S/Sgt Betty Vine-Stevens, Washington DC, May 1945.
On 31 March of this year we had to bid farewell to Charlotte Elizabeth “Betty” Webb (née Vine-Stevens) at the age of 101. She was one of the cryptanalysts who worked at Bletchley Park during World War 2, as well as being one of the few women who worked at Bletchley Park in this role. At the time existing societal biases held that women were not interested in ‘intellectual work’, but as manpower was short due to wartime mobilization, more and more women found themselves working at places like Bletchley Park in a wide variety of roles, shattering these preconceived notions.

Betty Webb had originally signed up with the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), with her reasoning per a 2012 interview being that she and a couple of like-minded students felt that they ought to be serving their country, ‘rather than just making sausage rolls’. After volunteering for the ATS, she found herself being interviewed at Bletchley Park in 1941. This interview resulted in a years-long career that saw her working on German and Japanese encrypted communications, all of which had to be kept secret from then 18-year old Betty’s parents.

Until secrecy was lifted, all her environment knew was that she was a ‘secretary’ at Bletchley Park. Instead, she was fighting on the frontlines of cryptanalysis, an act which got acknowledged by both the UK and French governments years later.

Writing The Rulebook

Enigma machine
Although encrypted communications had been a part of warfare for centuries, the level and scale was vastly different during World War 2, which spurred the development of mechanical and electronic computer systems. At Bletchley Park these were the Bombe and Colossus computers, with the former being an electro-mechanical system. Both were used for deciphering German Enigma machine encrypted messages, with the tube-based Colossus taking over starting in 1943.

After enemy messages were intercepted, it was the task of these systems and the cryptanalysis experts to decipher them as quickly as possible. With the introduction of the Enigma machine by the Axis, this had become a major challenge. Since each message was likely to relate to a current event and thus time-sensitive, any delay in decrypting it would render the resulting decrypted message less useful. Along with the hands-on decrypting work, there were many related tasks to make this process work as smoothly and securely as possible.

Betty’s first task at Bletchley was to do the registering of incoming messages, which she began with as soon as she had been subjected to the contents of the Official Secrets Act. This forbade her from disclosing even the slightest detail of what she did or had seen at Bletchley, at the risk of severe punishment.

As was typical at Bletchley Park, each member of the staff there was kept as much in the dark of the whole as possible for operational security reasons. This meant that of the thousands of incoming messages per day, each had to be carefully kept in order and marked with a date and obfuscated location. She did see a Colossus computer once when it was moved into one of the buildings, but this was not one of her tasks, and snooping around Bletchley was discouraged for obvious reasons.

Paraphrasing

The Bletchley Park Mansion where Betty Webb worked initially before moving to Block F, which is now demolished. (Credit: DeFacto, Wikimedia)
Although Betty’s German language skills were pretty good thanks to her mother’s insistence that she’d be able to take care of herself whilst travelling on the continent, the requirements for the translators at Bletchley were much more strict, and thus eventually she ended up working in the Japanese section located in Block F. After decrypting and translating the enemy messages, the texts were not simply sent to military headquarters or similar, but had to be paraphrased first.

The paraphrasing task entails pretty much what it says: taking the original translated message and paraphrasing it so that the meaning is retained, but any clues about what the original message was from which it was paraphrased is erased. In the case that such a message then falls into enemy hands, via a spy at HQ, it is made much harder to determine where this particular information was intercepted.

Betty was deemed to be very good at this task, which she attributed to her mother, who encouraged her to relate stories in her own words. As she did this paraphrasing work, the looming threat of the Official Secrets Act encouraged those involved with the work to not dwell on or remember much of the texts they read.

In May of 1945 with the war in Europe winding down, Betty was transferred to the Pentagon in the USA to continue her paraphrasing work on translated Japanese messages. Here she was the sole ATS girl, but met up with a girl from Hull with whom she had to share a room, and bed, in the rundown Cairo hotel.

With the surrender of Japan the war officially came to an end, and Betty made her way back to the UK.

Secrecy’s Long Shadow

When the work at Bletchley Park was finally made public in 1975, Betty’s parents had sadly already passed away, so she was never able to tell them the truth of what she had been doing during the war. Her father had known that she was keeping a secret, but because of his own experiences during World War 1, he had shown great understanding and appreciation of his daughter’s work.

