Category Archives: A Little Sunshine

Includes investigative blog posts meant to shine a light on the darker corners of the Internet.

Dread Pirate Sunk By Leaky CAPTCHA

September 6, 2014
76 Comments

Ever since October 2013, when the FBI took down the online black market and drug bazaar known as the Silk Road, privacy activists and security experts have traded conspiracy theories about how the U.S. government managed to discover the geographic location of the Silk Road Web servers. Those systems were supposed to be obscured behind the anonymity service Tor, but as court documents released Friday explain, that wasn’t entirely true: Turns out, the login page for the Silk Road employed an anti-abuse CAPTCHA service that pulled content from the open Internet, thus leaking the site’s true location.

Fun With Funny Money

September 1, 2014
65 Comments

Readers or “fans” of this blog have sent some pretty crazy stuff to my front door over the past few years, including a gram of heroin, a giant bag of feces, an enormous cross-shaped funeral arrangement, and a heavily armed police force. Last week, someone sent me a far less menacing package: an envelope full of cash. Granted, all of the cash turned out to be counterfeit money, but hey it’s the thought that counts, right?

Counterfeit U.S. Cash Floods Crime Forums

August 20, 2014
85 Comments

One can find almost anything for sale online, particularly in some of the darker corners of the Web and on the myriad cybercrime forums. These sites sell everything from credit cards to identities and stolen merchandise, but until very recently, one illicit good I had never seen for sale on the forums was counterfeit U.S. currency.

Lorem Ipsum: Of Good & Evil, Google & China

August 18, 2014
134 Comments

Imagine discovering a secret language spoken only online by a knowledgeable and learned few. Over a period of weeks, as you begin to tease out the meaning of this curious tongue and ponder its purpose, the language appears to shift in subtle but fantastic ways, remaking itself daily before your eyes. And just when you are poised to share your findings with the rest of the world, the entire thing vanishes.

This fairly describes my roller coaster experience of curiosity, wonder and disappointment over the past few weeks, as I’ve worked alongside security researchers in an effort to understand how “lorem ipsum” — common placeholder text on countless Web sites — could be transformed into so many apparently geopolitical and startlingly modern phrases when translated from Latin to English using Google Translate.

How Secure is Your Security Badge?

August 15, 2014
46 Comments

Security conferences are a great place to learn about the latest hacking tricks, tools and exploits, but they also remind us of important stuff that was shown to be hackable in previous years and never really got fixed. Perhaps the best example of this at last week’s annual DefCon security conference in Las Vegas came from hackers who built on research first released in 2010 to show just how trivial it still is to read, modify and clone most HID cards — the rectangular white plastic “smart” cards that organizations worldwide distribute to employees for security badges.

Tenn. Firm Sues Bank Over $327K Cyberheist

August 13, 2014
57 Comments

An industrial maintenance and construction firm in Tennessee that was hit by a $327,000 cyberheist is suing its financial institution to recover the stolen funds, charging the bank with negligence and breach of contract. Court-watchers say the lawsuit — if it proceeds to trial — could make it easier and cheaper for cyberheist victims to recover losses.

Personalize Your Copy of Spam Nation

August 11, 2014
26 Comments

Good news for fans of this blog who have not yet pre-ordered a copy of my upcoming book, Spam Nation. Politics & Prose, a literary landmark in the District of Columbia, will be helping me launch a six-city book tour, and is offering a personalized message from this author for anyone who pre-orders a copy of Spam Nation through the D.C. store’s Web site.

New Site Recovers Files Locked by Cryptolocker Ransomware

August 6, 2014
69 Comments

Until today, Microsoft Windows users who’ve been unfortunate enough to have the personal files on their computer encrypted and held for ransom by a nasty strain of malware called CryptoLocker have been faced with a tough choice: Pay cybercrooks a ransom of a few hundred to several thousand dollars to unlock the files, or kiss those files goodbye forever. That changed this morning, when two security firms teamed up to launch a free new online service that can help victims unlock and recover files scrambled by the malware.