Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • VB2016 paper: Diving into Pinkslipbot’s latest campaign

    Pinkslipbot, also known as Qakbot or Qbot, is a banking trojan that makes the news every once in a while, yet never seems to get the attention of the world’s Zbots and Dridexes. I looked at the malware myself three years ago , but since then it has been updated several times, the most recent…

  • Book review: Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet

    This review, by VB Editor Martijn Grooten, was originally published in the Journal of the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICON). It is republished with their kind permission. Title: Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet Author: Finn Brunton Publisher: The MIT Press Cambridge, MA, 2013. ISBN: 9780262018876 / 9780262527576 / 9780262313933 Those…

  • Book review: Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet

    This review, by VB Editor Martijn Grooten, was originally published in the Journal of the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICON). It is republished with their kind permission. Title: Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet Author: Finn Brunton Publisher: The MIT Press Cambridge, MA, 2013. ISBN: 9780262018876 / 9780262527576 / 9780262313933 Those…

  • Virus Bulletin to sponsor BSides London

    When VB’91 , the inaugural Virus Bulletin conference, took place (in 1991), there were few security conferences on the scene and there were more virus researchers than computer viruses. These days, there are more security conferences than there were people attending that very first VB conference! We think this is a great development and we…

  • Virus Bulletin to sponsor BSides London

    When VB’91 , the inaugural Virus Bulletin conference, took place (in 1991), there were few security conferences on the scene and there were more virus researchers than computer viruses. These days, there are more security conferences than there were people attending that very first VB conference! We think this is a great development and we…

  • VB2016 video: Last-minute paper: Malicious proxy auto-configs: an easy way to harvest banking credentials

    “Much media attention is given to imminent and visible threats, like ransomware. Other threats remain under the radar and often go unnoticed.” This part of Jaromír Horejší and Jan Širmer’s VB2016 abstract is perhaps even more relevant today than it was in September 2016, when it was written. Despite the seriousness of WannaCry , there…

  • VB2016 video: Last-minute paper: Malicious proxy auto-configs: an easy way to harvest banking credentials

    “Much media attention is given to imminent and visible threats, like ransomware. Other threats remain under the radar and often go unnoticed.” This part of Jaromír Horejší and Jan Širmer’s VB2016 abstract is perhaps even more relevant today than it was in September 2016, when it was written. Despite the seriousness of WannaCry , there…

  • WannaCry shows we need to understand why organizations don’t patch

    For the past few days, the world of Infosec on Twitter has tried to find as many ways as possible of saying “we told you so”. To be fair, it’s true – we did tell you so: for years we have warned of the dangers of not patching, of not keeping backups, and of running services…

  • WannaCry shows we need to understand why organizations don’t patch

    For the past few days, the world of Infosec on Twitter has tried to find as many ways as possible of saying “we told you so”. To be fair, it’s true – we did tell you so: for years we have warned of the dangers of not patching, of not keeping backups, and of running services…

  • Modern security software is not necessarily powerless against threats like WannaCry

    We have become used to the idea of cybersecurity stories sometimes making the mainstream news, but the UK’s newspapers across the spectrum, from broadsheets to tabloids, all opening with the same cybersecurity story – as they did on Saturday – is unprecedented. The reason for such a heightened level of interest was the crippling of the…

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