Friday Squid Blogging: Influencer Accidentally Posts Restaurant Table QR Ordering Code
Another rare security + squid story:
The woman—who has only been identified by her surname, Wang—was having a meal with friends at a hotpot restaurant in Kunming, a city in southwest China. When everyone’s selections arrived at the table, she posted a photo of the spread on the Chinese social media platform WeChat. What she didn’t notice was that she’d included the QR code on her table, which the restaurant’s customers use to place their orders.
Even though the photo was only shared with her WeChat friends list and not the entire social network, someone—or a lot of someones—used that QR code to add a ridiculous amount of food to her order. Wang was absolutely shocked to learn that “her” meal soon included 1,850 orders of duck blood, 2,580 orders of squid, and an absolutely bonkers 9,990 orders of shrimp paste.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
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vas pup • December 8, 2023 6:01 PM
Second attempt!!!
Inside the secret complex making high-tech gadgets for UK spies
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-67626880
“With its anonymous-looking buildings, the place looks like an industrial estate.
Engineers, physicists, chemists, designers, coders and other specialists work on what is described rather hazily as a “mix of artistry and engineering”.
In some areas we have to wear anti-static clothing, while in others we are shown a bewildering variety of machines. They include ones that make electronic
circuit boards, laser cutters and 3D printers (labelled Darth Vader, Luke and
Leia in a tribute to Star Wars).
But what exactly are the machines’ creations used for? Part of the problem is
that, despite my best efforts, no one will say. That is because the devices that come out the other end are highly classified.
By the time the war [ww2] began, this evolved into building smaller radio sets
which could be given to agents from MI6 who were parachuted behind enemy lines
in occupied Europe to send back intelligence.
During the war, Turing lived and worked at Hanslope Park. Most famous for breaking Nazi codes at nearby Bletchley Park, he worked at HMGCC to develop a device that !!!could provide speech encryption.
The existing system used by wartime leaders Winston Churchill and Franklin D
Roosevelt weighed 50 tones. Turing’s prototype, Delilah, overlaid noise from a
record turntable onto speech. It was portable, ahead of its time and is another
clue to what is built there today.
!!!”The need for secure communications hasn’t gone away.”
So how does this relate to the modern world? These days, undercover agents operating in what are called “denied areas” like Russia or Iran need to
communicate.
=>While HMGCC will not comment, other sources say modern-day spies rely on things like clandestine-burst transmitters. These can be made to look like ordinary objects and send information in fractions of a second. I am imagining that is what is made here – but no-one wants to say.
Communication is one part of the job. But so, it seems, are concealed bugging and tracking devices although, again, officials remain extremely tight-lipped
when I ask them.
“For most of our 85 years we have been producing secure communications systems that enable people in often difficult, dangerous, remote locations to
communicate in secrecy back to the UK,” Mr Williamson says.
One of HMGCC’s customers is MI5, who may need to secretly listen to a suspect at their house in the UK, or track them in a vehicle.
This could involve disguising a listening device as an everyday object that
nobody would spot. Quite what that could be is something else no-one wants to
discuss.”