In a post today by John Cartwright, it’s been revealed that the Full Disclosure mailing list is being shut down. It’s a shame really, as a student of cyber security this was one of the first things I would check for interesting news on various security flaws found in a plethora of different areas. It […]
Author Archives: Brian Town
Twitter halts progress on encryption for the time being.
In an article over at The Verge it has come to light that for the time, Twitter has put a halt on it’s work towards encrypting direct messages. News of this was leaked back in an October article at The New York Times which detailed that fall out after the NSA revelations came to light of the snooping […]
University of Maryland falls victim to data breach
In news today it has come to light that University of Maryland has fallen victim to a database breach of over 300,000 records, dating back to 1998. UMB President Wallace Loh was informed by Brian Voss, the VP of IT at the university. “A specific database of records maintained by our IT Division was breached […]
Massive DDoS attack
A large DDoS attack hit US and Europe based servers, that some are reporting to have been larger in scale then the attack last year titled Spamhaus. These attacks again utilized the Network Time Protocol on compromised servers to launch the attacks while spoofing the IP addresses of the attackers to masquerade as their victims. […]
How to properly incentivize hackers, and how not to!
Two news stories today both dealing with the do’s and don’ts of incentivizing minds to help out in tightening down security holes. First up we have Google announcing a $2.7 million bug bounty for their Chrome OS to take place at Pwnium 4 hacking contest in March. The article from BGR and another from PCworld go […]
Healthcare website still vulnerable says experts.
In an article this Sunday over at Salon published this past Sunday it was exposed for the second time that the government healthcare site, being used for the Affordable Care Act, is still vulnerable. A panel of experts met with the House Science, Space and Technology Committee on Thursday and expressed concerns of just how easy it […]
Just how far is the NSA’s reach?
On Monday, December 30th of 2013 Jacob Applebaum gave a presentation in to a conference in Germany where he described, in his words, “wrist slitting depression” details of just how far the NSA has extended its reach over the past years. The video is a little over an hour and length but I would suggest […]
RSA bribed to the tune of millions by the NSA
News that the NSA had requested the RSA to implement backdoors in their encryption has been known since September . Recently however it has come to light that the NSA bribed the RSA to the tune of $10million for these flaws to be kept in. Reuters reported on this Friday, citing that: “Undisclosed until now was […]
Department of Energy – a perfect model of Swiss cheese
In a recent published report on the DoE’s security breaches, Inspector General Gregory Friedman cited huge flaws in the departments network. In July of 2013 the DoE was again hacked, having been already hacked multiple times since 2011, this time more than 100,000 individuals had their information taken. Important information including: social security numbers, bank […]