Oscar winning documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras has a new film. It’s about Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder. She was at the Cannes Film Festival previewing it this week. In case you do not know who Laura Poitras is, she is the documentary film maker who Edward Snowden first contacted when
Hackers have for the second time stolen money from banks using the SWIFT payment system. Now we have some technical details about the first attack. Usually when hacking news breaks the technical details are not given to the public. Often law enforcement tells the victim to keep those secret. Yet th
The US Military has their own cybersecurity organization. It’s called the US Cyber Command. There is one for the Navy, Army, and Air Force. Their main goal is to protect military communications but they also have attack capabilities. They say they use the same techniques as other hackers to go
You might not know this, but the US Military created much of the encryption technology that we use today, including TOR, the cloaking software used by Edward Snowden and others. They also created SSL and the RSA algorithm. The US Military even invented the internet, in 1969. It was called ARPANET th
It is a cliché to say it, but you have to think like a criminal in order to defeat a criminal. Some businesses and organization, from Samsung, to Google, to even the US Military, have come to the rational conclusion that if that you cannot defeat your enemies outright you can buy them off. So that
Italy is not a country one usually thinks of when they think of hackers or even IT in general. With its perennially slow growing economy and focus on traditional businesses, like wine and sport cars, there are not a lot of startup tech companies there as compared to other places. Nor are there many
An article in The New York Times in March of 2016 explained that one of the 2015 Paris Terror Attackers was shown two things when he first met up with his ISIS handlers: how to fire an assault rifle and how to use TrueCrypt encryption software. The terrorist recruit was given a USB drive with TrueCr
As you probably have already heard, the FBI sued Apple because Apple refused its demand to unlock an iPhone 5C belonging to the San Bernardino terrorists. But what is new and shocking is that Apple withdrew its suit because they figured out how to unlock the phone themselves. In the past law
There are two items on the internet that you need to see if you follow security. First there is this film on Youtube that gives the history of Linux. And then there is story in The Washington Post that explains that some people are concerned that the people who maintain the Linux kernel are not fixi
Ransomware is malware that encrypt data files that can only be decrypted when the data file owner pays a ransom. The only recovery method is to go to a backup. Guessing the password to unlock the file is for all practical purposes impossible because of the nature of cryptography. Regarding defenses