Security News

The Polish Embassy has posted a series of short interview segments with Marian Rejewski, the first person to crack the Enigma. Like many cryptographers that come eventually to public attention Marian Rejewski had an interesting life.

Suspected Russian threat actors have been targeting Eastern European users in the crypto industry with fake job opportunities as bait to install information-stealing malware on compromised hosts. The attackers "Use several highly obfuscated and under-development custom loaders in order to infect those involved in the cryptocurrency industry with Enigma stealer," Trend Micro researchers Aliakbar Zahravi and Peter Girnus said in a report this week.

Fixing indirect vulnerabilities is one of those complex, tedious and, quite frankly, boring tasks that no one really wants to touch. You see, indirect dependencies are introduced deep down the dependency tree and it's very tricky to get to the exact version you want.

A Soviet equivalent of Nazi Germany's Enigma cipher machine has sold for more than double its auction asking price - while a secret camera disguised as a pack of cigarettes went for nearly $20,000. A Fialka M-125-3M 10-rotor cipher code machine complete with accessories sold for $22,400 at a US auction held over the weekend, trumping the device's $8,000-$12,000 estimated sale price.

In this episode, we dig into research that figured out a way to steal data from iPhones wirelessly; we tell the fascinating story of how environmentalist divers in Germany came across an old Enigma cipher machine at the bottom of the Baltic sea; and we give you advice on how to talk to phone scammers. LISTEN NOW. Click-and-drag on the soundwaves below to skip to any point in the podcast.

What they found instead is a treasured piece of computing history, a World War II-era German Enigma crypto machine, sunk to the bottom of the Baltic Sea to protect its precious technology from Allied forces. The development of the Enigma Cipher machine and the life-and-death race to crack its code wasn't just crucial to deciding the outcome of World War II; it ushered in the modern computing age.

Environmental group WWF operates a tragically necessary maritime cleanup operation to find and remove so-called "Ghost nets" from the sea. A ghost net is any rogue fishing device that has got loose and carries on snagging sea creatures, including fish, sea mammals such as whales and dolphins, and even birds, in an uncontrollable way.

German divers searching the Baltic Sea for discarded fishing nets have stumbled upon a rare Enigma cipher machine used by the Nazi military during World War Two which they believe was thrown overboard from a scuttled submarine. Thinking they had discovered a typewriter entangled in a net on the seabed of Gelting Bay, underwater archaeologist Florian Huber quickly realised the historical significance of the find.

A Cambridge post-graduate student has recreated the "Cyclometer", the decryption device devised by Polish mathematicians that informed Alan Turing's later code-breaking efforts. Turing famously devised the "Bombe", a machine that was capable of decrypting messages encoded by Nazi Germany's fiendish Enigma machines.

A four-rotor Enigma machine -- with rotors -- is up for auction....