With WannaCry and now with Petya we’re getting to see how and why some ransomware worms are more effective than others. [ Jul 3, 2017 — It’s now pretty well accepted that Petya wasn’t ransomware but a wiper instead. The post still applies to ransomware, though. ] I think there are 3 main factors: Propagation, Payload, and Payment….
I’m Selling a Late 2013 MacBook Pro
My friend Saša is selling his MacBook Pro from late 2013 for $1,700 so that he can buy a MacBook. Here are the specs: Retina 2.6 Ghz i7 (4 cores) 16 GB memory 1 TB SSD 1.5 GB dedicated video card Model Name:MacBook Pro Model Identifier:MacBookPro11,3 Processor Name:Intel Core i7 Processor Speed:2.6 GHz Number of Processors:1 Total Number…
Gun Control and British Terrorism
I didn’t write about this immediately because it seemed insensitive, but I want to ask a couple of simple questions about the various terrorist attacks in Britain. If you’re a “more guns equals more safety” type of person, do you honestly believe that the knife attacks in Britain would have been less deadly if guns were easy to…
This Universe’s Final Problem
Once we’re able to decipher our minds, our memories, and everything that makes us unique as individuals, we’ll be able to transfer our minds into digital form. This will basically make us immortal, and I think the next stage is to share knowledge among all of us that are digital. Once we’re all sharing common knowledge, I don’t…
4 Things the Far Left Are Doing to Drive Moderates to the Right
Liberalism in the United States is in the middle of a slow motion suicide by poison. We’re watching the unscrewing of the lid, the last looks about the room, and the multiple sips from the vial. Except we’re seeing it happen at one frame per month with no ability to stop the film. The far left has effectively…
20 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Wonder Woman
I really enjoyed the latest Wonder Woman movie and was surprised by how powerful she was both in it and in the previous Superman movie. So I decided to do some research since I knew virtually nothing about her as a character. Here are some of the interesting things I learned. Wonder Woman was created in 1941 by…
EDC 2017 Recap
I just returned from my annual pilgrimage with my buddy Jason and our friend Martin (plus his brother Jake this year), and here’s a recap. [ PLAYLIST: I’ve created a playlist of around 20 of the top sets at EDC Vegas 2017. You can download it here. ] I ended up going while really sick. I had a…
Terrorism May Destroy Traditional Religion
I think extreme religion is about to remove itself from liberal, western society as the result of internal terrorist attacks. Historically, liberal society has been inclusive. The mantra has been multiculturalism, inclusion, and all the related synonyms. But homegrown terrorism, where thousands or tens of thousands of religious people have all but openly declared war against the western…
OWASP Top 10 Lists are Art, Not Science
I attended the OWASP Top 10 data capture discussion session today at #OWASPSummit2017 in London. Andrew van der Stock lead the session and was asking how we could improve the data collection process, and what we thought the obstacles were to people submitting their data. My answer was that the drama around OWASP “data” collection comes from we…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 82
This week’s topics: Live from London, Gamestop hacked, PowerPoint malware, Chinese Apple Hack, XSS, WWDC summary, FDA approves cancer drug, heroin $51B, ideas, discovery, recommendation, aphorism, and more… This is Episode No. 82 of Unsupervised Learning—a weekly show where I curate 3-5 hours of reading in infosec, technology, and humans into a 15 to 30 minute summary. The…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 81
This week’s topics: OneLogin, Extortion, Coinbase, Pandemic, Booz, Mobile Apps, Electricity, AI voices, Sheets, Walmart, Karoshi, APIs, discovery, aphorisms, and more… This is Episode No. 81 of Unsupervised Learning—a weekly show where I curate 3-5 hours of reading in infosec, technology, and humans into a 15 to 30 minute summary. The goal is to catch you up on…
The Difference Between Precision and Accuracy
People tend to confuse precision and accuracy, and many of the definitions out there aren’t entirely clear. Here’s the easiest way to see the difference. Precision is about taking multiple attempts—such as shots, guesses, or measurements—and having all of them end up very close to each other. Accuracy is about having your attempts land at the true or…
Why I Talk More with Rideshare Drivers
