tl;dr: In August 2017, I reported a vulnerability to Panera Bread that allowed the full name, home address, email address, food/dietary…
tl;dr: In August 2017, I reported a vulnerability to Panera Bread that allowed the full name, home address, email address, food/dietary preferences, username, phone
number, birthday and last four digits of a saved credit card to be accessed in bulk for any user that had ever signed up for an account. This
includes my own personal data! Despite an explicit acknowledgement of the issue and a promise to fix it, Panera Bread sat on the vulnerability and,
as far as I can tell, did nothing about it for eight months. When Brian Krebs publicly broke the news, other news outlets emphasized the usual “We take your security very
seriously, security is a top priority for us” prepared statement from Panera Bread. Worse still, the vulnerability was not fixed at
all — which means the company either misrepresented its actual security posture to the media to save face or was not competent enough to
determine this fact for themselves. This post establishes a canonical timeline so subsequent reporting doesn’t get confused.
For over a decade, civil libertarians have been fighting government mass surveillance of innocent Americans over the Internet. We’ve just lost an important battle. On January 18,
President Trump signed the renewal of Section 702, domestic mass surveillance became effectively a permanent part of US law. Section 702 was initially passed in 2008, as an…
I've long been a proponent of Content Security Policies (CSPs). I've used them to fix mixed content warnings on this blog after Disqus made a little mistake, you'll see one adorning
Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) and I even wrote a dedicated Pluralsight course on browser security headers. I'm a
But it’s not all roses with CSPs and that’s partly due to what browsers will and will not let you do and partly due to what the platforms running our websites will and will not let
you do. For example, this blog runs on Ghost Pro which is a managed SaaS platform. I can upload whatever theme I like, but I can’t control
many aspects of how the platform actually executes, including how it handles response headers which is how a CSP is normally served by a site. Now I’m enormously supportive of running on managed platforms, but this is one of the
limitations of doing so. I also can’t add custom headers via Cloudflare at “the edge”; I’m serving the HSTS header from there because there’s first class support for that in the GUI, but not for CSP either
specifically in the GUI or via custom response headers. This will be achievable in the future via Cloudflare workers but for now, they have to come from the origin site.
However, you can add a CSP via meta tag and indeed that’s what I originally did with the upgrade-insecure-requests implementation I mentioned earlier when I fixed
the Disqus issue. However – and this is where we start getting into browser limitations – you can’t use the report-uri directive in a meta tag. Now that doesn’t matter if all the CSP
is doing is upgrading requests, but it matters a lot if you’re actually blocking content. That’s where the real value proposition of a CSP lies too; in its ability
to block things that may have been maliciously inserted into a site. I’ve had enough experience with breaking the CSP on HIBP to know that reporting is absolutely invaluable and
indeed when I’ve not paid attention to reports in the past, it’s
literally cost me money.
One of the most-popular WordPress plugins is Jetpack, a product of Automattic (best-known for providing the widely-used WordPress hosting service “WordPress.com“). Among Jetpack’s
features (many of which are very good) is Jetpack Protect which adds – among other things – the possibility for a CAPTCHA to appear on your login pages. This feature is slightly worse than pointless as it makes
it harder for humans to log in but has no significant impact upon automated robots; at best, it provides a false sense of security and merely frustrates and slows down legitimate human
editors.
Thanks, WordPress, for slowing me down with a CAPTCHA that a robot can solve more-easily than a human.
“Proving your humanity”, as you’re asked to do, is a task that’s significantly easier for a robot to perform than a human. Eventually, of course, all tests of this nature seem likely to fail as robots become smarter than humans
(especially as the most-popular system is specifically geared towards training robots), but that’s hardly an excuse for inventing a system
that was a failure from its inception. Jetpack’s approach is fundamentally flawed because it makes absolutely no effort to disguise the challenge in a way that humans are able to read
any-differently than robots. I’ll demonstrate that in a moment.
Don’t just disable this, though! Other “Protect” features make sense. If only you could disable just the one that doesn’t…
A while back, a colleague of mine network-enabled Jetpack Protect across a handful of websites that I occasionally need to log into, and it bugged me that it ‘broke’ my password safe’s
ability to automatically log me in. So to streamline my workflow – as well as to demonstrate quite how broken Jetpack Protect’s CAPTCHA is, I’ve written a userscript that you can install into your web browser that will
completely circumvent it, solving the maths problems on your behalf so that you don’t have to. Here’s how to use it:
Install a userscript manager into your browser if you don’t have one already: I use Tampermonkey, but it ought to work with almost any of
them.
