Security Now - 16k MP3

/ Firefox amends their privacy policy -- the world melts down. / Signal threatens to leave Sweden. / Aftermath of the massive $1.5 billion Bybit ETH heist. / It turns out that it wasn't actually Bybit's fault. / "The Lazarus Bounty" monitoring and management site. / Mozilla's commitment to Manifest V2 (and the uBlock Origin). / What does the ACM's plea for memory-safe languages mean for developers...

/ Apple disables Advanced Data Protection for new UK users. / Paying ransoms is not as cut and dried as we might imagine. / Elon Musk's "X" social media blocks "Signal.me" links. / Spain's soccer league blocks Cloudflare and causes a mess.

US lawmakers respond to the UK's outrageous demand about Apple's encryption. What, exactly, is a "backdoor", and can a "backdoor" NOT be secret? Highlights from last week's Windows' Patch Tuesday. A look into RansumHub: The latest king of the Ransomware hill. "TOAD": Telephone-Oriented Attack Delivery. The state of Texas -versus- DeepSeek. Disabling Apple's "Restricted Mode". Where did I put that...

New "SparkCat" secret-stealing AI image scanner discovered in App and Play stores. The UK demands that Apple does the impossible: decrypting ADP cloud data. France moves forward on legislation to require backdoors to encryption. Firefox moves to 135 with a bunch of useful new features. The Five Eyes alliance publishes edge-device security guidance. Six NetGear routers contain CVSS 9.6 and 9.8 vuln...

Why was DeepSeek banned by Italian authorities? What internal proprietary DeepSeek data was found online? What is "DeepSeek" anyway? Why do we care, and what does it mean? Did Microsoft just make OpenAI's strong model available for free? Google explains how generative AI can be and is being misused. An actively exploited and unpatched Zyxel router vulnerability. The new US "ROUTERS" Act. Is pirate...

eM Client CAN be purchased outright. An astonishing 5-year-old typo in MasterCard's DNS. An unwelcome surprise received by 18,459 low-level hackers. DDoS attacks continue growing, seemingly without any end in sight. Let's Encrypt clarifies their plans for 6-day "we barely knew you" certificates. SpinRite uncovers a bad brand new 8TB drive. Listener feedback about TOTP, Syncthing and UDP hole punch...

What do we learn from January's record breaking 0-day critical Patch Tuesday? Microsoft to "force-install" a new Outlook into all Windows 10 and 11 desktops? GoDaddy is required to get much more serious about its hosting security. More age verification enforcement is coming, including globally. What another instance of a widely exposed management interface teaches us. DJI drone's official firmware...

Meta winds down 3rd-party content filtering. Is encryption soon to follow? Taking over abandoned Command & Control server domains (strictly for research purposes only!). IoT devices to get the "Cyber Trust Mark" - will anyone notice or care? "SyncThing" receives a (blessedly infrequent) update. Government email is not using encryption? Really? Email relaying prevents point-to-point end-to-end encr...

The consequences of Internet content restriction. The measured risks of 3rd-party browser extensions. The consequences of SonicWall's unpatched 9.8 firewall severity. The incredible number of still-unencrypted email servers. Salt Typhoon finally evicted from three telecom carriers. HIPAA gets a long-needed cybersecurity upgrade. The EU standardizes on USB-C for power charging. What? Believe it or...

#956: Apple's Hardware Backdoor: Steve reflects on the previous week's 'The Mystery of CVE-2023-38606' deep-dive. #960: Unforeseen Consequences of Google's 3rd-party Cookie Cutoff: As Google moves to phase out third-party cookies, the advertising industry scrambles to find new ways to track users, potentially leading to more intrusive methods like requiring users to create accounts on websites. #9...

Is AI the Wizard of Oz? Or is it more? Microsoft's long standing effective MFA login bypass. Is TPM 2.0 not required after all for Windows 11? Meet 14 North Korean IT workers who made $88 million from the West. Android updates its Bluetooth tracking with anti-tracking. The NPM package manager repository has had 540,000 malicious packages discovered hiding in plain sight. The AskWoody site remains...

All telecom providers have been hacked and may still not be safe to use. So now the government is recommending that we use our own encrypted communications. The plan to obsolete all non-TPM 2.0 PCs remains well underway. Microsoft must be feeling the heat, so they're taking time to not apologize. Whoops. Microsoft's product activation system has been fully hacked. All Windows and Office products m...

