Research on Human Honesty

New research from Science: "Civic honesty around the globe": Abstract: Civic honesty is essential to social capital and economic development, but is often in conflict with material self-interest. We examine the trade-off between honesty and self-interest using field experiments in 355 cities spanning 40 countries around the globe. We turned in over 17,000 lost wallets with varying amounts of money… Continue reading Research on Human Honesty

Hacking Hardware Security Modules

Security researchers Gabriel Campana and Jean-Baptiste Bédrune are giving a hardware security module (HSM) talk at BlackHat in August: This highly technical presentation targets an HSM manufactured by a vendor whose solutions are usually found in major banks and large cloud service providers. It will demonstrate several attack paths, some of them allowing unauthenticated attackers to take full control of… Continue reading Hacking Hardware Security Modules

The Cost of Cybercrime

Really interesting paper calculating the worldwide cost of cybercrime: Abstract: In 2012 we presented the first systematic study of the costs of cybercrime. In this paper,we report what has changed in the seven years since. The period has seen major pl… Continue reading The Cost of Cybercrime

The Cost of Cybercrime

Really interesting paper calculating the worldwide cost of cybercrime: Abstract: In 2012 we presented the first systematic study of the costs of cybercrime. In this paper,we report what has changed in the seven years since. The period has seen major platform evolution, with the mobile phone replacing the PC and laptop as the consumer terminal of choice, with Android replacing… Continue reading The Cost of Cybercrime

Fraudulent Academic Papers

The term "fake news" has lost much of its meaning, but it describes a real and dangerous Internet trend. Because it’s hard for many people to differentiate a real news site from a fraudulent one, they can be hoodwinked by fictitious news stories pretending to be real. The result is that otherwise reasonable people believe lies. The trends fostering fake… Continue reading Fraudulent Academic Papers

Fingerprinting iPhones

This clever attack allows someone to uniquely identify a phone when you visit a website, based on data from the accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer sensors. We have developed a new type of fingerprinting attack, the calibration fingerprinting attack. Our attack uses data gathered from the accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer sensors found in smartphones to construct a globally unique fingerprint. Overall,… Continue reading Fingerprinting iPhones

The Concept of “Return on Data”

This law review article by Noam Kolt, titled "Return on Data," proposes an interesting new way of thinking of privacy law. Abstract: Consumers routinely supply personal data to technology companies in exchange for services. Yet, the relationshi… Continue reading The Concept of “Return on Data”

The Concept of "Return on Data"

This law review article by Noam Kolt, titled "Return on Data," proposes an interesting new way of thinking of privacy law. Abstract: Consumers routinely supply personal data to technology companies in exchange for services. Yet, the relationship between the utility (U) consumers gain and the data (D) they supply — "return on data" (ROD) — remains largely unexplored. Expressed as… Continue reading The Concept of "Return on Data"