Questions tagged [security]
Questions about security; as it applies to any vulnerable and valuable asset, such as a person, dwelling, community, nation, or organization.
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Is closed-source code more secure than open-source?
My computing teacher told us that closed source software is more secure than open source software, because with open source "anyone can modify it and put stuff in." This is why they do not want to use ...
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Are Americans more likely to be killed by vending machines than terrorist refugees?
The Financial Times did some analysis of Donald Trump's controversial immigration restrictions (which were claimed to be about protecting Americans from terrorism).
They focus on analysing risk from ...
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The origin of "99 cents"
I've seen two competing theories on the origin of pricing products at $<desired dollar amount minus 1>.99 (i.e. charging $19.99 instead of $20, of $5.99 instead of $6):
Psychological pricing ...
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Does Sci-Hub use malware and phishing to obtain researchers' login credentials?
There is a new BBC article, Police warn students to avoid science website about Sci-Hub, a pirate site to circumvent paywalls on science journals.
But Max Bruce, the City of London police's cyber ...
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Does Melania Trump's security cost double the National Endowment for the Arts' budget?
This viral post was found at The Resistance with 16,000 shares in less 12 hours. It's from @chapmanchapman who seems to be commenting on Trump cutting the National Endowment for the Arts.
The est. ...
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Will unsubscribing from spam get you even more spam?
To quote Rick's Spam Digest:
It’s just too likely that the spammer uses the “removal” feature as a means to compile lists of known-deliverable e-mail addresses, and you could simply wind up getting ...
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Does the "Nonstop Elevator Hack" work?
I stumbled across this claim pretty often in the last few years.
Now the problem is that I wasn't able to reproduce it but maybe it was just because I rarely visit tall buildings with multiple floors ...
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Were Facebook employees unable to enter their own building to fix router problems, during a recent (six hour) outage?
It's been somewhat mysteriously reported that FB employees couldn't fix some router (BGP) misconfiguration in a timely manner
because "the people trying to figure out what this problem was ...
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Do antivirus vendors write viruses for profit?
I think this forum post sums it up nicely:
I think that anti virus companies [...] are the ones who develop most of the viruses on the market today. If you think about it, it does make sence ...
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Do four random common words make a stronger password than passwords like "Tr0ub4dor&3"?
In xkcd comic #936, Randall Munroe claims that passwords like "Tr0ub4dor&3" (uncommon base word, caps, common letter substitutions with a number and punctuation suffix) has ~28 bits of entropy, ...
user39173
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Is it possible to recover data on a zeroed hard drive?
Let's assume that I have a modern magnetic (not SSD) hard drive, manufactured within the past ten years, and the hard drive is packed with the only copies of an unpublished paper about cheap cold ...
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Will entering the ATM's PIN in reverse notify the police?
I received a rather intriguing email. It says that if I am at an ATM and I'm in the process of getting robbed, I just enter my PIN in reverse order e.g. 4321 instead of 1234. The ATM will still give ...
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Did US prohibit the export of the mere description of a cryptographic algorithm?
A Wikipedia page says that in the US
regulations were introduced as part of munitions controls which required licenses to export cryptographic methods (and even their description)
What concrete ...
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Is anti-malware software effective?
I have heard claims that anti-malware software isn't really effective and will "only catch 33% of malware", and so it's best to "get rid of them; you don't have to pay, and your system will be faster"....
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Can mobile phones be tracked when they're switched off?
Seeing as mobile phones aren't sending signals when switched off, is it possible to track a mobile phone when it's switched off?
NSA growth fueled by need to target terrorists
By September 2004, a ...
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Do Facebook or its third-party partners use my photos in ads?
There's a current scare going around FB that now that it wants to make some actual money, they'll start using profile pics and other things uploaded to facebook in advertisements.
Here is an example ...
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Are 95% of Ashley Madison dating site's accounts male?
The hackers who procured and recently published Ashley Madison's internal databases, the so-called "Impact Team," have claimed that the accounts in the databases were predominantly, in fact "90-95%" ...
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Was the C compiler trojan horse written by Ken Thompson ever distributed?
This is a followup to the comments in this question. Thanks to Oddthinking for bringing up the issue.
Ken Thompson gave a famous speech upon receiving an award titled "Reflections on Trusting Trust" ...
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Does United States have no technology to allow Internet voting in a secure way?
In 2011, nearly a quarter (24.3%) of participating voters in Estonia cast their ballot by remote electronic voting (that is, on their computer/phone/tablet via the Internet).
Several larger ...
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Can the Rape-aXe only be removed by a doctor?
The Rape-aXe was a prototype of a female condom designed to attach itself to an attacker's penis with barbs if an attacker attempts to penetrate the woman wearing the Rape-aXe.
The inventor claims
...
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Is it safer to NOT light your house at night?
At some point, I read a news report that investigators found out it is actually safer not to light your house when you are not there or when asleep. It mentioned that thieves found very dark places '...
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Can the USA turn off the whole internet by deactivating root DNS servers based there?
Drinking with a friend, he told me how his lecturer had revealed to his class that the US can turn off the Internet for the whole world if it wants to, because all of the DNS root servers are there. I ...
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Are locks as easy to pick as in the movies?
Are door locks as easy to pick as in the movies? They seem to only take around 2-3 seconds to pick be it with a credit card or a hairpin. Is this realistic? Or is it simply Hollywood being Hollywood?
...
user7920
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Do removable faceplates on car stereos deter theft?
Everyone has probably seen a car stereo head unit with a removable face plate; the idea being you can take the faceplate with you to deter theft. The claim is specifically made in this product ...
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Is posting my bank account number online unsafe?
With a credit-card number, validity date and CVV-code, people can make purchases, so this information should be strictly protected. But if I post my bank account details online (IBAN + BIC/SWIFT), ...
