Data from Cloudflare's free digital defense service, Project Galileo, illuminates new links between online and offline attacks.

internet infrastructure company Cloudflare has offered the free web security service Project Galileo for nearly a decade, giving human rights and public interest organizations around the world access to defenses against DDoS attacks and other common online hacking techniques. More than 2,271 websites in 111 countries now use the service, including 81 Ukrainian organizations, the majority of which joined after the Russian invasion in February 2022. The main aim of Project Galileo is simply to utilize Cloudflare’s products and scale for organizations that might not otherwise have any web defenses at all. By examining the threats that different participants are facing, the company hopes to also raise awareness about what could be coming next.

In Ukraine, for example, Cloudflare found that emergency response services in numerous cities that are enrolled in Project Galileo—including those that perform search and rescue; offer medical care; and distribute supplies like food, water, and medicine—face spikes of malicious traffic concurrent with Russian bombings. Many of the other Ukrainian organizations that use Project Galileo are human rights groups or work in independent media and journalism. They often see increases in attacks around moments of international controversy, like when Russia assumed the presidency of the United Nations Security Council on April 1.

In a report released today, Cloudflare delved into data on attack trends across Project Galileo participants, including those in Ukraine, abortion and reproductive rights organizations, and LGBTQ+ groups. The company says that between July 1, 2022 and May 5, 2023, it mitigated 20 billion attacks against Project Galileo enrollees.

“We’re not specifically placing blame for the sources of the attacks,” says David Belson, Cloudflare’s head of data insight. “But we’re seeing things play out in new and unique ways. In Ukraine, if Russia is trying to attack them physically, and then an actor is trying to prevent them from getting access to the sites that provide emergency resources on the digital side, it’s a new facet in warfare.”

Since last summer, Project Galileo mitigated an average of 790,000 attacks per day against LGBTQ+ organizations and an average of 1.52 million per day against reproductive rights groups, Cloudflare says. In addition to defending against DDoS attacks—firehoses of junk traffic meant to deluge a site and take it down—more and more of the defense Project Galileo provides comes from Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall. The service helps defend sites against actual web application vulnerability exploitation, including hackers’ attempts to launch common attacks like injecting malicious scripts and manipulating databases.

“In those cases, it means that the attacks were less brute force—‘I’m going to try to knock this site down by throwing a load of garbage traffic at it’—and maybe a slightly more mature type of attack, probing to try to find a way in,” Belson says. “The intent then is not to take them down, but to do something arguably more malicious, like exfiltrate data.”

Defending small or under-resourced sites against DDoS attacks is still a key component of Project Galileo’s offering, though. And Cloudflare researchers emphasize that it’s important for sites to have some sort of protection in place, even if they’ve never been targeted before, because sites with low daily traffic, like those that provide resources to small or regional audiences, can so easily be overwhelmed by an unexpected DDoS attack.

“The goal is to provide some background for civil society groups to make them think about what they should be protecting against and show that these threats are real,” says Alissa Starzak, Cloudflare’s vice president and global head of public policy. “We often see attacks against websites if there are things happening in the physical world—controversy about a subject, focus on a particular topic. The organizations that are targeted are the ones that are navigating that.”

Hacks Against Ukraine's Emergency Response Services Rise During Bombings

Internal company documents reveal how the imageboard’s chaotic moderation allowed racism and violence to take over.

On May 14, 2022, 18-year-old Payton Gendron sent out a link to a select group of online friends. It was an invite to a private Twitch stream, access to his running online diary, and an upload of his 180-page manifesto.

Those who clicked the link saw Gendron sitting in his car, in the parking lot of the Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York. They watched as he lifted his AR-15-style rifle, equipped with a high-capacity magazine, and opened fire. He killed 10 people in just six minutes.

Even before police stopped the massacre and arrested Gendron, the link was being posted to the anonymous imageboard 4chan. On /pol/, the site’s “politically incorrect” board, people commented in real time on the mass shooting. “Why not shoot up the abortion rallys? What a faggot,” one user wrote. Another chimed in: “The kids manifesto is actually pretty good.” Dozens of people who missed the livestream demanded a recording. Others declared it a deep-state false flag operation.

One poster, however, was imploring the site’s users to accept responsibility. “Why is this place so full of hate and anger?” they asked. “It's like a den of inequity \[sic\]. Why don't you people ever express love or compassion?” They uploaded a photo of Payton Gendron, and named the file “the 4chan killer.”

“You made Payton Gentron \[sic\], a sociopathic mass murderer,” they wrote. 

4chan’s moderators soon jumped in and banned the user's account, deleting their comment. The reason for the ban: “Complaining about 4chan.”

The way in which 4chan is managed and moderated is of growing interest among US government officials. The US House of Representatives' January 6 committee subpoenaed 4chan over its role in facilitating the assault on the US Capitol, while investigators with the New York Attorney General’s Office ordered the company to turn over thousands of records to better understand its role in Gendron’s terrorist attack. WIRED obtained a number of internal 4chan documents through a public records request. 

Those documents show how 4chan’s team of moderators—janitors, in their own nomenclature—manage the site. Internal emails, chat logs, and moderation decisions reveal how the site’s janitors have helped shape it in their own image, using their moderation powers to engender 4chan’s particular brand of edgelord white supremacy. In particular, the documents show how the site’s moderators responded to a wave of attention as their website had, once more, been cited as an ideological driver for an act of mass murder. 

More than that, the documents lay bare the degree to which 4chan’s toxic influence is a design, not a bug.

In his manifesto, Gendron credited 4chan with showing him “the truth”—that is, a deeply paranoid and racist belief that “the White race is dying out.” He selected the Tops supermarket specifically because it was in a predominantly Black neighborhood. 4chan, too, told him what to do about it. Years earlier, browsing the site, he had come across a video of 28-year-old Brenton Tarrant stalking through the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, murdering 51 people.

In launching the attack in Buffalo, Gendron was following in Tarrant’s footsteps. He even liberally plagiarized Tarrant’s manifesto. And he made regular use of 4chan’s insular, hateful lexicon of memes and in-jokes.

While Gendron has pled guilty to murder, domestic terrorism, and hate crimes charges, and is awaiting trial on additional federal charges, the families of some of the victims have filed a lawsuit against a number of social media companies, including 4chan, Discord, Reddit, Snapchat, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon. They allege that Gendron’s radicalization was caused by an inability, or outright refusal, by these companies to stem the flow of violent conspiracy theories online.

Many of the companies named, however, do make a concerted effort to remove extremist content. But 4chan is markedly different. Its rules and moderation practices entrench its politics and culture in a major way. What is and isn’t allowed on the imageboard helps explain how it has become a website where racial slurs are used like commas, and where users frequently counsel each other to die by suicide and take as many people with them as they can.

