A lesson in journalism vs. cybersecurity
A recent NYTimes article blaming the NSA for a ransomware attack on Baltimore is typical bad journalism. It's an op-ed masquerading as a news article. It cites many to support the conclusion the NSA is to be blamed, but only a single quote, from the NSA director, from the opposing ... Read More
Programming languages infosec professionals should learn
Code is an essential skill of the infosec professional, but there are so many languages to choose from. What language should you learn? As a heavy coder, I thought I'd answer that question, or at least give some perspective.The tl;dr is JavaScript. Whatever other language you learn, you'll also need ... Read More
Was it a Chinese spy or confused tourist?
Politico has an article from a former spy analyzing whether the "spy" they caught at Mar-a-lago (Trump's Florida vacation spot) was actually a "spy". I thought I'd add to it from a technical perspective about her malware, USB drives, phones, cash, and so on.The part that has gotten the most ... Read More
Assange indicted for breaking a password
In today's news, after 9 years holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy, Julian Assange has finally been arrested. The US DoJ accuses Assange for trying to break a password. I thought I'd write up a technical explainer what this means.According to the US DoJ's press release:Julian P. Assange, 47, the ... Read More
Some notes on the Raspberry Pi
I keep seeing this article in my timeline today about the Raspberry Pi. I thought I'd write up some notes about it.The Raspberry Pi costs $35 for the board, but to achieve a fully functional system, you'll need to add a power supply, storage, and heatsink, which ends up costing ... Read More
A quick lesson in confirmation bias
In my experience, hacking investigations are driven by ignorance and confirmation bias. We regularly see things we cannot explain. We respond by coming up with a story where our pet theory explains it. Since there is no alternative explanation, this then becomes evidence of our theory, where this otherwise inexplicable ... Read More
A basic question about TCP
So on Twitter, somebody asked this question:I have a very basic computer networking question: when sending a TCP packet, is the packet ACK'ed at every node in the route between the sender and the recipient, or just by the final recipient?This isn't just a basic question, it is the basic ... Read More
How Bezo’s dick pics might’ve been exposed
In the news, the National Enquirer has extorted Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos by threatening to publish the sext-messages/dick-pics he sent to his mistress. How did the National Enquirer get them? There are rumors that maybe Trump's government agents or the "deep state" were involved in this sordid mess. The more ... Read More
Passwords in a file
My dad is on some sort of committee for his local home owners association. He asked about saving all the passwords in a file stored on Microsoft's cloud OneDrive, along with policy/procedures for the association. I assumed he called because I'm an internationally recognized cyberexpert. Or maybe he just wanted ... Read More
Notes on Build Hardening
I thought I'd comment on a paper about "build safety" in consumer products, describing how software is built to harden it against hackers trying to exploit bugs.What is build safety?Modern languages (Java, C#, Go, Rust, JavaScript, Python, etc.) are inherently "safe", meaning they don't have "buffer-overflows" or related problems.However, C/C++ ... Read More
