NonPetya: no evidence it was a "smokescreen"

Many well-regarded experts claim that the not-Petya ransomware wasn't "ransomware" at all, but a "wiper" whose goal was to destroy files, without any intent at letting victims recover their files. I want to point out that there is no real evidence of this.

A kindly lesson for you non-techies about encryption

The following tweets need to be debunked:

The answer to John Schindler's question is:

every expert in cryptography doesn't know this

Oh, sure, you can find fringe wacko who also knows crypto that agrees with you but all the sane members of the security community will not.

Notes on open-sourcing abandoned code

Some people want a law that compels companies to release their source code for "abandoned software", in the name of cybersecurity, so that customers who bought it can continue to patch bugs long after the seller has stopped supporting the product. This is a bad policy, for a number of reasons.

What about other leaked printed documents?

So nat-sec pundit/expert Marci Wheeler (@emptywheel) asks about those DIOG docs leaked last year. They were leaked in printed form, then scanned in an published by The Intercept. Did they have these nasty yellow dots that track the source? If not, why not?

The answer is that the scanned images of the DIOG doc don't have dots. I don't know why. One reason might be that the scanner didn't pick them up, as it's much lower quality than the scanner for the Russian hacking docs. Another reason is that the printer used my not have printed them -- while most printers do print such dots, some printers don't. A third possibility is that somebody used a tool to strip the dots from scanned images. I don't think such a tool exists, but it wouldn't be hard to write.

How The Intercept Outed Reality Winner

Today, The Intercept released documents on election tampering from an NSA leaker. Later, the arrest warrant request for an NSA contractor named "Reality Winner" was published, showing how they tracked her down because she had printed out the documents and sent them to The Intercept. The document posted by the Intercept isn't the original PDF file, but a PDF containing the pictures of the printed version that was then later scanned in.

As the warrant says, she confessed while interviewed by the FBI. Had she not confessed, the documents still contained enough evidence to convict her: the printed document was digitally watermarked.

The problem is that most new printers print nearly invisibly yellow dots that track down exactly when and where documents, any document, is printed. Because the NSA logs all printing jobs on its printers, it can use this to match up precisely who printed the document.

In this post, I show how.

Some non-lessons from WannaCry

This piece by Bruce Schneier needs debunking. I thought I'd list the things wrong with it.

How to track that annoying pop-up

In a recent update to their Office suite on Windows, Microsoft made a mistake where every hour, for a fraction of a second,  a black window pops up on the screen. This leads many to fear their system has been infected by a virus. I thought I'd document how to track this down.