Its rules are simultaneously more onerous and more permissive than other social media sites. 4chan has 17 “Global Rules.” The first forbids any content that violates US law. “Any sort of threat of violence or terroristic acts would violate Global Rule #1,” the 4chan administrators wrote to the New York attorney general.

Another rule, technically, bans racism—except on /b/, 4chan’s “random” board. There, racism is both allowed and encouraged. 4chan leadership confessed to the New York Attorney General’s Office that they take a permissive attitude towards racism on the /pol/ board as well. It is a similar approach to how 4chan handles “My Little Pony” content. (“All pony/brony threads, images, Flashes, and avatars belong on /mlp/,” the rules read.)

The site’s Global Rules are augmented by hundreds of other board-specific rules. In practice, however, 4chan users know that the application of these rules is often arbitrary and that much depends on the moderator enforcing them. The janitors are free to deem just about anything “off-topic,” or to just make up their own rules as they go.

According to 4chan’s filings to the New York Attorney General’s Office, the website regularly issues between 5,000 and 7,000 bans per day. That doesn’t include post deletions that do not result in an IP address ban. The website’s paid administrators submitted over 500 ban records to the state of New York, all of which touched—at least tangentially—on Gendron’s massacre in Buffalo.

Roughly 60 percent of those bans were because posts were off-topic, or on the wrong board. One person, for example, was banned for posting in /k/, the weapons board used by Gendron to pick his gear and prepare for his attack, to ask, “At what point do you people acknowledge we need some sort of restrictions or controls in this country?” The board’s rules state that “All images and discussion should pertain to firearms, military vehicles, knives, realistic mil-sim games, and other weapons.” (/k/ has just one board-specific rule: “All weaponry is welcome.”)

According to the cross-section of bans provided to New York, which were issued in the days after the Buffalo mass shooting, 21 bans were imposed for violating US law. Some of those were, as 4chan pointed out to the Attorney General’s Office, for counseling for further terror attacks. The posts encouraged fellow 4chan users to kill politicians, journalists, law enforcement officials, Jewish and Black people, and to target Pride events. 

In practice, however, the majority of calls for violence on 4chan do not result in bans. Users frequently make calls to instigate a race war—a “boogaloo,” in far-right parlance—or make threats against individuals or whole classes of people. Their vitriol is particularly vile when it comes to Black, queer, and Jewish people.

Users counsel each other to “go full ER”—a reference to Elliot Rodger, who, aged 22, murdered six people at his university in Isla Vista, California, in 2014 before dying by suicide. That kind of encouragement has been reflected back to 4chan by those who follow through on acts of violence. When 25-year-old Alek Minassian rammed a van through a crowd  of people in Toronto, Canada, in 2018, killing 11 and injuring 15, some critically, he uploaded a post to Facebook immediately beforehand, making a convoluted reference to “Sgt 4chan” and the “Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!”

Mike Chitwood, the sheriff of Florida’s Volusia County, has gone out of his way to underscore just how prevalent these violent threats are on 4chan. His office has arrested multiple 4chan users for issuing specific threats against the sheriff himself. Users, undeterred and without reprimand from moderators, have responded with posts like: “Kill Sheriff Shitwood.” “Behead Sheriff Shitwood.” “Roundhouse kick Sheriff Shitwood into the concrete.”

One particularly conspiratorial and racist poster, who sported a Nazi flag icon, was more blunt than many of their fellow users about 4chan’s toxic impact: “Hoping some kid reads this.. kinda keeps it in the back of his mind.. then if all things and chances fall in place then those kids may start a boogaloo in the future.”

4chan wasn’t always a hotbed of racial animus and hatred. When its founder, Chris Poole, ran the site, he was locked in a constant effort to keep it from sliding into racist chaos. Right until he quit the site in 2015, Poole actively resisted its emerging political streak. Initially, the imageboard trended towards a progressive libertarianism epitomized by the hacktivist group Anonymous. With time, however, it developed a harder edge.

At one point, 4chan had been organizing raids on the notorious neo-Nazi forum Stormfront. But around 2010, Poole was reckoning with the fact that some of the boards on his website had essentially “become Stormfront,” as Dale Beran writes in _It Came From Something Awful._

In 2011, Poole created /pol/ explicitly to contain this growing far-right attitude, hoping it would spread no further. It didn’t work. “Rather, 4chan’s new neo-Nazi section thrived,” Beran writes.

Poole would keep trying, in vain, to stem the growing vitriol. In 2014, the anti-feminist Gamergate movement took hold on 4chan. Poole tried to ban all discussions of Gamergate, but the reactionary ethos of the movement seeped into the website just the same.

Soon after, Poole lost his stomach for the fight. In 2015 he sold the site to Hiroyuki Nishimura, a Japanese internet tycoon and founder of 2channel, on which 4chan is based. Nishimura, backed by millions of dollars in investment from Japanese toy company Good Smile, became the sole owner of 4chan. But his involvement has been largely hands-off. To help manage, moderate, and cultivate the imageboard, he enlisted the help of one of its most senior janitors: RapeApe.

The senior moderator, sometimes referred to as “GrapeApe,” has exercised an enormous influence on 4chan over the past decade. As one former moderator told Motherboard in 2020, “RapeApe has an agenda: He wants /pol/ to have an influence on the rest of the site and \[its\] politics.”

Documents turned over to New York investigators reveal that 4chan signed an agreement to pay RapeApe $3,000 a month for their services in 2015. By May 2022, that fee had risen to $4,400 a month. (RapeApe is one of very few 4chan staff who receive a salary.)

Tasked with compiling these records for the New York attorney general, Nishimura offered them some overtime. “Could you add $1000 with an invoice for next month?” Nishimura wrote to RapeApe in 2022. “New York Attorney General paper works takes so much \[of\] your time. Thank you so much for you work!”

After the Buffalo terrorist attack, one user posted a link to the Motherboard story to multiple sections of 4chan and laid the carnage at RapeApe’s feet. “I’ve been saying for years that rapeape’s /pol/tardation would result in severe consequences, and the mass shooting in Buffalo has proven me right,” they wrote. “Therefore, the only possible way to save this website is to have him doxxed, hunted down, and murdered.”

The user was banned for violating US law.

In the hour after Gendron’s attack, 4chan’s moderators congregated in a chat room.

“Apparently today's mass shooter makes 4chan responsible in his manifesto,” one janitor, Astria, wrote. “4chan being associated with such an atrocity is the last thing I wanted.” The moderators hoped it was fake. “You couldn’t do a better job at making 4chan look bad.” 

Another janitor, Troid, wondered why they should bother discussing the mass murder. “What's the point of even mentioning it? unless we plan to do something about it, which we don't.”

