Tag Archives: Nicholas Weaver

The Lowdown on the Apple-FBI Showdown

February 22, 2016
194 Comments

Many readers have asked for a primer summarizing the privacy and security issues at stake in the the dispute between Apple and the U.S. Justice Department, which last week convinced a judge in California to order Apple to unlock an iPhone used by one of assailants in the recent San Bernardino massacres. I don’t have much original reporting to contribute on this important debate, but I’m visiting it here because it’s a complex topic that deserves the broadest possible public scrutiny.

This is Why People Fear the ‘Internet of Things’

February 18, 2016
149 Comments

Imagine buying an internet-enabled surveillance camera, network attached storage device, or home automation gizmo, only to find that it secretly and constantly phones home to a vast peer-to-peer (P2P) network run by the Chinese manufacturer of the hardware. Now imagine that the geek gear you bought doesn’t actually let you block this P2P communication without some serious networking expertise or hardware surgery that few users would attempt.

China Censors Facebook.net, Blocks Sites With “Like” Buttons

April 28, 2015
20 Comments

Chinese government censors at the helm of the “Great Firewall of China” appear to have errantly blocked Chinese Web surfers from visiting pages that call out to connect.facebook.net, a resource used by Facebook’s “like” buttons. While the apparent screw-up was quickly fixed, the block was cached by many Chinese networks — effectively preventing millions of Chinese Web surfers from visiting a huge number of sites that are not normally censored.

Don’t Be Fodder for China’s ‘Great Cannon’

April 10, 2015
57 Comments

China has been actively diverting unencrypted Web traffic destined for its top online search service — Baidu.com — so that some visitors from outside of the country were unwittingly enlisted in a novel and unsettling series of denial-of-service attacks aimed at sidelining sites that distribute anti-censorship tools, according to research released this week.

Treasury Dept: Tor a Big Source of Bank Fraud

December 5, 2014
50 Comments

A new report from the U.S. Treasury Department found that a majority of bank account takeovers by cyberthieves over the past decade might have been thwarted had affected institutions known to look for and block transactions coming through Tor, a global communications network that helps users maintain anonymity by obfuscating their true location online.

Service Drains Competitors’ Online Ad Budget

July 25, 2014
72 Comments

The longer one lurks in the Internet underground, the more difficult it becomes to ignore the harsh reality that for nearly every legitimate online business there is a cybercrime-oriented anti-business. Case in point: Today’s post looks at a popular service that helps crooked online marketers exhaust the Google AdWords budgets of their competitors.

Florida Targets High-Dollar Bitcoin Exchangers

February 7, 2014
131 Comments

State authorities in Florida on Thursday announced criminal charges targeting three men who allegedly ran illegal businesses moving large amounts of cash in and out of the Bitcoin virtual currency. Experts say this is the first case in which Bitcoin vendors have been prosecuted under state anti-money laundering laws, and that prosecutions like these could smother one of the last remaining avenues for purchasing Bitcoins anonymously.

No Bail for Alleged Silk Road Mastermind

November 21, 2013
84 Comments

A federal judge has denied bail for Ross Ulbricht, the ? man arrested last month on suspicion of running the Silk Road, an online black market that offered everything from drugs and guns to computer hackers and hitmen for hire.

The decision came after federal prosecutors dumped a virtual truckload of additional incriminating evidence supporting its claim that Ulbricht was the infamous Silk Road administrator known as the “Dread Pirate Roberts” (DPR), and that he was indeed a strong flight risk. To top it off, the government also now alleges that Ulbricht orchestrated and paid for a murder-for-hire scheme targeting six individuals (until today, Ulbricht was accused of plotting just two of these executions).