For me there’s an interesting element in rideshare services and how they affect human interaction. The idea was to require less interaction. You don’t have to tell them where you’re going. And you don’t have to talk about payment. So a lot of people imagine that as headphones in and no discussion other than hello and goodbye. But…
Some Thoughts on Presentation Styles
I’m going to talk about presentations here, but keep in mind that most of my context is within the information security world, and each field has a dominant style of its own. So here are my characterizations of various talk styles. INFOSEC Style InfoSec style talks can be summarized as slide-based descriptions of research that are designed to…
Ruby is Gentoo, Python is Ubuntu
I used to be a Gentoo guy. For like 7 years I ran it and it was my world. It was more of a religion than a Linux distro. But perhaps that’s implied. Anyway, I eventually ended up back at Ubuntu. I also used to be a Python guy, but I eventually ended up on Ruby. I feel…
APIs are 2FA’s Achilles Heel
One of the most popular thing to ask about the security of a service, a portal, or really anything internet-facing is: Is it 2FA-enabled? If they answer in the affirmative, this usually ends the conversation in a positive way. As if there’s not much an attacker can do against it. First, that’s not true. Lots of malware is…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 79
This week’s topics: WannaCry, Intel leaks, DocuSign phishing, cockpit codes, Delta facial recognition, China vs. CIA, WordPress bug bounty, Marines and drones, HPE R&D, Watts, graduates only making 40K, China’s DNA project, honeymoons vs. rings, Sherrif Eli, retirees hoarding money, boo restaurant kiosks, investing in employees, discovery, aphorisms, and more… This is Episode No. 79 of Unsupervised Learning—a…
Meaning Anchors
It’s pretty obvious that people need meaning in their lives, but I wonder if the rise of suicide and opiates use can be seen in this light. The way I think about it is that people have to subscribe to something. They need an anchor. Some of the best ones are conservative religions. Conservative Christianity, Islam, etc. I’ll…
An Ubuntu update Command
I have an alias I like to use on Ubuntu that goes something like this: alias update=apt update; apt upgrade -y But there’s an improvement that I made recently I’d like to share. First run this to get the tool. apt install debian-goodies Then run this command checkrestart. checkrestart checkrestart checks to see if you currently need to…
Restaurant Pay Kiosks Are Just Outsourcing Work to the Customer
Restaurants are trying really hard to sell us on the “cool” tech of table kiosks—which, as far as I can tell, are magical boxes that make it so you can never find your waiter. But that’s kind of the point, actually: the more of those boxes there are, the fewer waiters are needed. I thought it was slightly…
How to Download Your LinkedIn Profile as a Resume
For some reason I get a lot of questions about how to create a resume from a LinkedIn profile. I love this functionality because I find it much easier to keep LinkedIn updated and print a resume from there, rather than updating Word docs or whatever. Here’s how you do it. Log into your LinkedIn account. Click the…
Leveraging the Masses as a Competitive Advantage
Imagine a time, say 10-30 years from now, where 80% of people are not needed in society. They can’t produce more value, doing traditional tasks, than computers, AI, and robots can. So they are all either fired or can’t get a job in the first place. It’s a whole separate topic to ask what they’re going to be…
The Best WordPress Plugin for Related Posts
[ May 20, 2017 — I have moved from Similar Posts to YARPP because Similar Posts was destroying my box, both from a network requests and CPU standpoint. I’d avoid it if I were you. ] I’ve been hunting for a solid related posts plugin on WordPress for years. My go-to has always been Contextual Related Posts, which…
Criticism from Both Sides as an Indicator of Neutrality
I just put out issue No. 78 of my newsletter, and I got a couple of critical emails about my mention of the Russians hacking the Macron campaign. Here’s a piece of the first. And here’s a piece of the second. So the first is blasting me for being too right wing, and the second is blasting me…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 78
This week’s topics: The WannaCry ransomware worm, the president’s EO, Macron hacking, HP backdoors, laptop bans, Amazon releases, Chinese online commerce, CRISPR, Germany and renewable energy, beetles, dental health as social indicator, Reading superpowers, Net Neutrality, serverless, deep learning black box, The Three Body Problem, you can now support the site, The Mechanical Universe, TrueCaller, and more… This…