The Story of Colossus
Nice video of a talk by Chris Shore on the history of Colossus.
Entries Tagged "video"
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Details of a Computer Banking Scam
This is a longish video that describes a profitable computer banking scam that’s run out of call centers in places like India. There’s a lot of fluff about glitterbombs and the like, but the details are interesting. The scammers convince the victims to give them remote access to their computers, and then that they’ve mistyped a dollar amount and have received a large refund that they didn’t deserve. Then they convince the victims to send cash to a drop site, where a money mule retrieves it and forwards it to the scammers.
I found it interesting for several reasons. One, it illustrates the complex business nature of the scam: there are a lot of people doing specialized jobs in order for it to work. Two, it clearly shows the psychological manipulation involved, and how it preys on the unsophisticated and vulnerable. And three, it’s an evolving tactic that gets around banks increasingly flagging blocking suspicious electronic transfers.
Friday Squid Blogging: Amazing Video of a Black-Eyed Squid Trying to Eat an Owlfish
From the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.
Friday Squid Blogging: Live Giant Squid Found in Japan
A giant squid was found alive in the port of Izumo, Japan. Not a lot of news, just this Twitter thread (with a couple of videos).
If confirmed, I believe this will be the THIRD time EVER a giant squid was filmed alive!
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.
Cyber Public Health
In a lecture, Adam Shostack makes the case for a discipline of cyber public health. It would relate to cybersecurity in a similar way that public health relates to medicine.
Friday Squid Blogging: Ram’s Horn Squid Video
This is the first video footage of a ram’s horn squid (Spirula spirula) .
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.
Determining What Video Conference Participants Are Typing from Watching Shoulder Movements
Accuracy isn’t great, but that it can be done at all is impressive.
Murtuza Jadiwala, a computer science professor heading the research project, said his team was able to identify the contents of texts by examining body movement of the participants. Specifically, they focused on the movement of their shoulders and arms to extrapolate the actions of their fingers as they typed.
Given the widespread use of high-resolution web cams during conference calls, Jadiwala was able to record and analyze slight pixel shifts around users’ shoulders to determine if they were moving left or right, forward or backward. He then created a software program that linked the movements to a list of commonly used words. He says the “text inference framework that uses the keystrokes detected from the video … predict[s] words that were most likely typed by the target user. We then comprehensively evaluate[d] both the keystroke/typing detection and text inference frameworks using data collected from a large number of participants.”
In a controlled setting, with specific chairs, keyboards and webcam, Jadiwala said he achieved an accuracy rate of 75 percent. However, in uncontrolled environments, accuracy dropped to only one out of every five words being correctly identified.
Other factors contribute to lower accuracy levels, he said, including whether long sleeve or short sleeve shirts were worn, and the length of a user’s hair. With long hair obstructing a clear view of the shoulders, accuracy plummeted.
Seny Kamara on "Crypto for the People"
Seny Kamara gave an excellent keynote talk this year at the (online) CRYPTO Conference. He talked about solving real-world crypto problems for marginalized communities around the world, instead of crypto problems for governments and corporations. Well worth watching and listening to.
iPhone Apps Stealing Clipboard Data
iOS apps are repeatedly reading clipboard data, which can include all sorts of sensitive information.
While Haj Bakry and Mysk published their research in March, the invasive apps made headlines again this week with the developer beta release of iOS 14. A novel feature Apple added provides a banner warning every time an app reads clipboard contents. As large numbers of people began testing the beta release, they quickly came to appreciate just how many apps engage in the practice and just how often they do it.
This YouTube video, which has racked up more than 87,000 views since it was posted on Tuesday, shows a small sample of the apps triggering the new warning.
EDITED TO ADD (7/6): LinkedIn and Reddit are doing this.
Hacking Voice Assistants with Ultrasonic Waves
I previously wrote about hacking voice assistants with lasers. Turns you can do much the same thing with ultrasonic waves:
Voice assistants—the demo targeted Siri, Google Assistant, and Bixby—are designed to respond when they detect the owner’s voice after noticing a trigger phrase such as ‘Ok, Google’.
Ultimately, commands are just sound waves, which other researchers have already shown can be emulated using ultrasonic waves which humans can’t hear, providing an attacker has a line of sight on the device and the distance is short.
What SurfingAttack adds to this is the ability to send the ultrasonic commands through a solid glass or wood table on which the smartphone was sitting using a circular piezoelectric disc connected to its underside.
Although the distance was only 43cm (17 inches), hiding the disc under a surface represents a more plausible, easier-to-conceal attack method than previous techniques.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.