This week marked the first-ever online-only Black Hat and Defcon security conferences, both of which still produced impactful work despite going remote. But before you dive into everything that's broken, start off with a tale of perseverance that starts with the private keys needed to recover $300,000 of bitcoin trapped in an old zip file.
Dutch researchers figured out how to mess with traffic lights across at least 10 cities in the Netherlands. At most they could have caused a few traffic jams—not multicar pileups—but it's an important reminder about the potential fragility of connected city infrastructure. Also fragile: a file type known as Symbolic Link, which gave Apple hacker Patrick Wardle the foothold he needed to compromise macOS in a since-patched vulnerability chain. After months of qualifying rounds, the US Air Force's Hack-a-Sat finals arrived, albeit remotely thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic. And speaking of satellites, hackers have built cheap ground stations that allow anyone to intercept their transmissions. Neat!
We also took a look at how IoT botnets made from high-wattage machines like home appliances could potentially be used to game the energy markets. Decades-old flaws in email protocols make it possible for anyone to hide their true identity, a scary thought given the prevalence of high-stakes phishing attacks. And hackers took over doze ..
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