I’ve lately seen multiple bug bounty hunters on twitter (and other platforms) proudly exclaiming that hacking is not a crime. They are not wrong, but I think the answer needs to be a bit more nuanced. So here is my take on hacking. Hacking is not inherently a crime, but neither is it automatically never criminal. I would compare it with lighting a fire. There are instances where it is helpful and legal (eg. lighting a campfire), but there are at least as many ways of doing it illegally (eg. burning down a building). The act of lighting a fire can be good or bad, legal or illegal, ethical or unethical. Everything depends on how you do it. ...

I’ve gotten a bit curious about what data different companies are collecting about me. This have led to a couple of GDPR requests to companies to provide the data so I can analyse it. In this post I will share my thoughts about the content of the report I got from Spotify, and the process of fetching the data. The Download Process The process to get access to your data is quite straight forward. There are clear descriptions on how to download your data under privacy settings, where you can request a download. The collection process takes a while and an email is sent when your data is ready to be downloaded. In the email there are a link that allows you to download a zip archive containing your information. ...

A couple of weeks back I had a very interesting meeting at work. After meeting a new development team and discussing security (testing), they commented on how great it was to work with a driven and interested security engineer instead of a nay-sayer. This got me thinking about the overall view of security professionals from others, and realised that we are often seen as a hindrance. This line of thinking arose once more after reading the “Report on the 2020 FOSS Contributor Survey” [1]. The report highlights that developers of FOSS (Free Open Source Software) have the same view, that security is a hindrance, a necessary evil that has to be done. Something to not spend more time on than absolutely necessary since its just annoying and boring, something that we must strive to change. ...

In the news lately I’ve seen multiple news stories where security breaches have been discussed. Most of them have followed sensitive data being disclosed after a company has been hacked. In cybersecurity usually categorise a vulnerability or incident based on its impact, and to do so we use the CIA triad. NO, CIA in this case does not stand for Central Intelligence Agency. In this case CIA stands for the three kinds of impact a vulnerability can have, Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability. ...

Far to often organisations do all their security work on the few systems that are exposed to the internet. This might be acceptable when you begin the structured and ongoing work with security, but you should try to move on to defence in depth as soon as possible. Defence in depth is where you do not leave security to one layer of an application (or solution), but instead validate the security every step of the way. A common example for this is that even if you have a network firewall you do not disable the firewall in the operating system. This can be transferred to software development as well. In a more complex system each component should get the same security controls. It should not only be the frontend API that validates the input, instead each component should validate the data as untrusted when it receives it from another component. By doing so the resilience of the solution as a whole is greatly improved, where a single issue have limited impact, and might not even be exploitable. ...