“Be easy on him troid, its his first 4chan mass shooter as a mod ;^),” wrote a third janitor, yournamehere.

Janitor Aeolian jumped in to insist it wasn’t their fault. “IMO this guy is an 8chan user, not really a 4chan user. I also think we do a really good job moderating potential threats. I don’t feel we’re lacking anywhere on the site in that regard.”

In his manifesto, however, Gendron credits 4chan with his radicalization. While he credits 8chan as well, Gendron heaps praise on /pol/ and /k/, the guns board, for showing him the “truth” and helping him maximize his chances of carnage.

“I got a lot of information from Plateland; a discord I found on 4chan’s /k/ board (love you guys),” Gendron wrote.

Troid wasn’t as quick to dismiss 4chan’s role. “There are in fact threads about the great replacement on /pol/,” they wrote. “Let's not pretend we don't know what the connection is and why people would question 4chan in this instance.”

The other janitors—whose display names in the chat do not necessarily correspond to their 4chan usernames—agreed. But in the ensuing hours and days, the conversation in the chat room drifted away from self-reflection. The moderators shifted blame onto other websites (“If he was on 4chan he wasn’t ‘from’ here.”), mocked federal agencies trying to investigate the litany of threats posted to the website (“We get tons of emails about each moron who makes one of those troll posts”), and lauded their own moderation efforts.

In the chat room, set up to help janitors discuss their moderation practices, a junior janitor asked if requesting or sharing the video of the massacre violated the rules. “It’s prolly fine,” replied CIAeolian, a more senior moderator. (It’s unclear from the documents whether Aeolian and CIAeolian are the same person.) The debate turned toward which channel was the best placed to host recordings of the livestream.

CIAeolian replied later with a clarification on 4chan’s first rule. Violating US law, they said, is “serious” and comes with “a long ban duration.” So it should be reserved for the most obvious violations, they added. ”E.g. ‘I’m going to commit a crime at date, time, place, location’ or ‘How do I acquire \[illegal thing\]?’” 

Nearly a week after the Buffalo terrorist attack, RapeApe and dsw—two moderators on 4chan’s payroll—had a conversation about the fallout. They had just received notice from their advertising platform, Bid.Glass, that 4chan was being dropped.

“We just got a termination notice from Bid.Glass. I'm going to try to talk him out of it (it's basically one dude running the company), but in the likely event that fails we are going to need some kind of replacement,” RapeApe wrote. They continued: “So far neither the FBI nor the local police have any evidence that the shooter posted on 4chan at all.” 

RapeApe lamented that 4chan was “getting the shaft” as other websites, like Reddit and Discord, were being let off “scot free.” 

Reddit, however, aggressively moderates communities known to be advocating racism and violence—and it has outright banned a litany of far-right and incel communities. In his diary, Gendron wrote, “Many subreddits I joined have been banned.” Discord, meanwhile, took a number of steps to improve moderation in the wake of the Buffalo shooting, including banning the community where Gendron got tactical advice and partnering with the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism. While it remains to be seen how effective those kinds of tactics are, Reddit and Discord can claim they are taking some action.

4chan, meanwhile, seems determined to change as little as possible, even if it could mean more acts of domestic terrorism carried out by its users.

“This will never change unfortunately,” dsw wrote. “Unless we do soemthing \[sic\] drastic like removing pol and all other random boards,” they wrote. RapeApe dismissed the suggestion less than 20 seconds later. “Even if we do none of these companies are going to accept us.”

“They might, if 4chan rebrands itself,” dsw replied. But RapeApe wasn’t swayed.

“That’s naive.”

Inside 4chan’s Top-Secret Moderation Machine

Plus: Amazon’s Ring was ordered to delete algorithms, North Korea’s failed spy satellite, and a rogue drone “attack” isn’t what it seems.

Code hidden inside PC motherboards left millions of machines vulnerable to malicious updates, researchers revealed this week. Staff at security firm Eclypsium found code within hundreds of models of motherboards created by Taiwanese manufacturer Gigabyte that allowed an updater program to download and run another piece of software. While the system was intended to keep the motherboard updated, the researchers found that the mechanism was implemented insecurely, potentially allowing attackers to hijack the backdoor and install malware.

Elsewhere, Moscow-based cybersecurity firm Kaspersky revealed that its staff had been targeted by newly discovered zero-click malware impacting iPhones. Victims were sent a malicious message, including an attachment, on Apple’s iMessage. The attack automatically started exploiting multiple vulnerabilities to give the attackers access to devices, before the message deleted itself. Kaspersky says it believes the attack impacted more people than just its own staff. On the same day as Kaspersky revealed the iOS attack, Russia’s Federal Security Service, also known as the FSB, claimed thousands of Russians had been targeted by new iOS malware and accused the US National Security Agency (NSA) of conducting the attack. The Russian intelligence agency also claimed Apple had helped the NSA. The FSB did not publish technical details to support its claims, and Apple said it has never inserted a backdoor into its devices.

If that’s not enough encouragement to keep your devices updated, we’ve rounded up all the security patches issued in May. Apple, Google, and Microsoft all released important patches last month—go and make sure you're up to date.

And there’s more. Each week we round up the security stories we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click on the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

Lina Khan, the chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, warned this week that the agency is seeing criminals using artificial intelligence tools to “turbocharge” fraud and scams. The comments, which were made in New York and first reported by Bloomberg, cited examples of voice-cloning technology where AI was being used to trick people into thinking they were hearing a family member’s voice.

Recent machine-learning advances have made it possible for people’s voices to be imitated with only a few short clips of training data—although experts say AI-generated voice clips can vary widely in quality. In recent months, however, there has been a reported rise in the number of scam attempts apparently involving generated audio clips. Khan said that officials and lawmakers “need to be vigilant early” and that while new laws governing AI are being considered, existing laws still apply to many cases.

In a rare admission of failure, North Korean leaders said that the hermit nation’s attempt to put a spy satellite into orbit didn’t go as planned this week. They also said the country would attempt another launch in the future. On May 31, the Chollima-1 rocket, which was carrying the satellite, launched successfully, but its second stage failed to operate, causing the rocket to plunge into the sea. The launch triggered an emergency evacuation alert in South Korea, but this was later retracted by officials.

The satellite would have been North Korea’s first official spy satellite, which experts say would give it the ability to monitor the Korean Peninsula. The country has previously launched satellites, but experts believe they have not sent images back to North Korea. The failed launch comes at a time of high tensions on the peninsula, as North Korea continues to try to develop high-tech weapons and rockets. In response to the launch, South Korea announced new sanctions against the Kimsuky hacking group, which is linked to North Korea and is said to have stolen secret information linked to space development.