From now on, whenever you go to a page whose web path begins with “/wp-login.php” that contains a Jetpack Protect maths problem, the answer will be automatically calculated and
filled-in on your behalf. The usual userscript rules apply: if you don’t trust me, read the source code (there are really only five lines to check) and disable automatic updates for it
(especially as it operates across all domains), and feel free to adapt/improve however you see fit. Maybe if we can get enough people using it Automattic will fix this
half-hearted CAPTCHA – or at least give us a switch to disable it in the first
place.
Update: 15 October 2018 – the latest version of Jetpack makes an insignificant change to this CAPTCHA; version 1.2 of this script (linked above) works around the change.
Interesting research: “Long-term market implications of data breaches, not,” by Russell Lange and Eric W. Burger. Abstract: This report assesses the impact disclosure of data breaches
has on the total returns and volatility of the affected companies’ stock, with a focus on the results relative to the performance of the firms’ peer industries, as represented…
Turns out you can’t trust the free market to penalise companies whose negligence permits data breaches. I am
Dan’s lack of surprise. This is, of course, why security requires regulation.
It’s been a frantic week of security scares — it seems like every day there’s a new vulnerability. It’s been a real struggle for me personally to pretend like I understand what’s
going on when asked about it by family members.
Seeing people close to me get all flustered at the prospect of being “powned” has really put things in perspective for me.
So, it is with a heavy heart that I’ve decided to come clean and tell you all how I’ve been stealing usernames, passwords and credit card numbers from your sites for the past few
years.
This site maintains a table cross-referencing the most popular “secure” messaging apps (WhatsApp, Signal, Skype etc.) against their security features, so that you can make an informed
decision.
The tl;dr is, of course, what I’ve been saying all along: use Signal! (at least until Riot is more
mature…)
In January 2016, I spent $3,000 to buy 7.4 bitcoins. At the time, it seemed an entirely worthwhile thing to do. I had recently started working as a research director at the Institute
for the Future’s Blockchain Futures Lab, and I wanted firsthand experience with bitcoin, a cryptocurrency that uses a blockchain to record transactions on its network. I had no way of
knowing that this transaction would lead to a white-knuckle scramble to avoid losing a small fortune…
Yesterday, a hacker pulled off the second biggest heist in the history of digital currencies.
Around 12:00 PST, an unknown attacker exploited a critical flaw in the Parity multi-signature wallet on the Ethereum network, draining three massive wallets of over $31,000,000 worth
of Ether in a matter of minutes. Given a couple more hours, the hacker could’ve made off with over $180,000,000 from vulnerable wallets.
Let this pledge be duly noted on the permanent record of the Internet. I don’t know if there’s an afterlife, but I’ll be finding out soon enough, and I plan to go out mad as
hell…
One of the things people often tweet to us @ncsc are examples of websites which prevent you pasting in a password. Why do websites do this? The debate has raged – with most
commentators raging how annoying it is.
So why do organisations do this? Often no reason is given, but when one is, that reason is ‘security’. The NCSC don’t think the reasons add up. We think that stopping password
pasting (or SPP) is a bad thing that reduces security. We think customers should be allowed to paste their passwords into forms, and that
it improves security…
In early June 2014, accountants at the Lumiere Place Casino in St. Louis noticed that several of their slot machines had—just for a couple of days—gone
haywire. The government-approved software that powers such machines gives the house a fixed mathematical edge, so that casinos can be certain of how much they’ll earn over the long
haul—say, 7.129 cents for every dollar played. But on June 2 and 3, a number of Lumiere’s machines had spit out far more money than they’d consumed, despite not awarding any major
jackpots, an aberration known in industry parlance as a negative hold. Since code isn’t prone to sudden fits of madness, the only plausible explanation was that someone was cheating…
In this post I’ll explain why quantum computers are useless to find hash function collisions, and how we can leverage this powerlessness to build post-quantum signature
schemes. I’ll then describe a quantum computing model that you can try at home, and one where hash function collisions are easy to find…
In common slang, FTW is an acronym “for the win” and while that’s appropriate here, I think a better expansion is “for the world.”
We’re pleased to announce that we have sponsored the development of TLS 1.3 in OpenSSL. As it is one of the most widely-used TLS libraries, it is a good investment for the overall
health and security of the Internet, so that everyone is able to deploy TLS 1.3 as soon as possible…