After keeping her secrets along with everyone else at Bletchley, the Pentagon and elsewhere, Betty wasn’t about to change anything about this. Her husband had never indicated any interest in talking about it either. In her eyes she had just done her duty and that was good enough, but when she got asked to talk about her experiences in 1990, this began a period in which she would not only give talks, but also write about her experiences. In 2015 Betty was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) and in 2021 as a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honour) in France.

Today, as more and more voices from of those who experienced World War 2 and who were involved the heroic efforts to stop the Axis forces fall silent, it is more important than ever to recognize their sacrifices and ingenuity. Even if Betty Webb didn’t save the UK by her lonesome, it was the combined effort from thousands of individuals like her that cracked the Enigma encryption and provided a constant flow of intel to military command, saving countless lives in the process and enabling operations that may have significantly shortened the war.

Top image: A Colossus Mark 2 computer being operated by Dorothy Du Boisson (left) and Elsie Booker (right), 1943 (Credit: The National Archives, UK)

hackaday.com/2025/04/03/rememb…

Gli esperti hanno scoperto una piattaforma PhaaS (phishing-as-a-service) chiamata Lucid che ha attaccato 169 organizzazioni in 88 paesi utilizzando messaggi inviati tramite iMessage (iOS) e RCS (Android).

Gli analisti di Prodaft riferiscono che Lucid è nata a metà del 2023 ed è gestita da hacker cinesi del gruppo XinXin (noto anche come Black Technology). Lucid viene venduto ad altri aggressori tramite abbonamento, dando loro accesso a 1.000 domini di phishing, siti di phishing generati automaticamente e strumenti di invio di spam di livello professionale.

Si nota inoltre che in precedenza XinXin utilizzava la piattaforma Darcula per le sue operazioni, il che indica una potenziale connessione tra le due piattaforme PhaaS. Gli abbonamenti Lucid vengono venduti tramite un canale Telegram dedicato (con oltre 2.000 membri) e vengono forniti ai clienti con licenze settimanali. XinXin sostiene di inviare oltre 100.000 messaggi di phishing al giorno a potenziali vittime tramite Rich Communication Services (RCS) e Apple iMessage. Poiché i messaggi sono protetti dalla crittografia end-to-end, è possibile aggirare i filtri antispam.

“La piattaforma utilizza un meccanismo automatizzato per effettuare attacchi, distribuendo siti di phishing personalizzati, i cui link vengono distribuiti principalmente tramite esca SMS”, scrive Prodaft. “Per migliorare l’efficienza, Lucid sfrutta le tecnologie Apple iMessage e Android RCS per aggirare i tradizionali filtri antispam e migliorare significativamente la recapitabilità e l’efficacia.”

Per inviare messaggi, gli operatori Lucid utilizzano grandi quantità di dispositivi iOS e Android. Per lavorare con iMessage vengono utilizzati ID Apple temporanei, mentre per RCS gli aggressori sfruttano errori specifici nella convalida del mittente per determinati operatori.

Le campagne di phishing prendono di mira principalmente i paesi europei, il Regno Unito e gli Stati Uniti. I messaggi di phishing sono solitamente camuffati da notifiche di consegna, avvisi fiscali, notifiche di pagamento del parcheggio.

Ciò comporta l’utilizzo di tutti i loghi e marchi necessari, nonché del linguaggio appropriato, per soddisfare il target demografico e filtrare le vittime in base alla geolocalizzazione.

Quando le vittime cliccano sui link di phishing, vengono reindirizzate a false landing page che si spacciano per siti web governativi o del settore privato, tra cui USPS, DHL, Royal Mail, FedEx, Revolut, Amazon, American Express, HSBC, E-ZPass, SunPass, Transport for London e altri.

Queste pagine di phishing sono progettate per rubare informazioni personali e finanziarie, tra cui nomi completi, indirizzi e-mail, indirizzi fisici e dati delle carte di credito. Lucid offre ai propri clienti un validatore di carte bancarie affinché gli aggressori possano verificare immediatamente i dati rubati.

Le carte funzionanti vengono poi vendute ad altri criminali informatici o utilizzate per scopi fraudolenti.

L'articolo Phishing come se non ci fosse un domani! Arriva Lucid PhaaS, la piattaforma cinese per truffe globali proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

La biografia definitiva di Robert Johnson. La mia recensione su Free Zone Magazine.
#libri #biografie #blues #RobertJohnson

Bruce Conforth, Gayle Dean Wardlow - Il diavolo, probabilmente. Vita di Robert Johnson | FREE ZONE MAGAZINE freezonemagazine.com/articoli/…

Bruce Conforth, Gayle Dean Wardlow - Il diavolo, probabilmente. Vita di Robert Johnson | FREE ZONE MAGAZINE

Robert Johnson è un bluesman fondamentale, e questo libro fa pulizia degli aspetti mitologici per approfondire il musicista.