In recent years, Amazon has come under scrutiny for lax controls on people’s data. This week the US Federal Trade Commission, with the support of the Department of Justice, hit the tech giant with two settlements for a litany of failings concerning children’s data and its Ring smart home cameras.

In one instance, officials say, a former Ring employee spied on female customers in 2017—Amazon purchased Ring in 2018—viewing videos of them in their bedrooms and bathrooms. The FTC says Ring had given staff “dangerously overbroad access” to videos and had a “lax attitude toward privacy and security.” In a separate statement, the FTC said Amazon kept recordings of kids using its voice assistant Alexa and did not delete data when parents requested it.

The FTC ordered Amazon to pay around $30 million in response to the two settlements and introduce some new privacy measures. Perhaps more consequentially, the FTC said that Amazon should delete or destroy Ring recordings from before March 2018 as well as any “models or algorithms” that were developed from the data that was improperly collected. The order has to be approved by a judge before it is implemented. Amazon has said it disagrees with the FTC, and it denies “violating the law,” but it added that the “settlements put these matters behind us.”

As companies around the world race to build generative AI systems into their products, the cybersecurity industry is getting in on the action. This week OpenAI, the creator of text- and image-generating systems ChatGPT and Dall-E, opened a new program to work out how AI can best be used by cybersecurity professionals. The project is offering grants to those developing new systems.

OpenAI has proposed a number of potential projects, ranging from using machine learning to detect social engineering efforts and producing threat intelligence to inspecting source code for vulnerabilities and developing honeypots to trap hackers. While recent AI developments have been faster than many experts predicted, AI has been used in the cybersecurity industry for several years—although many claims don’t necessarily live up to the hype.

The US Air Force is moving quickly on testing artificial intelligence in flying machines—in January, it tested a tactical aircraft being flown by AI. However, this week, a new claim started circulating: that during a simulated test, a drone controlled by AI started to “attack” and “killed” a human operator overseeing it, because they were stopping it from accomplishing its objectives.

“The system started realizing that while they did identify the threat, at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat,” said Colnel Tucker Hamilton, according to a summary of an event at the Royal Aeronautical Society, in London. Hamilton continued to say that when the system was trained to not kill the operator, it started to target the communications tower the operator was using to communicate with the drone, stopping its messages from being sent.

However, the US Air Force says the simulation never took place. Spokesperson Ann Stefanek said the comments were “taken out of context and were meant to be anecdotal.” Hamilton has also clarified that he “misspoke” and he was talking about a “thought experiment.”

Despite this, the described scenario highlights the unintended ways that automated systems could bend rules imposed on them to achieve the goals they have been set to achieve. Called specification gaming by researchers, other instances have seen a simulated version of _Tetris_ pause the game to avoid losing, and an AI game character killed itself on level one to avoid dying on the next level.

AI Is Being Used to ‘Turbocharge’ Scams

Criminals may use artificial intelligence to scam you. Companies, like Google, are looking for ways AI and machine learning can help prevent phishing.

When Aparna Pappu, vice president and general manager of Google Workspace, spoke at Google I/O on May 10, she laid out a vision for artificial intelligence that helps users wade through their inbox. Pappu showed how generative AI can whisper summaries of long email threads in your ear, pull in relevant data from local files as you salsa together through unread messages, and dip you low to the ground as it suggests insertable text. Welcome to the inbox of the future. 

While the specifics of how it’ll arrive remain unclear, generative AI is poised to fundamentally alter how people communicate over email.  A broader subset of AI, called machine learning, already performs a kind of safety dance long after you've logged off. “Machine learning has been a critical part of what we’ve used to secure Gmail,” Pappu tells WIRED.

A few, errant clicks on a suspicious email can wreak havoc on your security, so how does machine learning help deflect phishing attacks? Neil Kumaran, a product lead at Google who focuses on security, explains that machine learning can look at the phrasing of incoming emails and compare it to past attacks. It can also flag unusual message patterns and sniff out any weirdness emanating from the metadata.

Machine learning can do more than just flag dangerous messages as they pop up. Kumaran points out that it also can be used to track the people responsible for phishing attacks. He says, “At the time of account creation, we do evaluations. We try to figure out, ‘Does it look like this account is going to be used for malicious purposes?’” In the event of a successful phishing attack on your Google account, AI is involved with the recovery process as well. The company uses machine learning to help decide which login attempts are legit.

“How do we extrapolate intelligence from user reports to identify attacks that we may not know about, or at least start to model the impact on our users?” asks Kumaran. The answer from Google, like the answer to many questions in 2023, is more AI. This instance of AI is not a flirty chatbot teasing you with long exchanges late into the night; it’s a burly bouncer kicking out the rabble-rousers with its algorithmic arms crossed.

On the reverse side, what’s instigating even more phishing attacks on your email inbox? I’ll give you one guess. First letter “A,” last letter “I.” For years, security experts have warned about the potential for AI-generated phishing attacks to overwhelm your inbox. “It’s very, very hard to detect AI with the naked eye, either through the dialect or through the URL,” says Patrick Harr, CEO of SlashNext, a messaging security company. Just like when people use AI-generated images and videos to create fairly convincing deepfakes, attackers may use AI-generated text to personalize phishing attempts in a way that’s difficult for users to detect.

Multiple companies focused on email security are working on models and using machine-learning techniques in an effort to further protect your inbox. “We take the corpus of data that’s coming in and do what’s called supervised learning,” says Hatem Naguib, CEO of Barracuda Networks, an IT security firm. In supervised learning, someone adds labels to a portion of the email data. Which messages are likely to be safe? Which ones are suspicious? This data is extrapolated to help a company flag phishing attacks with machine learning.

It's a valuable aspect of phishing detection, but attackers remain on the prowl for ways to circumvent protections. A persistent scam about a made-up Yeti Cooler giveaway evaded filters last year with an unexpected kind of HTML anchoring. 

Cybercriminals will remain intent on hacking your online accounts, especially your business email. Those who utilize generative AI may be able to better translate their phishing attacks into multiple languages, and chatbot-style applications can automate parts of the back-and-forth messages with potential victims.

Despite all of the possible phishing attacks enabled by AI, Aparna Pappu remains optimistic about the continued development of better, more refined security protections. “You’ve lowered the cost of what it takes to potentially lure someone,” she says. “But, on the flip side, we’ve built up greater detection capabilities as a result of these technologies.”

How AI Protects (and Attacks) Your Inbox

Newly announced sanctions against Iran-based Avaran Cloud underscore the complexity of crafting Washington’s internet freedom efforts.

