Phishing with Unicode Domains

When visiting a domain name containing a Unicode character that visually resembles an ASCII character, your browser will transform the Unicode characters to Punycode in the address bar to prevent homograph attacks. For example: the Cyrillic а (codepoint U+0430) totally looks like the Latin a (codepoint U+0061). When visting brаm.us (with the Cyrillic а in …

KeySweeper – Log all keystrokes from any Microsoft wireless keyboard

KeySweeper is a stealthy Arduino-based device, camouflaged as a functioning USB wall charger, that wirelessly and passively sniffs, decrypts, logs and reports back (over GSM) all keystrokes from any Microsoft wireless keyboards (using proprietary 2.4GHz RF) in the area. Keystrokes are sent back to the KeySweeper operator over the Internet via an optional GSM chip, …

How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username

I had a rare Twitter username, @N. Yep, just one letter. I’ve been offered as much as $50,000 for it. People have tried to steal it. Password reset instructions are a regular sight in my email inbox. As of today, I no longer control @N. I was extorted into giving it up. A sad story …

Reverse Engineering a D-Link Backdoor

alpha_auth_check itself is a fairly simple function. It does a few strstr’s and strcmp’s against some pointers in the http_request_t structure, then calls check_login, which actually does the authentication check. It is the final strcmp however, which proves to be the most compelling: This is performing a strcmp between the string pointer at offset 0xD0 …

Kill the Password: Why a String of Characters Can’t Protect Us Anymore

Mat Honan, who’s digital life was destroyed this summer, on passwords The age of the password has come to an end; we just haven’t realized it yet. And no one has figured out what will take its place. What we can say for sure is this: Access to our data can no longer hinge on …

How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking

Mat Honan’s digital life was destroyed: His Google account, Twitter Account, Apple account, … all were gone. Along with that all of his iDevices were remotely wiped by the hackers. Getting into Amazon let my hackers get into my Apple ID account, which helped them get into Gmail, which gave them access to Twitter. Information …