Security | Arik Yavilevich's blog

Real-time location tracking of individuals or things that are important to you

Dec

19

2020

When I was taking my young kids to the park or playground I wished I had a solution that would tell me where they are in case they go out of sight. This led me to a project where I made a system to tell me in which direction (AKA bearing) and how far a ...

Capturing and reversing wireless keyboard signal

Sep

4

2016

Recently I have made a presentation at the “Software Defined Radio Israel” meetup about my work capturing and reversing wireless keyboard signals. I focused on a “Rapoo E2700 keyboard and track-pad” but we also discussed the broader challenge of such capturing for SDR enthusiasts. The project involved capturing 2.4Ghz wireless signal with an RTL-SDR dongle ...

Dear Gigya CEO, JavaScript files are important

Dec

2

2014

A few days ago, news broke about a large-scale hack of various sites by the Syrian Electronic Army. The motivation behind the hack was political and the only damage came down to a popup message: “You’ve been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA).”. Happy thanks giving, hope you didn't miss us! The press: Please ...

XSA-108 hitting AWS EC2 makes me speculate

Oct

24

2014

You might have heard of the massive September EC2 virtual machine reboot on the Amazon Web Services cloud. Right away it was speculated that this is due to a security bug in Xen, the hypervisor platform used by EC2. On October 1st, the embargo was lifted and the suspicions were confirmed. The bug, XSA-108, can ...

How we fell for a SORBS SPAM trap because we are such nice guys 13

Aug

11

2014

A few days ago our IT teams got a support ticket from an employee, who sent an email and it bounced. The explanation for the reject states: “This message has been blocked because it is from a FortiGuard – AntiSpam black IP address”. Naturally it was quite a surprise for us. A quick check with ...

Study shows technical individuals choose better passwords

Nov

12

2013

A research at Carnegie Mellon University tested how likely a password is to be guessed, segmented by the faculty of the password owner. The news were covered in Ars Technica. To me this is scientific proof that technically inclined individuals care about computer security more than non-technical ones. I would go as far as to ...