Another Reminder That Anonymity Tools Aren’t Foolproof – Vice’s MotherBoard: “Tails, the operating system favoured by journalists, activists, and Edward Snowden for its high degree of privacy protection, has been shown to have critical vulnerabilities in its code. By exploiting these, attackers could peal away a Tails user’s cloak of anonymity. It’s just the latest reminder that tools touted as ‘anonymous’ are not infallible.”
Back Doors in Apple’s Mobile Platform for Law Enforcement, Bosses, Spies (Possibly) — Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing: “Jonathan Zdziarski’s HOPE X talk, ‘Identifying Backdoors, Attack Points, and Surveillance Mechanisms in iOS Devices’, suggests that hundreds of millions of Iphone and Ipad devices ship from Apple with intentional back-doors that can be exploited by law enforcement, identity thieves, spies, and employers.”
Tor Break Talk Axed from Black Hat Conference — ZDNet: “A proposed talk by two Carnegie Mellon University researchers demonstrating how to de-anonymise Tor users on a budget of US$3,000 has been axed from the Black Hat USA 2014 conference in Las Vegas next month. The talk, ‘You don’t have to be the NSA to Break Tor: Deanonymizing Users on a Budget’ by speakers, Alexander Volynkin and Michael McCord, from Carnegie Mellon University’s Computer Emergency Response Team, had reportedly been highly anticipated by punters.”
Visit the Wrong Website, and the FBI Could End Up in Your Computer — Wired: “Security experts call it a ‘drive-by download’: a hacker infiltrates a high-traffic website and then subverts it to deliver malware to every single visitor. It’s one of the most powerful tools in the black hat arsenal, capable of delivering thousands of fresh victims into a hackers’ clutches within minutes . . . For the last two years, the FBI has been quietly experimenting with drive-by hacks as a solution to one of law enforcement’s knottiest Internet problems: how to identify and prosecute users of criminal websites hiding behind the powerful Tor anonymity system.”
Putin Sets $110,000 Bounty for Cracking Tor as Anonymous Internet Usage in Russia Surges — Bloomberg.