The United States Treasury announced on Friday that it is sanctioning the Iranian technology company Arvan Cloud, along with two senior employees of the company and an affiliated firm based in the United Arab Emirates. Officials from both the Treasury and the US State Department said on Friday that the company has close ties to Iran’s Information and Communications Technology Ministry and plays a key role in providing infrastructure for the regime's surveillance activities and restrictive intranet known as the National Information Network (NIN).

US sanctions against Iran are extensive, and the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has issued a number of sanctions specifically related to the Iranian government's long-standing attacks on internet freedom and digital access within the country. The full scope of US sanctions against Iran have already significantly isolated the country's economy, and its government's own internet shutdowns, digital blocking, and censorship have only further fueled financial hardship. But a US government official told WIRED on Friday that the Biden administration has seen consistent evidence that naming and shaming regime collaborators stifles an impacted company's ability to recruit top talent within the country.

“Today is a very bad day for anyone who has Arvan Cloud listed on their résumé,” said the official, who spoke to WIRED on the condition that they not be named. “We really do see Iran as an epicenter in the global struggle over the free flow of information. You’re at a tipping point between a bifurcated series of intranets and a global internet.”

The Iranian regime faced months of mass protests after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in the custody of Iran's “morality police” in September while being held for allegedly violating rules about wearing hijab. Ever since, the government has continued to expand its NIN national intranet and tighten digital restrictions and censorship.

Many Iranians still maintain access to the global internet, though, through circumvention tools like VPNs and other relay technologies. The Biden administration has specifically invested in recent years to help private companies that create circumvention tools tailor them for Iran and keep them running. This fits into broader US investment. Since 2008, for example, the State Department has invested more than $320 million of congressionally directed funding toward global internet freedom programs, technology, and digital access research. The US Treasury also announced a special license in September, known as Iran General License D-2, that allows private companies to develop and offer digital services to Iranians without violating sanctions.

A senior government official, who also spoke on background, told WIRED that at some points since the regime escalated its internet disruptions in September, 30 million Iranians—nearly one in three—were using US-supported anti-censorship tools. And the official said that usage by millions or tens of millions of Iranians is still common currently.

Developing and maintaining circumvention tools is a cat-and-mouse game in Iran and in any country that restricts digital freedom because regimes are always looking for technological solutions to block loopholes. 

“We’ve seen that the regime has taken unprecedented steps to disrupt the internet and disrupt people’s access to the internet,” the senior official told WIRED. “Everyone has to assume that the regime is doing everything it can to crack down on these types of tools.”

Digital rights activists working outside the country to support Iran say the US government's support of circumvention tools has been valuable.

“It's certainly true that they are by far providing the highest amount of support for the main VPNs used in Iran,” says Reza Ghazinouri, a strategic adviser at United for Iran, a San Francisco–based human rights and civil liberties group.

But some have reservations about the strategies the US government has used to promote internet freedom in Iran. Amir Rashidi, director of internet security and digital rights at the Iran-focused human rights organization Miaan Group, says he has concerns about the sanctions against Arvan Cloud because he worries that cracking down on key digital services in Iran simply adds more restrictions.

“In any place, if you go after infrastructure, even if they're controlled by the government, sanctioning an electric company or a gas company, that's not going to help anyone,” Rashidi says. "If you sanction internet infrastructure, you're just making the Iranian government's job a lot easier.

Rashidi notes, too, that while he is not surprised that a company like Arvan has close ties to the Iranian regime, he wishes the US government would provide more detailed evidence for why it singled out this tech company to be sanctioned over any other in Iran. He points out that Arvan is seemingly the only Iranian tech company that publishes an annual transparency report of any sort—even if it is often not particularly illuminating. 

In July 2021, Arvan also publicly joined other Iranian tech companies and digital rights activists in opposing restrictive legislation the regime was promoting under the guise of a “user protection” bill. And on Tuesday, the company's CEO Pouya Pirhosseinloo, one of the executives named in the US Treasury sanctions on Friday, published an essay calling for expanded internet freedom within Iran.

Pirhosseinloo wrote that Iran should be focused on “removing filtering and extensive internet disruptions” as well as “removing any kind of disruptions and restrictions on internet protocols in the name of dealing with VPNs.” And he concluded by calling for a massive overhaul of Iran's approach to internet freedom.

“We should accept that Iran should be taken out of global isolation, sanctions, and hope should be restored to the body of Iranian society by removing internal sanctions,” Pirhosseinloo wrote. "Such a path will not begin until life is restored through the freedom of the Internet and the removal of its widespread disturbances and restrictions. Return to the roots of the digital economy."

Iran's digital landscape is complicated and efforts to influence the Iranian regime are never straightforward.

“I'm not saying these people are fantastic, but they were outspoken against the Iranian government's plans,” Rashidi says. “Maybe the US government has information I don't have, but I'd like to see more evidence to back up the claim.”

The Messy US Influence That’s Helping Iranians Stay Online

On the same day, Russia’s FSB intelligence service launched wild claims of NSA and Apple hacking thousands of Russians.

The Moscow-based cybersecurity firm Kaspersky has made headlines for years by exposing sophisticated hacking by Russian and Western state-sponsored cyberspies alike. Now it’s exposing a stealthy new intrusion campaign where Kaspersky itself was a target.

In a report published today, Kaspersky said that at the beginning of the year, it detected targeted attacks against a group of iPhones after analyzing the company’s own corporate network traffic. The campaign, which the researchers call Operation Triangulation and say is “ongoing,” appears to date back to 2019 and utilized multiple vulnerabilities in Apple’s iOS mobile operating system to let attackers take control of victim devices.

Kaspersky says the attack chain utilized “zero-click” exploitation to compromise targets’ devices by simply sending a specially crafted message to victims over Apple’s iMessage service. Victims received the message, which included a malicious attachment, and exploitation would begin whether victims opened the message and inspected the attachment or not. Then the attack would chain together multiple vulnerabilities to give the hackers deeper and deeper access to the target’s device. And the final malware payload would automatically download to the victim’s device before the original malicious message and attachment self-deleted.

Kaspersky’s revelation of the new iOS hacking campaign comes on the same day that Russia’s FSB intelligence service separately announced a claim that the US National Security Agency has hacked thousands of Russians’ phones. Even more remarkably, the FSB claimed that Apple had participated in that broad hacking of iOS devices, willingly providing vulnerabilities to the NSA to exploit in its spying operations.

Apple said in a statement to WIRED, “We have never worked with any government to insert a backdoor into any Apple product and never will.”

When asked about Kaspersky’s report, an Apple spokesperson noted that the findings only appear to pertain to iPhones running iOS version 15.7 and below. The current version of iOS is 16.5.

