
Machine learning systems are pretty good at finding hidden correlations in data and using them to infer potentially compromising information about the people who generate that data: for example, researchers fed an ML system a bunch of Google Play reviews by reviewers whose locations were explicitly given in their Google Plus reviews; based on this,…
Andy Greenberg (previously) is Wired's senior security reporter; he did amazing work covering Russian cyberwarfare in Ukraine, which he has expanded into a forthcoming book: Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers (I read it for a blurb and a review; it's excellent).
Spectre and Meltdown are a pair of chip-level security bugs that exploit something called "speculative execution," through which chips boost performance by making shrewd guesses about which computer operations are performed together.
Eva Galperin is one of my colleagues at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, running our Threat Lab project, where she has made it her personal mission to eradicate stalkerware: malicious software marketed to abusive spouses, overbearing parents, and creepy employers, which runs hidden on mobile devices and allows its owner to spy on everything his target…
Andy Greenberg (previously) is a veteran Wired security reporter who has chronicled the frightening and chaotic world of cyberwar since its earliest days; in a forthcoming book called "Sandworm," Greenberg tells the fascinating and terrible tale of Notpetya (previously), a Russian cyberweapon (built on leaked NSA cyberweapons!) that disguised itself as criminal ransomware, but which…
At Defcon, Tencent's Wu HuiYu and Qian Wenxiang presented Breaking Smart Speakers: We are Listening to You, detailing their work in successfully exploiting an Amazon Alexa speaker, albeit in a very difficult-to-achieve fashion.
The Vingcard Vision locks are RFID-based hotel locks; at this week's Infiltrate conference in Miami, Tomi Tuominen and Timo Hirvonen from F-Secure will present a method for combining a $300 Proxmark RFID tool with any discarded key from a given hotel to derive the master keys that allow them to unlock every room in the…
The U.S. Senate today confirmed President Donald Trump's selection to lead the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command. Paul Nakasone will replace Mike Rogers, who is retiring.
It's been a year since someone hacked all 156 of Dallas's emergency tornado sirens, setting them off in the middle of the night, and the security picture for cities' emergency PA systems keeps getting uglier.
In An Empirical Analysis of Traceability in the Monero Blockchain, a group of eminent computer scientists analyze a longstanding privacy defect in the Monero cryptocurrency, and reveal a new, subtle flaw, both of which can be used to potentially reveal the details of transactions and identify their parties.
Computers that are isolated from the internet and local networks are said to be "airgapped," and it's considered a best practice for securing extremely sensitive systems.
