Security News Bites for January 10, 2025
New Orleans Truck Terrorist Used Meta Ray-Bans to Surveil French Quarter
An advertising executive once said all publicity was good. I don’t think he understands terrorism. The FBI has revealed footage from the attacker’s Meta glasses that he took while going through the French Quarter on a bicycle. Not exactly the “use case” Meta wants to feature in their ads. Unless you knew what you were looking at, you would have no idea that you were being surveilled. Credit: Cybernews
Oath Keepers and American Patriots III Data Released
I am not sure that I would have admitted to this since I am sure there is a bounty on his head now, but John Williams has released over 200 gigabytes of chat logs and recordings post January 6, 2021 from paramilitary groups Oath Keepers and American Patriots Three Percent after he infiltrated the groups and rose up through the ranks. That means this was not a hack, but rather an inside job. The release contains more than 50,000 files and details the inner workings of the groups. The data is available to anyone who wants to download it. Credit: DDoS Secrets
UN Passes Flawed Cybercrime Treaty; US Unlikely to Ratify It
On Christmas eve the UN ratified its controversial cybercrime treaty that has no protections for researchers, whistleblowers, activists or journalists – just what Russia and China asked for and got. Given it would take 67 Senators to ratify it and the incoming administration’s dislike of the UN and the fact that 150 cybersecurity companies said it was dangerous, it is highly unlikely that the incoming administration will expend any political capital on it. And, if the US doesn’t sign on to the treaty, it probably becomes a bit useless. Credit: Data Breach Today
Is DoD Doing Enough to Protect Communications?
Two Senators are accusing DoD of not doing enough to protect the communications of its military personnel as we deal with the hacks at 9 telecom carriers, including AT&T and Verizon. Apparently DoD doesn’t require end to end encryption in its unclassified voice, video and text. One example is Signaling System 7 or SS7, a many decades old signaling protocol that the phone companies use and is known to be horribly insecure. The Senators want the DoD to force carriers to get their security acts together. Given how much DoD spends, they have a lot of clout. Credit: Tech Crunch
License Plate Readers as a Global Surveillance Tool
Researchers have figured out how to abuse some automated license plate reader surveillance cameras that transmit over the Internet unsecured. These cameras are used by law enforcement everywhere. The researchers have figured out how to extract the image and location data and build a spreadsheet with license plate, make, model, location and date and time. Credit: 404 Media
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