^{FREE ZONE MAGAZINE}

It’s not often you’ll see us singing the praises of Microsoft on these pages, but credit where credit is due, this first-person account of how the software giant got its foot in the proverbial door by Bill Gates himself is pretty slick.

Now it’s not the story that has us excited, mind you. It’s the website itself. As you scroll down the page, the text and images morph around in a very pleasing and retro-inspired way. Running your cursor over the text makes it flip through random ASCII characters, reminding us a bit of the “decryption” effect from Sneakers. Even the static images have dithering applied to them as if they’re being rendered on some ancient piece of hardware. We don’t know who’s doing Billy’s web design, but we’d love to have them come refresh our Retro Edition.

Presentation aside, for those who don’t know the story: back in 1975, Gates and Paul Allen told the manufacturer of the Altair 8800 that they had a version of BASIC that would run on the computer and make it easier for people to use. Seeing the potential for increased sales, the company was very interested, and asked them to come give a demonstration of the software in a few weeks.

There was just one problem — Bill and Paul lied. They had never even seen an Altair in person, let alone wrote any code for one. So they set off on a mad dash to complete the project in time, with Allen famously still working on the code on the plane as they flew to the meeting. As you’ve probably guessed, they ended up pulling it off, and the rest is history.

At the very end of the page, you can download the actual source code for Altair BASIC that Gates and Allen co-delivered, presented as scans of the original printout. A little light reading as you wait to find out if that latest Windows update that’s installing is going to tell you that your machine is too old to use anymore.

hackaday.com/2025/04/03/a-very…

Mozilla ha rilasciato ufficialmente Firefox 137, risolvendo numerose vulnerabilità di sicurezza di elevata gravità che potrebbero consentire ad aggressori di eseguire codice arbitrario, innescare condizioni di negazione del servizio o elevare i privilegi sui sistemi interessati.

Questo aggiornamento di sicurezza critico, annunciato il 1° aprile 2025, corregge diversi bug di sicurezza della memoria e vulnerabilità di tipo use-after-free che presentavano rischi significativi per gli utenti delle versioni precedenti. La vulnerabilità più preoccupante corretta in questa versione è CVE-2025-3028, scoperta da Ivan Fratric di Google Project Zero.

Questa vulnerabilità ad alto impatto di tipo use-after-free potrebbe essere attivata quando il codice JavaScript viene eseguito durante la trasformazione di un documento con XSLTProcessor.

Se sfruttata, questa falla potrebbe consentire agli aggressori di eseguire codice arbitrario sul sistema della vittima. Il difetto interessava le versioni di Firefox precedenti alla 137, le versioni di Firefox ESR precedenti alla 115.22 e 128.9 e le versioni di Thunderbird precedenti alla 137 e 128.9. Mozilla lo ha risolto in Firefox 137 migliorando la gestione della memoria durante l’elaborazione XSLT.

Mozilla ha inoltre risolto il bug CVE-2025-3030, un bug critico per la sicurezza della memoria presente in Firefox 136 e altri prodotti Mozilla. Secondo i ricercatori di sicurezza Sylvestre Ledru, Paul Bone e il Mozilla Fuzzing Team, questi bug hanno evidenziato prove di corruzione della memoria e potrebbero essere potenzialmente sfruttati per eseguire codice arbitrario con un certo sforzo.

Le correzioni in Firefox 137 e Thunderbird 137 includono il rafforzamento dei controlli di sicurezza del compilatore JIT e la risoluzione delle condizioni di competizione nella gestione della memoria.

L'articolo Firefox 137 corregge bug pericolosi: Aggiorna subito per non essere a rischio! proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

Siamo ormai nel 2025 ed è ora di aggiornare anche i teoremi scientifici più blasonati.

Il gatto di Schroedinger non è più attuale; passiamo al foglietto illustrativo di Schroedinger.

Si trova sia a destra che a sinistra nella confezione del farmaco, finché non apri la scatola: allora sarai certo che si trova nel lato che hai aperto.

In sostanza: non importa quante volte giri la scatola o in che senso, il foglietto sarà sempre nella posizione migliore per romperti i coglioni.

#Teorema #scienza #humour #medicine #farmaci #schroedinger #gattodischrodinger #bugiardino #bigpharma