Week of July 19, 2021

Welcome to my weekly letter, where I share a few noteworthy articles and my own commentary. Without further ado…

Weekly Read

• The Full Story of the Stunning RSA Hack Can Finally Be Told (Wired) — incredible story on RSA’s battle against the hack that compromised its security-as-a-service, by taking its ‘seeds’ (a value that’s used to render the private key. If the world is a mystery unlockable by the private key, its seed would be…. Of course, 42). It would have been a lot harder to hack if the FIDO security key was a thing back then… 😉
• The Hostile Takeover of a Microsoft Flight Simulator Server (Wired) — A very different kind of hack: discord community take-over by intimidating the original teenage owners!! Now that’s not something a better cryptographic algorithm or security model can help avoid.
• A Never-Before-Seen Wiper Malware Is Hitting Israeli Targets (Wired) — welcome to the age of cyber espionage, you have codes that are wiper malware pretending to be ransomware, ransomware pretending to excel spreadsheet, and maybe very soon codes that pretend to be your best friends…
• As Chips Shrink, Rowhammer Attacks Get Harder to Stop (Wired) — right, so… somebody sends a memo to the AI that’s designing the next chips! And hopefully the AI hasn’t been compromised due to rowhammer yet…
• Covert channel in Apple’s M1 is mostly harmless, but it sure is interesting (Ars Technica) — Ok, take a deep breath, and don’t panic… because this is considered very low risk… and because covert channels are common in processors!!? What can go wrong? How about the fact that M1 chips are now on iPad Pro (which is iOS based)?

That’s it for this week! Have a nice weekend!

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Originally published at https://heta.link on July 23, 2021.