Kaspersky says that the malware it discovered cannot persist on a device once it is rebooted, but the researchers say they saw evidence of reinfection in some cases. The exact nature of the vulnerabilities used in the exploit chain remains unclear, though Kaspersky says that one of the flaws was likely the kernel extension vulnerability CVE-2022-46690 that Apple patched in December. 

Zero-click vulnerabilities can exist on any platform, but in recent years, attackers and spyware vendors have focused on finding these flaws in Apple’s iOS, often in iMessage, and exploiting them to launch targeted attacks on iPhones. This is partly because services like iMessage present unusually fertile ground within iOS for discovering vulnerabilities, but also because attacks on iOS devices with this approach are often very difficult for victims to detect.

“Kaspersky, arguably one of the best exploit detection companies in the world, was potentially hacked via an iOS zero-day for five years, and it was only discovered now,” says longtime macOS and iOS security researcher Patrick Wardle. “That shows how ridiculously hard it is to detect these exploits and attacks.”

In their report, the Kaspersky researchers point out that one of the reasons for this difficulty is iOS’s locked-down design, which makes it very tough to inspect the operating system’s activity.

“The security of iOS, once breached, makes it really challenging to detect these attacks,” says Wardle, who was formerly an NSA staffer. At the same time, he adds that attackers would need to assume any brazen campaign to target Kaspersky would eventually be discovered. “In my opinion, this would be sloppy for an NSA attack,” he says. “But it shows that either hacking Kaspersky was incredibly valuable for the attacker or that whoever this was likely has other iOS zero days as well. If you only have one exploit, you’re not going to risk your only iOS remote attack to hack Kaspersky.”

The NSA declined WIRED’s request for comment on either the FSB announcement or Kaspersky’s findings.

With the release of iOS 16 in September 2022, Apple introduced a special security setting for the mobile operating system known as Lockdown Mode that intentionally restricts usability and access to features that can be porous within services like iMessage and Apple’s WebKit. It is not known whether Lockdown Mode would have prevented the attacks Kaspersky observed.

The Russian government’s purported discovery of Apple’s collusion with US intelligence “testifies to the close cooperation of the American company Apple with the national intelligence community, in particular the US NSA, and confirms that the declared policy of ensuring the confidentiality of personal data of users of Apple devices is not true,” claims an FSB statement, which adds that it would allow the NSA and “partners in anti-Russian activities” to target “any person of interest to the White House,” as well as US citizens.

The FSB statement wasn’t accompanied by any technical details of the described NSA spy campaign, or any evidence that Apple colluded in it.

Apple has historically resisted pressure to provide a “backdoor” or other vulnerability to US law enforcement or intelligence agencies. That stance was demonstrated most publicly in Apple’s high-profile 2016 showdown with the FBI over the bureau’s demand that Apple assist in the decryption of an iPhone used by San Bernadino mass shooter Syed Rizwan Farook. The standoff only ended when the FBI found its own method of accessing the iPhone’s storage with the help of Australian cybersecurity firm Azimuth.

Despite its announcement coming on the same day as the FSB’s claims, Kaspersky has so far made no claims that the Operation Triangulation hackers who targeted the company were working on behalf of the NSA. Nor has the cybersecurity firm attributed the hacking to the Equation Group, Kaspersky’s name for the state-sponsored hackers it has previously tied to highly sophisticated malware, including Stuxnet and Duqu, tools widely believed to have been created and deployed by the NSA and US allies.

Kaspersky did say in a statement to WIRED that, “Given the sophistication of the cyberespionage campaign and the complexity of analysis of the iOS platform, further research will surely reveal more details on the matter.”

US intelligence agencies and US allies would, of course, have plenty of reason to want to look over Kaspersky’s shoulder. Aside from years of warnings from the US government that Kaspersky has ties to the Russian government, the company’s researchers have long demonstrated their willingness to track and expose hacking campaigns conducted by Western governments that Western cybersecurity firms don’t. In 2015, in fact, Kaspersky revealed that its own network had been breached by hackers who used a variant of the Duqu malware, suggesting a link to the Equation Group—and thus potentially the NSA.

That history, combined with the sophistication of the malware that targeted Kaspersky, suggests that as wild as the FSB’s claims may be, there’s good reason to imagine that Kaspersky’s intruders could have ties to a government. But if you hack one of the world’s most prolific trackers of state-sponsored hackers—even with seamless, tough-to-detect iPhone malware—you can expect, sooner or later, to get caught.

Kaspersky Says New Zero-Day Malware Hit iPhones—Including Its Own

Plus: Microsoft patches two zero-day flaws, Google’s Android and Chrome get some much-needed updates, and more.

Apple, Google, and Microsoft have released major patches this month to fix multiple security flaws already being used in attacks. May was also a critical month for enterprise software, with GitLab, SAP, and Cisco releasing fixes for multiple bugs in their products.

Here’s everything you need to know about the security updates released in May.

Apple iOS and iPadOS 16.5

Apple has released its long-awaited point update iOS 16.5, addressing 39 issues, three of which are already being exploited in real-life attacks. The iOS upgrade patches vulnerabilities in the Kernel at the heart of the operating system and in WebKit, the engine that powers the Safari browser. The three already exploited flaws are among five fixed in WebKit—tracked as CVE-2023-32409, CVE-2023-28204, and CVE-2023-32373.

CVE-2023-32409 is an issue that could allow an attacker to break out of the Web Content sandbox remotely, reported by Clément Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Group and Donncha Ó Cearbhaill of Amnesty International’s Security Lab. CVE-2023-28204 is a flaw that risks a user disclosing sensitive information. Finally, CVE-2023-32373 is a use-after-free bug that could enable arbitrary code execution.

Earlier in the month, Apple released iOS 16.4.1 (a) and iPadOS 16.4.1 (a)—the iPhone maker’s first-ever Rapid Security Response update—fixing the latter two exploited WebKit vulnerabilities also patched in iOS 16.5.

Apple iOS and iPadOS 16.5 were issued alongside iOS 15.7.6 and iPadOS 15.7.6 for older iPhones, as well as iTunes 12.12.9 for Windows, Safari 16.5, macOS Big Sur 11.7.7, macOS Ventura 13.4, and macOS Monterey 12.6.6.

Apple also released its first security update for Beats and AirPods headphones.

Microsoft

Microsoft’s mid-month Patch Tuesday fixed 40 security issues, two of which were zero-day flaws already being used in attacks. The first zero-day vulnerability, CVE-2023-29336, is an elevation-of-privilege bug in the Win32k driver that could allow an attacker to gain System privileges.

The second serious flaw, CVE-2023-24932, is a Secure Boot security feature bypass issue that could allow a privileged attacker to execute code. “An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could bypass Secure Boot,” Microsoft said, adding that the flaw is difficult to exploit: “Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires an attacker to compromise admin credentials on the device.”

