A new reflection attack was unveiled today which can increase the size of a DDoS attack by 51,000-fold. It uses memcached, an object caching system designed to speed up web applications, to amplify attacks against a target. This represents a substantial increase from previous attacks, which have used network time servers to amplify attacks 58-fold…
Interesting Links
New WordPress Vulnerability Results in ~2 Million Defaced Sites
The vulnerability was patched in WordPress v4.7.2 two weeks ago, but millions of sites haven’t yet updated. This leaves them open to a vulnerability in the WordPress REST API, which can allow malicious actors to edit any post on a site. Ars Technica has a very nice writeup on the effects of the exploit, which…
Is it time to abandon antivirus software?
I’ve noticed a growing trend in more advanced computer users lately: some of them have begun advocating against using antivirus software. Instead, they suggest using browser extensions like uBlock Origin (which I use and recommend), combined with safe browsing practices, to remove the need for antivirus software altogether. Ars Technica did a very nice write-up on this trend today,…
Clinton’s Email Server
Ars Technica did a nice job of creating an impartial write-up on why Hillary Clinton used an external email server, and how it was actually used. It sounds to me like there’s an institutional history of using private email to conduct business, largely due to obstructive or incompetent IT services (in fairness to the State…
What is asymmetric cryptography?
Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman were jointly awarded the 2015 ACM A.M. Turing Award today. Their 1976 paper, New Directions in Cryptography, essentially created asymmetric cryptography. Today, asymmetric cryptography secures our online communications—from PGP-secured texts, emails, and files, to TLS and SSL-secured websites (including this one). So how does asymmetric cryptography work, and how is the Diffie-Hellman key…
How Stories Drive the Stock Market
I came across this article today in The New York Times written by Robert Shiller. Shiller is a Sterling Professor at Yale University who studies macroeconomics, behavioral economics, and public attitudes regarding markets, so he’s very qualified to discuss the role of stories in our economy. The general gist of the article, as I understand it, is that…