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Scientists from the National University of Singapore and Yonsei University in the Republic of Korea have developed a device for verifying whether your laptop microphone is secretly recording your conversations.…
VMware engineers have tested the Linux kernel's fix for the Retbleed speculative execution bug, and report it can impact compute performance by a whopping 70 percent.…
I'm so excited to see the book finally out and awesome feedback coming in, but I'm disappointed with this week's video. I frankly wasn't in the right frame of mind to do it justice (it's been a very hard road up until this point, for various reasons), then my connection dropped out halfway through and I had to roll to 5G, and now I'm hearing (both from other people and with my own ears), a constant background noise being picked up by the mic. Argh! But, that's the reality of scheduled live streams and for better or worse, you end up getting the "warts and all" version. It is what it is, and next week's will be better 😊
The US Treasury Department has issued sanctions against Iran's intelligence agency in response to that country's cyberattack against Albania and other "cyber-enabled activities against the United States and its allies."…
In brief AT&T cybersecurity researchers have discovered a sneaky piece of malware targeting Linux endpoints and IoT devices in the hopes of gaining persistent access and turning victims into crypto-mining drones.…
The massive amounts of digital data being bought and sold — or sometimes freely shared — poses a grave national security risk, according to a former US policymaker and diplomat.…
Federal investigators and private companies seized $30 million in cryptocurrency stolen in March by North Korean-linked APT gang Lazarus Group from a video game developer, the latest example of the growing skills of government and cybersecurity experts to track and recover such ill-gotten gains.…
Facebook parent Meta has disbanded its Responsible Innovation Team (RIT) that it claimed last year was a central part of efforts to "proactively surface and address potential harms to society in all that we build." …
Communities like Craigslist, OfferUp, Facebook Marketplace and others are great for finding low- or no-cost stuff that one can pick up directly from a nearby seller, and for getting rid of useful things that don’t deserve to end up in a landfill. But when dealing with strangers from the Internet, there is always a risk that the person you’ve agreed to meet has other intentions.
Nearly all U.S. states now have designated safe trading stations — mostly at local police departments — which ensure that all transactions are handled in plain view of both the authorities and security cameras.
These safe trading places exist because sometimes in-person transactions from the Internet don’t end well for one or more parties involved. The website Craigslistkillers has catalogued news links for at least 132 murders linked to Craigslist transactions since 2015. Many of these killings involved high-priced items like automobiles and consumer electronics, where the prospective buyer apparently intended all along to kill the owner and steal the item offered for sale. Others were motivated simply by a desire to hurt people.
This is not to say that using Craigslist is uniquely risky or dangerous; I’m sure the vast majority of transactions generated by the site end amicably and without physical violence. And that probably holds true for all of Craigslist’s competitors.
Still, the risk of a deal going badly when one meets total strangers from the Internet is not zero, and so it’s only sensible to take a few simple precautions. For example, choosing to transact at a designated safe place such as a police station dramatically reduces the likelihood that anyone wishing you harm would even show up.
I recently stumbled upon one of these designated exchange places by accident, hence my interest in learning more about them. The one I encountered was at a Virginia county sheriff’s office, and it has two parking spots reserved with a sign that reads, “Internet Purchase & Exchange Location: This Area is Under 24 Hour Video Surveillance” [image above].
According to the list maintained at Safetradestations.com, there are four other such designated locations in Northern Virginia. And it appears most states now have them in at least some major cities. Safeexchangepoint.com also has a searchable index of safe trading locations in the United States and Canada.
Granted, not everyone is going to live close to one of these designated trading stations. Or maybe what you want to buy, sell or trade you’d rather not have recorded in front of police cameras. Either way, here are a few tips on staying safe while transacting in real life with strangers from the Internet (compliments of the aforementioned safe trading websites).
The safest exchange points are easily accessible and in a well-lit, public place where transactions are visible to others nearby. Try to arrange a meeting time that is during daylight hours, and consider bringing a friend along — especially when dealing with high-value items like laptops and smart phones.
Safeexchangepoint.com also advises that police or merchants that host their own exchange locations generally won’t get involved in the details of your transaction unless specified otherwise, and that many police departments (but not all) are willing to check the serial number of an item for sale to make sure it’s not known to be stolen property.
Of course, it’s not always practical or possible to haul that old sofa to the local police department, or a used car that isn’t working. In those situations, safetradestations.com has some decent suggestions:
The US Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) has relaxed restrictions that barred export of some encryption technologies to Huawei, in the name of ensuring the United States is in a better position to negotiate global standards.…
Cisco patched three security vulnerabilities in its products this week, and said it will leave unpatched a VPN-hijacking flaw that affects four small business routers.…
Mandiant is "highly confident" that foreign cyberspies will target US election infrastructure, organizations, and individuals in the run-up to the November midterm elections.…
Google's open source security team says OSS-Fuzz, its community fuzzing service, has helped fix more than 8,000 security vulnerabilities and 26,000 other bugs in open source projects since its 2016 debut.…
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