The personal information of more than 243 million Brazilians, including alive and deceased, has been exposed online after web developers left the password for a crucial government database inside the source code of an official Brazilian Ministry of Health’s website for at least six months. From a report: The security snafu was discovered by reporters from Brazilian newspaper Estadao, the same…
Tag: keys
Ok Google: Please Publish Your DKIM Secret Keys
Matthew Green, a cryptographer and professor at Johns Hopkins University, writes: The Internet is a dangerous place in the best of times. Sometimes Internet engineers find ways to mitigate the worst of these threats, and sometimes they fail. Every now and then, however, a major Internet company finds a solution that actually makes the situation worse for just about everyone. Today…
Research produces intense light beams with quantum correlations
The properties of quantum states of light are already leveraged by such highly sophisticated leading-edge technologies as those of the latest sensitivity upgrades to LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, deployed to detect gravitational waves since September 2015, or the encryption keys used for satellite on-board security. …
The Eerie AI World of Deepfake Music
Artificial intelligence is being used to create new songs seemingly performed by Frank Sinatra and other dead stars. ‘Deepfakes’ are cute tricks — but they could change pop for ever. From a report: “It’s Christmas time! It’s hot tub time!” sings Frank Sinatra. At least, it sounds like him. With an easy swing, cheery bonhomie, and understated brass and string flourishes,…
Silk Road Bitcoins Worth $1 Billion Change Hands After Seven Years
A billion dollars worth of bitcoins linked to the shuttered darknet market Silk Road has changed hands for the first time in seven years, prompting renewed speculation about the fate of the illicit fortune. The Guardian reports: Almost 70,000 bitcoins stored in the account which, like all bitcoin wallets, is visible to the public, had lain untouched since April 2013. The…
IT’S INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY
bobstreo informs us that it’s CAPS LOCK DAY and shares an excerpt about its history: Caps Lock Day first came to pass in the year 2000, when Derek Arnold of Iowa decided that he, like so many other internet users, had simply had enough of people using all caps to emphasize themselves on the web. So he created Caps Lock Day…
Microsoft Adds Option To Disable JScript In Internet Explorer
As part of the October 2020 Patch Tuesday security updates, Microsoft has added a new option to Windows to let system administrators disable the JScript component inside Internet Explorer. ZDNet reports: The JScript scripting engine is an old component that was initially included with Internet Explorer 3.0 in 1996 and was Microsoft’s own dialect of the ECMAScript standard (the JavaScript language)….
Three npm Packages Opened Remote-Access Shells on Linux and Windows Systems
“Three JavaScript packages have been removed from the npm portal on Thursday for containing malicious code,” reports ZDNet. “According to advisories from the npm security team, the three JavaScript libraries opened shells on the computers of developers who imported the packages into their projects.” The shells, a technical term used by cyber-security researchers, allowed threat actors to connect remotely to the…
Zoom To Roll Out End-to-End Encrypted (E2EE) Calls
Video conferencing platform Zoom announced today plans to roll out end-to-end encryption (E2EE) capabilities starting next week. From a report: E2EE will allow Zoom users to generate individual encryption keys that will be used to encrypt voice or video calls between them and other conference participants. These keys will be stored locally and will not be shared with Zoom servers, meaning…
Amazon’s Latest Gimmicks Are Pushing the Limits of Privacy
At the end of September, Amazon debuted two especially futuristic products within five days of each other: a small autonomous surveillance drone, called Ring Always Home Cam, and a palm recognition scanner, called Amazon One. “Both products aim to make security and authentication more convenient — but for privacy-conscious consumers, they also raise red flags,” reports Wired. From the report: Amazon’s…