Happy 14th Birthday, KrebsOnSecurity!

Read Time:3 Minute, 25 Second

KrebsOnSecurity celebrates its 14th year of existence today! I promised myself this post wouldn’t devolve into yet another Cybersecurity Year in Review. Nor do I wish to hold forth about whatever cyber horrors may await us in 2024. But I do want to thank you all for your continued readership, encouragement and support, without which I could not do what I do.

As of this birthday, I’ve officially been an independent investigative journalist for longer than I was a reporter for The Washington Post (1995-2009). Of course, not if you count the many years I worked as a paperboy schlepping The Washington Post to dozens of homes in Springfield, Va. (as a young teen, I inherited a largish paper route handed down from my elder siblings).

True story: At the time I was hired as a lowly copy aide by The Washington Post, all new hires — everyone from the mailroom and janitors on up to the executives — were invited to a formal dinner in the Executive Suite with the publisher Don Graham. On the evening of my new hires dinner, I was feeling underdressed, undershowered and out of place. After wolfing down some food, I tried to slink away to the elevator with another copy aide, but was pulled aside by the guy who hired me. “Hey Brian, not so fast! Come over and meet Don!”

I was 23 years old, and I had no clue what to say except to tell him that paper route story, and that I’d already been working for him for half my life. Mr. Graham laughed and told me that was the best thing he’d heard all day. Which of course made my week, and made me feel more at ease among the suits.

I remain grateful to WaPo for instilling many skills, such as how to distill technobabble into plain English for a general audience. And how to make people the focus of highly technical stories. Because people — and their eternal struggles — are imminently relatable, regardless of whether one has a full grasp of the technical details.

Words fail me when trying to describe how grateful I am that this whole independent reporter thing still works, financially and otherwise. I mostly just keep my head down researching stuff and sharing what I find, and somehow loads of people keep coming back to the site. As I like to say, I hope they let me keep doing this, because I’m certainly unqualified to do much else!

Another milestone of sorts: We’ve now amassed more than 52,000 subscribers to our email newsletter, which is a fancy term for a plain text email that goes out immediately whenever a new story is published here. Subscribing is free, we never share anyone’s email address, and we don’t send emails other than new story notifications (2-3 per week).

A friendly reminder that while you may see ads (or spaces where ads otherwise would be) at the top of this website, all two-dozen or so ad creatives we run are vetted by me and served in-house. Nor does this website host any third-party content. If you regularly browse the web with an ad blocker turned on, please consider adding an exception for KrebsOnSecurity.com. Our advertising partners are how we keep the lights on over here.

And in case you missed any of them, here are some of the most-read stories published by KrebsOnSecurity in 2023. Happy 2024 everyone!

Ten Years Later, New Clues in the Target Breach
It’s Still Easy for Anyone to Become You at Experian
Experts Fear Crooks are Cracking Keys Stolen in LastPass Breach
Why is .US Being Used to Phish So Many of US?
Few Fortune 100 Firms List Security Pros in Their Executive Ranks
Who’s Behind the Domain Networks Snail Mail Scam?
Phishing Domains Tanked After Meta Sued Freenom
Many Public Salesforce Sites are Leaking Private Data
Hackers Claim They Breached T-Mobile More Than 100 Times in 2022
Identity Thieves Bypassed Experian Security to View Credit Reports

Read More

AI Is Scarily Good at Guessing the Location of Random Photos

Read Time:56 Second

Wow:

To test PIGEON’s performance, I gave it five personal photos from a trip I took across America years ago, none of which have been published online. Some photos were snapped in cities, but a few were taken in places nowhere near roads or other easily recognizable landmarks.

That didn’t seem to matter much.

It guessed a campsite in Yellowstone to within around 35 miles of the actual location. The program placed another photo, taken on a street in San Francisco, to within a few city blocks.

Not every photo was an easy match: The program mistakenly linked one photo taken on the front range of Wyoming to a spot along the front range of Colorado, more than a hundred miles away. And it guessed that a picture of the Snake River Canyon in Idaho was of the Kawarau Gorge in New Zealand (in fairness, the two landscapes look remarkably similar).

This kind of thing will likely get better. And even if it is not perfect, it has some pretty profound privacy implications (but so did geolocation in the EXIF data that accompanies digital photos).

Read More

Friday Squid Blogging: Sqids

Read Time:27 Second

They’re short unique strings:

Sqids (pronounced “squids”) is an open-source library that lets you generate YouTube-looking IDs from numbers. These IDs are short, can be generated from a custom alphabet and are guaranteed to be collision-free.

I haven’t dug into the details enough to know how they can be guaranteed to be collision-free.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Read my blog posting guidelines here.

Read More