The security update is not a full fix: It addresses the vulnerability by updating the Windows Boot Manager, which could cause issues, the company warned. Additional steps are required at this time to mitigate the vulnerability, Microsoft said, pointing to steps affected users can take to mitigate the issue.

Google Android

Google has released its latest Android security patches, fixing 40 flaws, including an already exploited Kernel vulnerability. The updates also include fixes for issues in the Android Framework, System, Kernel, MediaTek, Unisoc, and Qualcomm components.

The most severe of these issues is a high-severity security vulnerability in the Framework component that could lead to local escalation of privilege, Google said, adding that user interaction is needed for exploitation.

Previously linked to commercial spyware vendors, CVE-2023-0266 is a Kernel issue that could lead to local escalation of privilege. User interaction is not needed for exploitation.

Apple's iOS 16.5 Fixes 3 Security Bugs Already Used in Attacks

Hidden code in hundreds of models of Gigabyte motherboards invisibly and insecurely downloads programs—a feature ripe for abuse, researchers say.

Hiding malicious programs in a computer’s UEFI firmware, the deep-seated code that tells a PC how to load its operating system, has become an insidious trick in the toolkit of stealthy hackers. But when a motherboard manufacturer installs its own hidden backdoor in the firmware of millions of computers—and doesn’t even put a proper lock on that hidden back entrance—they’re practically doing hackers’ work for them.

Researchers at firmware-focused cybersecurity company Eclypsium revealed today that they’ve discovered a hidden mechanism in the firmware of motherboards sold by the Taiwanese manufacturer Gigabyte, whose components are commonly used in gaming PCs and other high-performance computers. Whenever a computer with the affected Gigabyte motherboard restarts, Eclypsium found, code within the motherboard’s firmware invisibly initiates an updater program that runs on the computer and in turn downloads and executes another piece of software.

While Eclypsium says the hidden code is meant to be an innocuous tool to keep the motherboard’s firmware updated, researchers found that it’s implemented insecurely, potentially allowing the mechanism to be hijacked and used to install malware instead of Gigabyte’s intended program. And because the updater program is triggered from the computer’s firmware, outside its operating system, it’s tough for users to remove or even discover.

“If you have one of these machines, you have to worry about the fact that it’s basically grabbing something from the internet and running it without you being involved, and hasn’t done any of this securely,” says John Loucaides, who leads strategy and research at Eclypsium. “The concept of going underneath the end user and taking over their machine doesn’t sit well with most people.”

In its blog post about the research, Eclypsium lists 271 models of Gigabyte motherboards that researchers say are affected. Loucaides adds that users who want to see which motherboard their computer uses can check by going to “Start” in Windows and then “System Information.”

Eclypsium says it found Gigabyte’s hidden firmware mechanism while scouring customers’ computers for firmware-based malicious code, an increasingly common tool employed by sophisticated hackers. In 2018, for instance, hackers working on behalf of Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency were discovered silently installing the firmware-based anti-theft software LoJack on victims’ machines as a spying tactic. Chinese state-sponsored hackers were spotted two years later repurposing a firmware-based spyware tool created by the hacker-for-hire firm Hacking Team to target the computers of diplomats and NGO staff in Africa, Asia, and Europe. Eclypsium’s researchers were surprised to see their automated detection scans flag Gigabyte’s updater mechanism for carrying out some of the same shady behavior as those state-sponsored hacking tools—hiding in firmware and silently installing a program that downloads code from the internet.

Gigabyte’s updater alone might have raised concerns for users who don’t trust Gigabyte to silently install code on their machine with a nearly invisible tool—or who worry that Gigabyte’s mechanism could be exploited by hackers who compromise the motherboard manufacturer to exploit its hidden access in a software supply chain attack. But Eclypsium also found that the update mechanism was implemented with glaring vulnerabilities that could allow it to be hijacked: It downloads code to the user’s machine without properly authenticating it, sometimes even over an unprotected HTTP connection, rather than HTTPS. This would allow the installation source to be spoofed by a man-in-the-middle attack carried out by anyone who can intercept the user’s internet connection, such as a rogue Wi-Fi network.

In other cases, the updater installed by the mechanism in Gigabyte’s firmware is configured to be downloaded from a local network-attached storage device (NAS), a feature that appears to be designed for business networks to administer updates without all of their machines reaching out to the internet. But Eclypsium warns that in those cases, a malicious actor on the same network could spoof the location of the NAS to invisibly install their own malware instead.

Eclypsium says it has been working with Gigabyte to disclose its findings to the motherboard manufacturer, and that Gigabyte has said it plans to fix the issues. Gigabyte did not respond to WIRED’s multiple requests for comment regarding Eclypsium’s findings.

Even if Gigabyte does push out a fix for its firmware issue—after all, the problem stems from a Gigabyte tool intended to automate firmware updates—Eclypsium’s Loucaides points out that firmware updates often silently abort on users’ machines, in many cases due to their complexity and the difficulty of matching firmware and hardware. “I still think this will end up being a fairly pervasive problem on Gigabyte boards for years to come,” Loucaides says.

Given the millions of potentially affected devices, Eclypsium’s discovery is “troubling,” says Rich Smith, who is the chief security officer of supply-chain-focused cybersecurity startup Crash Override. Smith has published research on firmware vulnerabilities and reviewed Eclypsium’s findings. He compares the situation to the Sony rootkit scandal of the mid-2000s. Sony had hidden digital-rights-management code on CDs that invisibly installed itself on users’ computers and in doing so created a vulnerability that hackers used to hide their malware. “You can use techniques that have traditionally been used by malicious actors, but that wasn’t acceptable, it crossed the line,” Smith says. “I can’t speak to why Gigabyte chose this method to deliver their software. But for me, this feels like it crosses a similar line in the firmware space.”

Smith acknowledges that Gigabyte probably had no malicious or deceptive intent in its hidden firmware tool. But by leaving security vulnerabilities in the invisible code that lies beneath the operating system of so many computers, it nonetheless erodes a fundamental layer of trust users have in their machines. “There’s no intent here, just sloppiness. But I don’t want anyone writing my firmware who’s sloppy,” says Smith. “If you don’t have trust in your firmware, you’re building your house on sand.”

Millions of Gigabyte Motherboards Were Sold With a Firmware Backdoor

TikTok user data is exposed to Chinese ByteDance employees, a screen recording app goes rogue in Google Play, and privacy groups want Slack to expand encryption.

“We use information such as IP addresses, device IDs, and account activity to determine whether a device signed into your account is part of your Netflix Household,” Netflix has said. “We do not collect GPS data to try to determine the precise physical location of your devices.”