Microsoft makes very clear what data they are NOT using to train their AI models. What's a "Digital Epileptic Seizure"? What induces them? And why you don't want your self-driving car to have one! A public plea for help in the form of volunteer bridge servers from the Tor Network. If you are one of 140 million Zello users, heed their notice to change your password. The U.S. Federal Trade Commissio...

What's the new "nearest neighbor" attack and how do you defend against it? Let's Encrypt just turned 10. What changes has it wrought? Now the Coast Guard is worried about Chinese built ship-to-shore cranes. Pakistan becomes the first country to block Bluesky. There's a new way to get Git repos "swatted" and removed. Who's to blame for Palo Alto Networks' serious new 0-day vulnerabilities? If you h...

How Microsoft lured the US Government into a far deeper and expensive dependency upon its cybersecurity solutions. Gmail to offer native throwaway email aliases like Apple and Mozilla. Russia to ban several additional hosting companies and give its big Internet disconnect switch another test. Russia uses a diabolical Windows flaw to attack Ukrainians. The value of old Security Now episodes. TrueCr...

Did Bitwarden go closed-source? The rights of German security researchers are clarified. Australia to impose age limits on social media. Free Windows Server 2025 anyone? UAC wasn't in the way enough, so they're fixing that. "From Russia with fines" -- obey or else. South Korea fines Meta over serious user privacy violations. Synology's (very) critical zero-click RCE flaw. Malicious Python packages...

Google's record-breaking fine by Russia. (How many 0's is that?) RT's editor-in-chief admits that their TV hosts are AI-generated. Windows 10 security updates set to end next October... or are they? When a good Chrome extension goes bad. Windows .RDP launch config files. What could possibly go wrong? Firefox 132 just received some new features. Chinese security cameras being removed from the UK. I...

Apple proposes 45-day maximum certificate life. Please, no. :( SEC fines four companies for downplaying their SolarWinds attack severity. Google adds 5 new features to Messenger including inappropriate content. Does AI-driven local device-side filtering resolve the encryption dilemma forever? The very nice looking "Session" messenger leaves Australia for Switzerland. Another quick look at the ques...

Did Chinese researchers really break RSA encryption? What did they do? What next-level terror extortion is being powered by the NPD breach data? The EU to hold software companies liable for software security? Microsoft lost weeks of security logs. How hard did the try to fix the problem? The Chinese drone company DJI has sued the DoJ over its ban on DJI's drones. The DoJ wishes to acquire "DeepFak...

A great deal more about uBlock Origin which we've been underutilizing. National Public Data files for bankruptcy (is anyone surprised?). Will the .IO top level Internet domain be disappearing? Last week was Patch Tuesday, what did we learn? Firefox fixed a bad remote exploit that was attacking Tor users. Why a Server edition of Windows won't substitute for a desktop edition. A look back at a fabul...

Meta was not bothering to hash passwords? PayPal to begin selling its user's purchase histories. 2021's record for maximum DDoS size has been broken. It's national cybersecurity month. When was the last time you updated your router's firmware? North Korean hackers are successfully posing as domestic IT workers. Why would a security-related podcast ever talk about Vitamin D? What's another way the...

We have the full story about the Linux remote code execution flaw. What bad stuff can happen if a domain escapes control even briefly? What social media platform is now in Russia's Roskomnadzor crosshairs? Update VLC to eliminate a potential remote code execution flaw. Tor merges with Tails for greater efficiency. Telegram announces that it will now obey court orders to disclose information. Inter...

The case of the exploding pagers and walkie-talkies. Are Ford Motor Company autos planning to listen-in to their occupants? Highly personal data of 106,316,633 U.S individuals was found unprotected online. Passkeys takes a huge step forward with native support in Chrome. Is there a serious 9.9-level unauthenticated remote code exploit in Linux? More credit bureau freezing insanity, Drobo vs Synolo...

What happened during Microsoft's recent Windows Endpoint Security Ecosystem Summit? And what, if anything, will probably result? How reliable is ANY form of digital storage when used for long-term archiving? What happened when an illegal Starlink Internet network was set up on a U.S. Navy ship? What's the best solution for securing the Internet-facing "edge" of enterprise networks? GRC has started...

Microsoft's "Recall" uninstallability is a bug. Yubikeys can be cloned. How worried should you be? When was that smoke detector installed? We share and discuss lots of interesting listener feedback: Is whatsApp more secure than Telegram? Does Telegram's lack of security really matter? Elevators in Paris have problems, too. There's a 4th credit bureau to be frozen, too. Can high pitched sound keep...