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Did the FBI not require assistance from Apple to unlock the San Bernadino terrorist's phone?
Edward Snowden's official Twitter account posted the following tweet:
The first 4 points are not in contention, but the 5th point states that the FBI does not require Apple's assistance to unlock the ...
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Does scam-baiting make a noticeable difference to the prevention of internet fraud?
So I've recently found out about scam-baiting, and I've discovered a whole community around just wasting the times of scammers, such as 419Baiter and TheScamBaiter.
A lot of the people there are ...
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Do the "Presidential Alerts" give the government full access to all phone functionality?
John McAfee, libertarian politician and former computer programmer, tweeted this:
The "Presidential alerts": they are capable of accessing the E911 chip
in your phones - giving them full access ...
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Is there a "cyber war"?
I've been extremely sceptical of this new concept of a cyber war. That is, a malicious country or organisation could attack another country by bringing down their network through, say a DDoS or a well ...
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Are conversation-starting memes on social-media harvested by criminals?
There have been a raft of warnings circulating on Facebook for years (but seem to have had a recent uptick) warning that memes that are shared on social media that encourage people to post trivia ...
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Have "backdoors" in software programs been seen in the real world?
Has there ever been a software program that has been shown to have an in-bad-faith "backdoor" allowing privileged access? When I say "in bad faith" I mean, "that cannot be credibly explained by ...
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Does US Intelligence have built-in interfaces in major social networking sites that allow them to browse personal information at will?
From this interview from Julian Assange:
He believes the social network is joined by Google, Yahoo and other major US organisations that have “built in interfaces for US Intelligence”:
It’...
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Have ATMs across the US "spat out money" in the second half of January 2018?
In a response to the DDoS attacks on several Dutch banks and other institutions, "cybersecurity specialist" Rian van Rijbroek claimed on 29 January 2018 on the Dutch news programme Nieuwsuur ...
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Is the trending Facebook "privacy notice" necessary and/or effective?
This facebook post has gone viral among my friends
PRIVACY NOTICE: Warning - any person and/or institution and/or Agent
and/or Agency of any governmental structure including but not limited
to ...
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Can aircraft be hacked and "commandeered remotely"?
This sensationalist article by John McAfee on Business Insider makes a number of unsupported claims about cybersecurity.
In the article, he claims that (emphasis mine):
For the purpose of our ...
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Can cardiac rhythms be used to uniquely identify a person?
Nymi, claims:
"Like a fingerprint, your heartbeat is unique", and
"Your Nymi lets you use your unique cardiac rhythm to authenticate your identity"
Is it true that heartbeats are unique, like ...
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Do home alarm systems reduce burglaries?
Does installing an alarm system in your home have an effect on the number or results of burglaries?
I am about to buy a house with an alarm system installed, with a siren/flash light on the front ...
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Did Seth Rich give Wikileaks the DNC leak emails?
This image has a few claims, are they true?
Image text:
Hi, I'm Seth Rich. I was the DNC staffer who gave Wikileaks the DNC emails proving that they had rigged the primaries against Bernie Sanders ...
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Does aluminum foil safeguard your credit card from RFID attacks?
Evidence against
Does Aluminum Foil Stop Identity Theft?
Some sources say that if you actually have an RFID-enabled credit card, aluminum foil does the same job, if not better, than an expensive RFID-...
user16959
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Did Facebook allow Netflix, Spotify, and the Royal Bank of Canada to read users' private messages?
From As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants
Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without ...
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Do 1.4 million Americans have Top Secret clearance?
One of the claims related to the PRISM scandal is that, regardless what NSA and other agencies assert, leaks are inevitable because of sheer number of people with access to secrets. According to this ...
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Did two brothers steal credit card information worth millions and walked away scot-free because banks were embarrassed?
In this DEFCON talk at around 24:52 minute mark, the speaker (a Cambridge professor) tells a story of two brothers stealing millions of dollars using a weakness in credit card terminal technology, and ...
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Was John Podesta's email password "password"?
Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, said in a recent interview with Sean Hannity that John Podesta’s password was 'password'.
The Daily Mail reports:
In an interview, Assange revealed the ...
user36356
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Can diabetics with pumps be killed from a half mile away?
Black Hat: Lethal Hack and wireless attack on insulin pumps to kill
people Like something straight out of science fiction, an
attacker with a powerful antenna could be up to a half mile away from
...
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Were the BOSS Linux update servers hacked in 2015?
The Hackology Blog claims that update servers for BOSS Linux were hacked in 2015, eventually allowing access to Indian military and government servers.
This website claims that:
Hackers infected the ...
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Are contactless payment cards/phones insecure?
I've heard claims that contactless cards and NFC is no less secure than chip and PIN as indicated below.
According to Barclays:
All our new Contactless debit cards
include the latest advanced ...
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Do US agents intercept and install spyware on new computers ordered by persons of interest?
In a Fox news article entitled "German magazine claims NSA hacking unit uses powerful methods to obtain data", a magazine article in Der Spiegel is cited as claiming, among other things:
...if the ...
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Do BT routers secretly connect to a NSA/GHCQ network?
Today I was pointed at this document which claims, among other things, that the secret agencies perform man-in-the-middle attacks by using a second network connection established by the home router. ...
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Has Telegram decrypted user messages and provided them to a gov agency?
Background: Telegram is a secured messaging app, similar to many others (WhatsApp, Signal, ...). It emphasizes its security features and has become (like a few others) a way for people to exchange ...
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Did Russian hackers obtain billions of passwords?
Many news outlets seem to be reporting this story (NY Times article) about Russian hackers allegedly acquiring billions of usernames and passwords.
A Russian crime ring has amassed the largest known ...
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