Dear Readers,
We try to keep up on the highlights of computer security news by selecting published articles from the past several weeks before each edition of this newsletter. Clever or surprising zero day attacks, large-scale disruptions due to malware, interesting uses or failures of security methods, etc. are the usual fare. We also try to follow government policies regulating cybersecurity and privacy. Between the last Cipher issue in January and this one, there have been so many changes that it is difficult to even understand what the "highlights" are. Thus, we have many more news articles than usual in this edition. Whether any of them will seem relevant in May is anybody's guess. Welcome to Sturm and Drang Part II.
A couple of decades ago I was surprised to get text messages from some youth sports club. I sent back a message asking that they take my number out of their list. There were a lot of people in the text group, and none of them knew or cared about administering the phone number list. In fact, some were hostile, as if I were the culprit --- an interloper trying to disrupt their organization with bogus complaints! Finally, I sent a message about violations of communications acts, legal actions, cancellation of accounts, and accrual of extra charges. It was nonsense, but the messages ceased. When I read about White House advisors mistakenly adding a reporter to their discussions of military actions, I spent some time laughing. Maybe one of them was a youth soccer coach in the past.
This month we have a review by Sven Dietrich of a book that illuminates five pieces of malware that are important to the history of Internet security. The news items in our newsletter are snippets of larger stories about malware development and deployment, sometimes with pointers to more detailed explanations, but the book "Fancy Bear Goes Phishing" travels much further into five delectable examples.
Dietrich also provides a short report about the festschrift for the late Ross Anderson, one of the finest security researchers and authors of our time.
Fine FettleHilarie Orman
I dosed the disk drives with vitamin A,
The machine went blue screen anyway.
My firewall jettisoned all methods diverse,
But the straightened defenses only got worse.
My keyboard has beef tallow bathing the keys,
My photos are raw, no processing please.
But rather than healthy, I feel a demise,
For even my chatbot won't have that with fries.