A few days ago, October 27 2016 to be exact, the U.S. Copyright Office temporarily made hackers’ lives a lot easier. They eliminated some restrictions imposed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that had prevented researchers from circumventing protections, such as encryption, that restricted access to copyright protected material. This means that it’s now legal (at least for the next two years) to hack or reverse engineer the software in your own car, pacemaker, PC, phone, you name it. What …
Category: Information Security
Address Sanitizer is a compile time tool that instruments C/C++ applications before running memory corruption and memory leak tests. Due to the extra instrumentation, the performance of the resulting binary is reduced so I wouldn’t recommend it for release builds. But it’s a great tool for debugging your code prior to release. For GCC or clang C/C++ compilers, the steps are as simple as: Compile the binaries to be tested with “–fsanitize=address” flag. There are many options that you can tweak. Run the …
It could be the NSA, it or that geeky dude next door, or it could even be your IT guy… Hacking always commences with reconnaissance, searching and sorting through any available information on the target. In the web 2.0 age of the internet, a lot of that information is freely accessible. Unsurprisingly, such information isn’t just useful for hacking in the conventional sense, but is also valued for national intelligence agencies. In fact, the OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) term was coined …
The open source Go programming language was developed by the 3 Google engineers in 2009 due to their dislike for the complexity of languages like C/ C++. It was designed to maintain the positive characteristics of those languages while improving conciseness, simplicity, and safety. …
Everything comes alive. It’s the long heralded tech future and the future is now. Many things around us – from bulbs to thermostats and sprinklers – are getting smarter, which simply means that they’re getting easier to administer or personalize. That feat is achieved by designing previously mechanical devices to be digital, enabling them to run complex software that process digital input commands, and even hooking them up to the internet in many cases. Et Voilà! The Internet of things (IoT) …
[tribulant_slideshow gallery_id=”3″] I still remember the most productive cup of coffee I had last winter. It was a cappuccino served by an outlet called Dukes, at the City Gate business centre in Cork, Ireland. Darren Fitzpatrick and I were catching up after weeks of ‘maybe next week?’. It’s not the cuppa’s taste I remember, although I guess it must have been alright given that Darren loves Dukes and he know’s more about the caffeine monkey than I ever will. But in the time it took …
From Single-Sign-On for consumers to the integration of partners into corporate systems and applications, in a super connected world, simplifying authentication for your users and your partners is more than a good-to-have. Near-seamless authentication allows you to provide the security for user resources that you must, while keeping your customers happy. How can we achieve this? …
It had been a super long night. The kind of blurry night that involves going to bed way past midnight and waking up well before dawn, after slipping in about 3+ hours of shut eye. The previous day had brought me the gift of a fascinating issue involving ‘device drivers’, my first foray into that area. I had spent all of the previous evening and most of the night reading up on how device drivers work on the Windows operating …
Things happen fast in Cybersecurity. Information technology has always been a rapidly evolving discipline, but in cybersecurity I get the feeling this seem to change even faster. This probably has a lot to do with the nature of ‘immediate urgency’ in this field. Cyber criminals rush to detect and exploit security holes while defenders watch in paranoia lest they get pwned! As such, we experience almost weekly releases of technical discoveries, vulnerabilities, tools, and new (often controversial) laws. …
Cybercriminals churn out thousands of Malware variants each day, using automated means to modify sections of code to evade Antivirus detection. White Hat malware researchers analyse malicious software by dissecting its different components and studying its behavior on the host computer’s operating system. It’s a pretty interesting and intricate field. What skills are required, though? …