720-891-1663

HR 4681 and government surveillance

HR 4681, the Intelligence Authorization Act for FY 2015 was signed into law on December 19th, 2014 and provides funding for the intelligence community until next September.  The bill and now law contains one section – section 309 – that deals with the collection, retention and sharing of information collected by the intelligence community.  Because […]

Continue reading → [DISPLAY_ACURAX_ICONS]

Why fingerprints should not be used for access control

A presentation at the Chaos Communication Congress (a large hacker convention in Hamburg, Germany that attracted about 10,000 visitors this year – sort of, kind of, like  Defcon here) demonstrated the ability to reproduce fingerprints of a target subject from just photographs.  Reports in PC Magazine say that the researcher, Jan Krissler, took photographs of Ursula von […]

Continue reading → [DISPLAY_ACURAX_ICONS]

Is your encryption secure? – Sure, just like flying pigs (keep reading)

Der Spiegel wrote an article on efforts by the NSA and GCHQ (their British equivalent) to crack encryption of various sorts. Take the article at what it is worth;  it is based on documents that Snowden released, so it is a little bit old. I apologize that this post is pretty long, but there is […]

Continue reading → [DISPLAY_ACURAX_ICONS]

SS7 flaws enable listening to cell phone calls and reading texts

SC Magazine is reporting that a flaw signaling System 7, the telephone industry standard for setting up, managing and tearing down phone calls allows anyone to listen in on cell phone calls, read texts and locate a user. Two separate researchers have identified the flaw and are going to demonstrate it at a hackers conference […]

Continue reading → [DISPLAY_ACURAX_ICONS]

Misfortune Cookie bug impacts more than 12 million home and small office routers

While this is not exactly an “Internet Of Things” issue, it points out how long it takes to get things fixed and how the tail of a bug can live on forever.  In the case of the Internet of things, people rarely patch their refrigerator, so that bug will live on until the refrigerator is […]

Continue reading → [DISPLAY_ACURAX_ICONS]