Security – Software Engineering Daily

Online advertising enables free content and services of the Internet. One of the free services that is powered by advertising is the browser. 60% of web browsing is done through Chrome, which is owned by Google, which is powered by advertising. The application that most of us use to explore the web is made by The post Brave Browser with Jonathan Sampson appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

When a cyber attack occurs, how do we identify who committed it? There is no straightforward answer to that question. Even if we know Chinese hackers have infiltrated our power grid with logic bombs, we might not be able to say with certainty whether those hackers were state actors or rogue Chinese hackers looking for The post Attack Attribution with John Davis appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Ransomware and DDoS attacks happen all the time. Sometimes they affect large swaths of users. WannaCry ransomware froze the computer systems in hospitals. Mirai botnet DDoS attacks took down a DNS provider, making Netflix and Twitter inaccessible for a short period of time. These are innocent attacks compared to what we could face from a The post Car and IoT Security with Chris Craig appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Quality assurance testing is a form of testing that closely mirrors user behavior. Sometimes it is manual, sometimes it is automated. Automated QA tests are scripts that validate correct data representation as the application mechanically runs through high-level workflows–like a login page. Manual QA testers act out use cases of an application to see if The post QA Testing with Jonathan Alexander appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Shopify is a company that helps customers build custom online storefronts. Shopify has built upon the same Ruby on Rails application since the founding of their business 12 years ago starting with Rails 0.5 and moving all the way to Rails 5.   MRuby is a lightweight implementation of the Ruby language. Shopify made the The post MRuby and Language Security with Daniel Bovensiepen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

At Coinbase, security is more important than anything else. Coinbase is a company that allows for storage and exchange of cryptocurrencies. Protecting banking infrastructure is difficult, but in some ways the stakes are higher with Coinbase, because bitcoin is fundamentally unregulated. If a hacker were able to syphon all of the money out of Coinbase The post Coinbase Security with Philip Martin appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

A cryptocurrency exchange faces a uniquely difficult fraud problem. A hacker who steals my credentials can initiate a transfer of all my bitcoin to another wallet, and it is a non-reversible, non-identifiable payment. So it is really important to prevent those kinds of fraudulent transactions. At the third Software Engineering Daily Meetup, Coinbase director of The post Fighting Fraud at Coinbase with Soups Ranjan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Ransomware uses software to extort people. A piece of ransomware might arrive in your inbox looking like a PDF, or a link to a website with a redirect. Ransomware is often distributed using social engineering. The email address might resemble someone you know, or a transactional email from a company like Uber or Amazon. Tim The post Ransomware with Tim Gallo and Allan Liska appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

The online advertising industry is a giant casino. Giant technology companies are the casino owners, online publishers are the casino employees, the brand advertisers are the victims who keep returning to the casino to lose their money, and the small adtech companies are the sharks who make lots of money exploiting the inefficiencies of the The post Ad Fraud In Our Own Backyard with Shailin Dhar appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

The Internet is decreasing in privacy and increasing in utility. Under some conditions, this tradeoff makes sense. We publicize our profile photo so that people know what we look like. Under other conditions, this tradeoff does not make sense. We do not want a television that costs less to purchase because it is silently recording The post Web Tracking with Bill Budington appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Thursday February 23rd was a big day in security news: details were published about the Cloudbleed bug, which leaked tons of plaintext requests from across the Internet into plain view. On the same day, the first collision attack against SHA-1 was demonstrated by researchers at Google, foretelling the demise of SHA-1 as a safe hashing The post Cloudbleed and SHA-1 Collision with Max Burkhardt appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Security vulnerabilities are an important concern in systems. When we specify that we want certain information hidden, for example our phone number or our date of birth, we expect the system to hide the information. However, this doesn’t always happen due to human error in the code because programmers have to write checks and filters The post Security Language with Jean Yang appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Vulnerabilities exist in every computer system. As a system gets bigger, the number of vulnerabilities magnifies. The web is the biggest, most complex computer system we have–but fortunately, the steps we can take to secure our web applications are often quite simple. Jared Smith is a cyber security research scientist with Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The post Cyber Warfare with Jared Smith appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Every digital system has vulnerabilities. Cars can be hacked, locked computers can be exploited, and credit cards can be spoofed. Security researchers make a career out of finding these types of vulnerabilities. Samy Kamkar’s approach to security research is not just about dissection–it’s also about creativity. For many of the technologies he hacks on, Samy The post Security Research with Samy Kamkar appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

A huge percentage of online advertisements are never seen by humans. They are viewed by bots–automated scripts that are opening web pages in a browser and pretending to be a human. Advertising scammers set up web pages, embed advertisements on those pages, and then pay for bot traffic to come and view those advertisements. This The post Ad Fraud Research with Augustine Fou appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Advertising fraud is easy, legal, and extremely profitable. A fraudster can set up a website, scrape content from the internet, and run programmatic advertisements against that website. The fraudster can then purchase bot traffic. Those bots will visit the page, consume advertisements, and return profit to the owner of the page. In a past life, The post Ad Fraud Everywhere with Shailin Dhar appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Botnets have a massive influence on the Internet. As we have seen recently with the Mirai Botnet, IOT bots can take down companies as big as Netflix. In our recent episodes about advertising fraud, we’ve talked about how bots are being used to take billions of dollars of revenue from advertisers. Derek Muller is one The post Botnet Facebook Likes with Derek Muller appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

When Facebook acquired Instagram, one of the first systems Instagram plugged into was Facebook’s internal spam and fraud prevention system. Pete Hunt was the first Facebook engineer to join the Instagram team. When he joined, the big problems at Instagram were around fake accounts, harassment, and large volumes of spammy comments. After seeing the internal The post Fraud Prevention with Pete Hunt appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

When you visit a web page, that web page can write data to a file on your computer, known as a cookie. Scripts on that page can also read from your cookie file to understand where you have been in the past. All of this data about you is getting shared between advertising companies like The post Ad Tracking with Larry Furr appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Advertising fraud takes billions of dollars out of the economy every year. We don’t know exactly how much money is being lost, because we don’t know what percentage of Internet users are bots. Are You A Human is a company designed to solve that exact problem and provide a service for verifying whether a user The post Ad Fraud with Ben Trenda appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.