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US Treasury Department Sanctions Chinese Company Over Cyberattacks
From the Washington Post:
The sanctions target Beijing Integrity Technology Group, which U.S. officials say employed workers responsible for the Flax Typhoon attacks which compromised devices including routers and internet-enabled cameras to infiltrate government and industrial targets in the United States, Taiwan, Europe and elsewhere.
Privacy of Photos.app’s Enhanced Visual Search
Initial speculation about a new Apple feature.
Friday Squid Blogging: Anniversary Post
I made my first squid post nineteen years ago this week. Between then and now, I posted something about squid every week (with maybe only a few exceptions). There is a lot out there about squid, even more if you count the other meanings of the word.
Google Is Allowing Device Fingerprinting
Lukasz Olejnik writes about device fingerprinting, and why Google’s policy change to allow it in 2025 is a major privacy setback.
EDITED TO ADD (1/12): Shashdot thread.
Gift Card Fraud
It’s becoming an organized crime tactic:
Card draining is when criminals remove gift cards from a store display, open them in a separate location, and either record the card numbers and PINs or replace them with a new barcode. The crooks then repair the packaging, return to a store and place the cards back on a rack. When a customer unwittingly selects and loads money onto a tampered card, the criminal is able to access the card online and steal the balance.
[…]
In card draining, the runners assist with removing, tampering and restocking of gift cards, according to court documents and investigators.
A single runner driving from store to store can swipe or return thousands of tampered cards to racks in a short time. “What they do is they just fly into the city and they get a rental car and they just hit every big-box location that they can find along a corridor off an interstate,” said Parks.
Salt Typhoon’s Reach Continues to Grow
The US government has identified a ninth telecom that was successfully hacked by Salt Typhoon.
Casino Players Using Hidden Cameras for Cheating
The basic strategy is to place a device with a hidden camera in a position to capture normally hidden card values, which are interpreted by an accomplice off-site and fed back to the player via a hidden microphone. Miniaturization is making these devices harder to detect. Presumably AI will soon obviate the need for an accomplice.
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid on Pizza
Pizza Hut in Taiwan has a history of weird pizzas, including a “2022 scalloped pizza with Oreos around the edge, and deep-fried chicken and calamari studded throughout the middle.”
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.