The Kaspersky GERT has detected a VBS script that has been abusing Microsoft Windows features by modifying the system to lower the defenses and using the local MS BitLocker utility to encrypt entire drives and demand a ransom.
#BitLocker #Data #Descriptions #Encryption #Incident #Malware #Microsoft #Ransomware #Technologies #Windows #response
Useful quantum computers aren’t a reality—yet. But in one of the biggest deployments of post-quantum encryption so far, Apple is bringing the technology to iMessage.
#apple #computing #encryption #privacy #quantum #security
Here's an article from a French anarchist describing how his (encrypted) laptop was seized after he was arrested, and material from the encrypted partition has since been entered as evidence against him. His encryption password was supposedly greater than 20 characters and included a mixture of cases, numbers, and punctuation, so in the absence of any sort of opsec failures this implies that even relatively complex passwords can now be brute forced, and we should be transitioning to even more secure passphrases.
Or does it? Let's go into what LUKS is doing in the first place. The actual data is typically encrypted with AES, an extremely popular and well-tested encryption algorithm. AES has no known major weaknesses and is not considered to be practically brute-forceable - at least, assuming you have a random key. Unfortunately it's not really practical to ask a user to type in 128 bits of binary every time they want to unlock their drive, so another approach has to be taken.