TikTok employees have been sharing sensitive user data on an internal productivity and communication platform known as Lark. Documents obtained by _The New York Times_ show that thousands of Chinese employees of TikTok's parent company ByteDance have access to and use Lark each day. User data shared on Lark mostly shows up in group chats, but the documents show that TikTok employees have raised concerns about the fact that ByteDance employees in China could potentially access users' personal details on the platform, like US driver's license data and even child sexual abuse material. Employees have reportedly been warning ByteDance and TikTok executives about the exposure since at least July 2021. Both TikTok and ByteDance have maintained over the years that there are barriers in place to prevent TikTok user's data from being accessed in China.

An Android app known as iRecorder Screen Recorder that has been downloaded more than 50,000 times on Google Play was a legitimate app when it emerged in September 2021. But researchers from the security firm ESET found that in August 2022, the app received an update and started displaying malicious behavior. It now abuses its device microphone access to record audio every 15 minutes and send the data to a malicious server.

“Unfortunately, we don’t have any evidence that the app was pushed to a particular group of people, and from the app description and further research … it isn’t clear if a specific group of people was targeted or not,” ESET researcher Lukas Stefanko wrote. “It seems very unusual.”

Dozens of digital rights, pro-privacy, and civil liberties groups including Mozilla, the Tor Project, Fight for the Future, Derechos Digitales, and Abortion Access Front signed a letter calling for the workplace communication platform Slack to implement end-to-end encryption on its platform. Slack has long been criticized for failing to provide an end-to-end encryption option, which would cut down on governments' ability to access and surveil Slack messages, but the letter is the most organized commentary yet. “For many of these groups and individuals, Slack is an absolutely vital communication tool, but it could also become the basis of government targeting, repression, censorship,” the organizations wrote. “Default end-to-end encrypted messaging \[is\] a first and best step companies can take to protect targeted communities.”

Netflix’s Password-Sharing Crackdown Has Hit the US

The coinventor of “bcrypt” is reflecting on the ubiquitous function’s 25 years and channeling cybersecurity’s core themes into electronic dance music.

When data breaches went from being an occasional threat to a persistent fact of life during the early 2010s, one question would come up again and again as victim organizations, cybersecurity researchers, law enforcement, and regular people assessed the fallout from each incident: Which password hashing algorithm had the target used to protect its users’ passwords? 

If the answer was a faulty cryptographic function like SHA-1—not to mention the nightmare of passwords stored in plaintext with no encryption scrambling at all—the victim had more to worry about because it meant that it would be easier for whoever stole the data to crack the passwords, directly access users’ accounts, and try those passwords elsewhere to see if people had reused them. If the answer was the algorithm known as bcrypt, though, there was at least one less thing to panic about.

Bcrypt turns 25 this year, and Niels Provos, one of its coinventors, says that looking back, the algorithm has always had good energy, thanks to its open source availability and the technical characteristics that have fueled its longevity. Provos spoke to WIRED about a retrospective on the algorithm that he published this week in Usenix ;login:. Like so many digital workhorses, though, there are now more robust and secure alternatives to bcrypt, including the hashing algorithms known as scrypt and Argon2. Provos himself says that the quarter-century milestone is plenty for bcrypt and that he hopes it will lose popularity before celebrating another major birthday.

A version of bcrypt first shipped with the open source operating system OpenBSD 2.1 in June 1997. At the time, the United States still imposed stringent export limits on cryptography. But Provos, who grew up in Germany, worked on its development while he was still living and studying there.  

“One thing I found so surprising was how popular it became,” he says. “I think in part it’s probably because it was actually solving a problem that was real, but also because it was open source and not encumbered by any export restrictions. And then everybody ended up doing their own implementations in all these other languages. So these days, if you are faced with wanting to do password hashing, bcrypt is going to be available in every language that you could possibly operate in. But the other thing that I find interesting is that it’s even still relevant 25 years later. That is just crazy.”

Provos developed bcrypt with David Mazieres, a systems security professor at Stanford University who was studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he and Provos collaborated on bcrypt. The two met through the open source community and were working on OpenBSD.

Hashed passwords are put through an algorithm to be cryptographically transformed from something that’s readable into an unintelligible scramble. These algorithms are “one-way functions” that are easy to run but very difficult to decode or “crack,” even by the person who created the hash. In the case of login security, the idea is that you choose a password, the platform you’re using makes a hash of it, and then when you sign in to your account in the future, the system takes the password you input, hashes it, and then compares the result to the password hash on file for your account. If the hashes match, the login will be successful. This way, the service is only collecting hashes for comparison, not passwords themselves.   

The innovation of bcrypt was that it included a security parameter that could be tuned over time to require more and more computing power to crack bcrypt hashes. This way, as broadly available processing speed increased, bcrypt hashes could become more and more difficult to crack. 

“It’s one of those ideas that’s so obvious in retrospect,” Mazieres says. “Of course, it’s cool that bcrypt was a thing Niels and I did. But I think the important thing is, whatever password hashing algorithm we have, that there be some sort of security parameter to make it harder \[in a way\] that’s a function of computing resources.”

The next generation of hash functions requires more memory to attempt to crack hashed passwords, in addition to processing power.

“The problem was that computers keep getting faster, so a function that seems ‘slow’ today might be fast on tomorrow’s computer,” says Johns Hopkins cryptographer Matthew Green. “The idea behind bcrypt was to make this adjustable. So over time, you could crank up the difficulty level very easily. But then the problem became that people have made guessing even faster by taking advantage of specialized hardware that can compute many things in parallel. This undermines security for functions like bcrypt. So the more recent idea is to use functions that also require a lot of memory, as well as computation, on the theory that parallel attacks won’t be able to scale this resource as well.”

Password security is always lagging, though, and both Provos and Mazieres expressed disbelief and disappointment that the state of passwords broadly has not evolved in decades. Even new schemes like passkeys are only just beginning to emerge.

“Bcrypt should have been superseded already,” Provos says. “It’s surprising how much reliance we still have on passwords. If you had asked me 25 years ago, I would not have guessed that.”

Provos has turned to making cybersecurity- and authentication-themed electronic dance music under the DJ name Activ8te as a way to share his ideas about security with a broader audience and attempt to create cultural change in how people approach their personal security. Mazieres emphasizes, too, that the tech industry has done people a disservice by training them to authenticate in dangerous ways—clicking on links and plugging in passwords constantly and often indiscriminately.

Even if bcrypt’s moment is passing, its inventors say it’s still worth investing time and energy into efforts to improve digital authentication and security more broadly and to help people bolster their own digital defenses.

“There was a version of the world where I would just make music and do blacksmithing,” Provos says. “But the state of security still makes me so sad that I still feel like I have to contribute back somehow.”

Source

Wired