It's almost August, which means Hacker Summer Camp — the confluence ofBSides Las Vegas,Black Hat USA, and DEF CON — is nearly upon us. If you're going to Las Vegas to take part in the annual celebration of probing every system for any possible weakness, we've got a wide selection of documentaries to get you in the investigative mood.
And even if you can't make it to the desert this year, you can console yourself by looking at theweather reports for Nevadaand streaming these examinations of cyberattacks and the people behind them. Most of these are available either free on YouTube or as a standard offering on a streaming service, but we note which ones require rental or purchase fees.
Full disclosure: I haven't seen any of these, but each of them looks far superior to the execrable Hackers. Unknown if they live up to Sneakers, but that was the best computer security film of all time.
Body Heat was a 1981 remake of the classic 1944 film Double Indemnity. Known mostly for the skin showed by Kathleen Turner, about the only thing really superior about the remake is John Barry's spectacular Film Noir score.
I took Wolfgang's toys to a dog shelter today. Well, not all of them - we kept his frisbee, his blue stuffed animal, and a couple of balls that his dog friends look for when they come over. But I took probably 30 dog toys to be shelter.
After all, Wolfgang always got Puppy Loot on Christmas. Now we hope that these dogs who have nothing will enjoy having a toy all their own. As The Queen Of The World has been saying, he was always so good about sharing his toys. She says that he'd like sharing his toys with other dogs. She's right, of course.
But this was a hard experience for me. It was part of letting go, which has to be done. But it was hard. Chris Stapleton wrote this song the night that his dog died. I expect that was hard, too.
Maggie's Song (Songwriter: Chris Stapleton)
Let me tell you a story About an old friend of mine Somebody left her in a shopping cart In a parking lot for us to find
Just a fuzzy black pup She was hungry and feeling alone We put her in the back seat Told her we were taking her home
Run, Maggie, run With the heart of a rebel child Oh, run, Maggie, run Be just as free as you are wild
A few kids later We moved out on the farm And she followed those kids around Yeah, she kept them safe from harm
And she loved to chase squirrels And playing out in the snow She'd take off like a bullet Man, you should have seen her go
Run, Maggie, run With the heart of a rebel child Oh, run, Maggie, run Be just as free as you are wild
It was raining on a Monday The day that Maggie died She woke up and couldn't use her legs So I laid down by her side
She put her head on my hand Like she'd done so many times I told her she was a good dog Then I told her goodbye
Run, Maggie, run With the heart of a rebel child Oh, run, Maggie, run Be just as free as you are wild
I had a revelation As the tractor dug a hole I can tell you right now That a dog has a soul
And I thought to myself As we buried her on the hill I never knew me a better dog And I guess I never will
Run, Maggie, run With the heart of a rebel child Oh, run, Maggie, run Be just as free as you are wild
Oh, run, Maggie, run With the heart of a rebel child Oh, run, Maggie, run Be just as free as you are wild
Wolfgang never had the heart of a rebel child. Instead, he shared his toys with his doggie friends. But I never knew me a better dog, and I guess I never will.
Most interestingly is the researchers’ findings of what they describe as the backdoor in TEA1. Ordinarily, radios using TEA1 used a key of 80-bits. But Wetzels said the team found a “secret reduction step” which dramatically lowers the amount of entropy the initial key offered. An attacker who followed this step would then be able to decrypt intercepted traffic with consumer-level hardware and a cheap software defined radio dongle.
Looks like the encryption algorithm was intentionally weakened by intelligence agencies to facilitate easy eavesdropping.
There's an old saying that while there may be friendly foreign governments, there are no friendly foreign Intelligence Agencies. Or domestic ones either, seemingly.
Even if you're a LEO. Note that this makes secure police communications problematic. Not cool.
Four suspects in theshocking theft of a Celtic gold coin hoardfrom the Celtic-Roman Museum in Manching, Bavaria,have been arrested. The bad news is one of the suspects was carrying 18 gold lumps in a plastic bag at the time of his arrest. Micro-X-ray fluorescence analysis of the composition of the nuggets found they match that of the Celtic coins. Each lump amounts to four of the coins. So yes, these rats stole a historically priceless hoard of 483 Celtic coins from 100 B.C. and melted at least 70 of them down.
It was interesting how well planned the heist was, and the various skill sets in the group. I hope they find the rest of the coins.
Apple fixes security bugs that are being exploited in the wild. If you have any of the following, you will want to update ASAP:
Apple has released fixes for several security flaws that affect its iPhones, iPads, macOS computers, and Apple TV and watches, and warned that some of these bugs have already been exploited.
Here's a quick list of all of the security updates released late on Monday afternoon:
The goal of the new US Cyber Trust Mark, coming voluntarily to Internet of Things (IoT) devices by the end of 2024, is to keep people from having to do deep research before buying a thermostat, sprinkler controller, or baby monitor.
If you see a shield with a microchip in it that's a certain color, you'll know something by comparing it to other shields. What exactly that shield will mean is not yet decided. The related National Institute of Standards and Technology report suggests it will involve encrypted transmission and storage, software updates, and how much control a buyer has over passwords and data retention. But the only thing really new since the initiative's October 2022 announcement is the look of the label, a slightly more firm timeline, and more input and discussion meetings to follow.
We'll have to see how this plays out, but better consumer information on security is A Good Thing.
Back on myWandering Around Monday, I noted that solar cycle 25 had just posted the highest sunspot number since cycle 23 back in 2002; the highest sunspot number in 21 years.
And so to sun spots and climate. We have quite good records of sunspot activity going back to 1700 A.D. We have decent records of the price of wheat going back much further - pretty good ones to 1500 A.D., and sporadic recordsall the way back to 1250 A.D.(!). The reason is that bread is the staff of life - no bread, and people starved.
In short, grain prices are a pretty good proxy for climate, in the days before thermometers. Certainly better than, say,bristle cone pinetree rings. This is important for two reasons, and the combination is very bad news indeed for people who cling to the "Carbon Dioxide is killing Mother Gaia" theory.
First, the price of grain and the number of sunspots have been known to be very closely correlated for hundreds of years. William Herschel (who discovered the planet Uranus) first published this,back around 1800. When there are a lot of sun spots, he said, the price of grain is low - harvests are good. When there are few sun spots, harvests fail and the price of grain soars.
Remember, we have records on this that are so old that this has been known for literally hundreds of years. You might say that, err, the Science is Settled.
So yay for sun spots. To celebrate, here is some music from back when Disney made good films (the music here was the soundtrack to the 1959 Academy Award winning Disney short Grand Canyon.
Cybercriminals are leveraging generative AI technology to aid their activities and launchbusiness email compromise(BEC) attacks, including use of a tool known as WormGPT, a black-hat alternative to GPT models specifically designed for malicious activities.
According to a report from SlashNext, WormGPT was trained on various data sources, with a focus on malware-related data, generating human-like text based on the input it receives and is able to create highly convincing fake emails.
The only real defense you have against this new AI-generated email threat is to be very, very cautious (should I say "suspicious") of all emails that you get. As with firearms, the most important computer security safety tool is between your ears.
Wolfgang had a favorite tree that he loved to lie underneath. We would go out at the end of the day and sit (we even called it "Sit Time" and he knew those words and what they meant - he'd get all wiggly when he heard them).
The Queen Of The World ordered a special gift for me for Father's Day. I put it under Wolfgang's tree.
Here's a close up picture.
The text reads:
Wolfgang
2012-2023
If love could have saved you, you would have lived forever.
It's been around 100 days now and his absence still hangs heavy. We're both still sad. He's a dog that will take a lot of getting over.
