The Irish government is planning to bolster its police's ability to intercept communications, including encrypted messages, and provide a legal basis for spyware use. From a report: The Communications (Interception and Lawful Access) Bill is being framed as a replacement for the current legislation that governs digital communication interception. The Department of Justice, Home Affairs, and Migration said in an announcement this week the existing Postal Packets and Telecommunications Messages (Regulation) Act 1993 "predates the telecoms revolution of the last 20 years." As well as updating laws passed more than two decades ago, the government was keen to emphasize that a key ambition for the bill is to empower law enforcement to intercept of all forms of communications. The Bill will bring communications from IoT devices, email services, and electronic messaging platforms into scope, "whether encrypted or not." In a similar way to how certain other governments want to compel encrypted messaging services to unscramble packets of interest, Ireland's announcement also failed to explain exactly how it plans to do this. However, it promised to implement a robust legal framework, alongside all necessary privacy and security safeguards, if these proposals do ultimately become law. It also vowed to establish structures to ensure "the maximum possible degree of technical cooperation between state agencies and communication service providers."/i

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The pro-Russian CyberVolk group resurfaced with a Telegram-based ransomware-as-a-service platform, but fatally undermined its own operation by hardcoding master encryption keys in plaintext. The Register reports: First, the bad news: the CyberVolk 2.x (aka VolkLocker) ransomware-as-a-service operation that launched in late summer. It's run entirely through Telegram, which makes it very easy for affiliates that aren't that tech savvy to lock files and demand a ransom payment. CyberVolk's soldiers can use the platform's built-in automation to generate payloads, coordinate ransomware attacks, and manage their illicit business operations, conducting everything through Telegram. But here's the good news: the ransomware slingers got sloppy when it came time to debug their code and hardcoded the master keys -- this same key encrypts all files on a victim's system -- into the executable files. This could allow victims to recover encrypted data without paying the extortion fee, according to SentinelOne senior threat researcher Jim Walter, who detailed the gang's resurgence and flawed code in a Thursday report.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Earlier this year, home goods maker Kohler launched a smart camera called the Dekoda that attaches to your toilet bowl, takes pictures of it, and analyzes the images to advise you on your gut health. Anticipating privacy fears, Kohler said on its website that the Dekoda's sensors only see down into the toilet, and claimed that all data is secured with "end-to-end encryption." The company's use of the expression "end-to-end encryption" is, however, wrong, as security researcher Simon Fondrie-Teitler pointed out in a blog post on Tuesday. By reading Kohler's privacy policy, it's clear that the company is referring to the type of encryption that secures data as it travels over the internet, known as TLS encryption -- the same that powers HTTPS websites. [...] The security researcher also pointed out that given Kohler can access customers' data on its servers, it's possible Kohler is using customers' bowl pictures to train AI. Citing another response from the company representative, the researcher was told that Kohler's "algorithms are trained on de-identified data only." A "privacy contact" from Kohler said that user data is "encrypted at rest, when it's stored on the user's mobile phone, toilet attachment, and on our systems." The company also said that, "data in transit is also encrypted end-to-end, as it travels between the user's devices and our systems, where it is decrypted and processed to provide our service."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press: The information needed to decipher the last remaining unsolved secret message embedded within a sculpture at CIA headquarters in Virginia sold at auction for nearly $1 million, the auction house announced Friday. The winner will get a private meeting with the 80-year-old artist to go over the codes and charts in hopes of continuing what he's been doing for decades: interacting with would-be cryptanalyst sleuths. The archive owned by the artist who created Kryptos, Jim Sanborn, was sold to an anonymous bidder for $963,000, according to RR Auction of Boston. The archive includes documents and coding charts for the sculpture, dedicated in 1990. Three of the messages on the 10-foot-tall (3-meter) sculpture — known as K1, K2 and K3 — have been solved, but a solution for the fourth, K-4, has frustrated the experts and enthusiasts who have tried to decipher the S-shaped copper screen... One side has a series of staggered alphabets that are key to decoding the four encrypted messages on the other side. "The purchaser's 'long-term stewardship plan' is being developed, according to the auction house."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.