Press

Huge cyberattack ebbs as investigators work to find culprits
May 15, 2017 | Anick Jesdanun and Barbara Ortutay, AP

Another possible slip-up: Nicholas Weaver, who teaches networking and security at the University of California, Berkeley, said good ransomware usually generates a unique bitcoin address for each payment to make tracing difficult. That didn’t seem to happen here.

Transcribing Audio Sucks—So Make the Machines Do It
April 26, 2017 | Jesse Jarnow, Wired

Using a standard test from ICSI’s Meeting Recorder Project, Friedland pushed Trint by feeding it a conversation recorded with an iPhone containing “overlap, laughter, emotions, and other things that occur in a meeting.” Then he observed how accurately Trint maps the fragments of everyday human speech, if not all of the nuances. “Overall, I think it has a state-of-the-art performance with a nice interface,” he says.

US considers cabin laptop ban on flights from UK airports
April 24, 2017 | Chris Johnston, The Guardian

Nicholas Weaver, researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, said last month: “It doesn’t match a conventional threat model. If you assume the attacker is interested in turning a laptop into a bomb, it would work just as well in the cargo hold.”

Brain Hacking May Mitigate Computer Users’ Risky Behavior
April 19, 2017 | Joyce E. Cutler, Bloomberg Law

One big problem in security design “is that security isn’t usually the primary task: people don’t sit down at the computer to ‘do security,’” Serge Egelman, director of usable security and privacy research at the University of California, Berkeley-affiliated International Computer Science Institute, told Bloomberg BNA.

Trove of Stolen NSA Data Is ‘Devastating’ Loss for Intelligence Community
April 17, 2017 | Jenna McLaughlin, Foreign Policy
This article also appeared in the Chicago Tribune.

“These were God mode tools that, used sparingly, were an incredible asset to U.S. intelligence,” Nicholas Weaver, senior researcher at Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute, wrote to Foreign Policy.

Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast - Interview with Nicholas Weaver
April 11, 2017 | Stewart A. Baker, Steptoe & Johnson, LLP

Our guest interview is with Nick Weaver, of Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute. It covers the latest dumps of hacker tools, the vulnerability equities process, the so-bad-you-want-to-cover-your-eyes story of Juniper and the Dual_EC hacks, and ends with a tour of recent computer security disasters, from the capture of a bank’s entire online presence, to the pwning of Dallas’s emergency sirens, and a successful campaign to compromise the outsourcing firms that supply IT to small and medium sized businesses.

Many security experts and analysts remain uncertain about the motive of the leaks. Nicholas Weaver, a researcher with the International Computer Science Institute at the University of California at Berkeley, previously said the CIA leaks appear "designed to disrupt ongoing CIA operations, but not help anyone else."

WikiLeaks spills source code files for CIA’s Marble Framework
April 5, 2017 | Bill Brenner, Naked Security

UC Berkeley researcher Nicholas Weaver told the Washington Post that this could be the most “technically damaging” document drop since Vault7 was launched, “as it seems designed to directly disrupt ongoing CIA operations and attribute previous operations”.

Wikileaks releases code that could unmask CIA hacking operations
April 2, 2017 | Sean Gallagher, Ars Technica

University of California at Berkeley computer security researcher Nicholas Weaver told the Washington Post's Ellen Nakashima, "This appears to be one of the most technically damaging leaks ever done by WikiLeaks, as it seems designed to directly disrupt ongoing CIA operations.”

Nicholas Weaver, a researcher with the International Computer Science Institute at the University of California at Berkeley, said in a statement that releasing the packer will allow antivirus companies to block CIA malware, but notes that is only in the public interest if "disrupting the CIA's operations for the sake of disrupting the CIA's operations is in your 'public interest.'"

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