After the Storm

While Hurricane Hilary heads for Mexico and Southern California the world has just seen another security vulnerability named Storm-0558. I guess no-one will ever really know what happened, but from publicly available information the story goes like this: An allegedly Chinese hacker group stole a signing key from tokens within Microsoft Azure Active Directory (MS … More After the Storm

And another OpenSSL security vulnerability

Third times a charm… Or so they say. The OpenSource encryption library OpenSSL had its third “major” security vulnerability, which was fixed with a patch available as of November 1, 2022. As per CVE-2022-3786 and CVE-2022-3602 the security vulnerability constitute X.509 email address buffer overflows. 8 years ago it was Heartbleed. This security vulnerability was … More And another OpenSSL security vulnerability

Germany’s Cybersecurity council(s) or Social Engineering goes organisations*

In his regular show on Friday Oct 7, 2022**, German satirist and TV host, Jan Böhmermann, reported about Germany’s Cybersecurity council. The question only is, which one… Turns out we have two: One, which was inaugurated by Germany’s Ministry of Defence. This is a council made up of politicians from Bund and Länder (representatives from … More Germany’s Cybersecurity council(s) or Social Engineering goes organisations*

Vladimir Putin: with whom do we have to deal here?

An analysis based on past behaviour, his autobiography and selected sources I usually write about topics like software and IT security in my blog. However given the geopolitical events, I decided to publish this blog which at least fits into the area of international security. So, who is Vladimir Putin? Vladimir Putin grew up like … More Vladimir Putin: with whom do we have to deal here?

Quantum computing will soon break current encryption algorithms

After a couple of articles on fraud related topics, I decided that it is high time that I publish another article on a security topic, which is dear to my heart. Quantum computing is on the brink of becoming a reality. IBM conducts research and innovation with its system Quantum Eagle. The German government decided … More Quantum computing will soon break current encryption algorithms

Language of a con man – what can be learned from the NXIVM cult

I usually don’t look at cults when analysing fraud, but I was given the recommendation by American friends of mine to check out NXIVM (pronounced NEXIUM), of which I had not heard anything before.  More details can be found here for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NXIVM. I got curious and subscribed to an additional channel from one of … More Language of a con man – what can be learned from the NXIVM cult