Kim Zetter

> But i just don’t see how those state actors would benefit from this. You should never stop at obvious/superficial explanations but look at all scenarios (i.e. Game Theory probabilities) including "false flag" operations. Eg. a) What might have happened elsewhere when the world's attention was focused on this one incident? Did we miss something of greater importance? b) Was this a dry run/false flag to get businesses to tighten their cyber defences because somebody knows something about what might be forthcoming? c) The Russia/Ukraine war seems to be entering a critical phase with increasing incidents across NATO countries; see https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/10/europe/russia-shadow-war-nato-intl-… etc. etc. At the minimum there has already been billions in damage and counting; one Australian report - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YedowOtznNo > how the Kaspersky ban factors in here in your opinion? Because this is very recent news; see https://www.zetter-zeroday.com/kaspersky-lab-closing-u-s-division-layi… Is somebody flexing their attack capabilities just to demonstrate they can do it without Kaspersky? Also the US govt. has specifically banned "updating of malware signatures" in Kaspersky software which was exactly the vector used with Crowdstrike. > Are you saying that this scrutiny is somehow enough to overcome companies natural tendency to be disparate and unorganised? Yes. Companies do not treat kernel mode code with the same…

Kim Zetter has a great post walking through some details and commentary across a few sources, related to the vulnerability - https://www.zetter-zeroday.com/apple-chips/ > The cryptographic key itself isn’t placed in cache. But bits of material derived from the key gets placed in the cache, and an attacker can piece these bits together in a way that allows them to reconstruct the key, after causing the processor to do this multiple times. The researchers were able to derive the key for four different cryptographic algorithms: Go, OpenSSL, CRYSTALS-Kyber and CRYSTALS-Dilithium. > [Green] notes that in theory this attack might be used to break the TLS cryptography that a computer’s browser uses to encrypt communication between their computer and web sites, which could allow attackers to decrypt that communication to extract a user’s session cookie for their Gmail or other web-based email account and use it to log into the account as them.

https://www.zetter-zeroday.com/court-documents-shed-new-light-on-doge-… "New court documents shed light on what a 25-year-old DOGE employee named Marko Elez did inside Treasury Department payment systems. They also provide extensive new details about which systems Elez accessed, the security precautions Treasury IT staff took to limit his access and activity, and what changes he made to the systems. The documents indicate that the situation at Treasury is more nuanced than previously reported." (...) "Additionally, he could only connect using a government-issued laptop that had "cybersecurity tools" installed on it to prevent him from accessing web sites or cloud-based storage services with the laptop or connecting a USB or other external storage device to it to copy large amounts of data from Treasury systems. "

He was mistakenly given write access by the treasury department employees in charge of managing DOGE permissions. He resigned a day later, likely before he even realized he had write access. In that short window, he accessed the system "exclusively under the supervision of Bureau database administrators", and the initial treasury department investigation did not find any misuse of said write permissions. I don't see how this can be blamed on DOGE. If anything it shows that DOGE employees are closely monitored, and their access is minimized and audited. https://www.zetter-zeroday.com/court-documents-shed-new-light-on-doge-…

Actual article: https://www.zetter-zeroday.com/kaspersky-lab-closing-u-s-division-layi… (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40969919)

The interview that is linked[0] in the footnotes of the article with the person from ETSI is absolutely wild... Some excerpts: > kz (interviewer): How did it go about meeting those requirements, because that's the one they're saying has a backdoor in it. Was that the condition for export? > BM (ETSI): Backdoor can mean a couple of things I think. Something like you'd stop the random number generator being random, for instance. [But] what I think was revealed [by the researchers] was that TEA1 has reduced key-entropy. So is that a backdoor? I don't know. I'm not sure it's what I would describe as a backdoor, nor would the TETRA community I think. ... > KZ: People ... believe they're getting an 80-bit key and they're not. > BM: Well it is an 80-bit long key. [But] if it had 80 bits of entropy, it wouldn't be exportable. ... > kz: You're saying 25 years ago 32 bit would have been secure? > BM: I think so. I can only assume. Because the people who designed this algorithm didn't confer with what was then EP-TETRA [ETSI Project-TETRA is the name of the working group that oversaw the development of the TETRA standard]. We were just given those algorithms. And the algorithms were designed with some assistance from some government authorities, let me put it that way. ... > bm: That's what we now know yeah - that it did have a reduced key length. > KZ: What do you mean we now know? SAGE created this algorithm but the Project-TETRA people did not know it had a reduced…