We’ve been loving the variety of entries to the 2025 One-Hertz Challenge. Many a clock has been entered, to be sure, but also some projects that step well outside simple timekeeping. Case in point, this AM transmitter from [oldradiofixer.]

The software-only transmitter uses an ATTiny85 processor to output an AM radio signal in the broadcast band. It transmits a simple melody that you can tune in on any old radio you might have lying around the house. Achieving this was simple. [oldradiofixer] set up the cheap microcontroller to toggle pin PB0 at 1 MHz to create an RF carrier. Further code then turns the 1MHz carrier on and off at varying rates to play the four notes—G#, A, G#, and E—of the Twilight Zone theme. This is set up to repeat every second—hence, it’s a perfectly valid entry to the 2025 One-Hertz Challenge!

It’s a simple project, but one that demonstrates the basics of AM radio transmission quite well. The microcontroller may not put out a powerful transmission, but it’s funny to think just how easy it is to generate a broadcast AM signal with a bit of software and a length of wire hanging off one pin. Video after the break.

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hackaday.com/2025/07/30/2025-o…

[Remy van Elst] found an obsolete bike navigation system, the Navman Bike 1000, in a thrift store for €10. The device was a rebadged Mio Cyclo 200 from 2015. Can a decade-old GPS be useful? Well, the answer depends on a little reverse engineering.

There were some newer maps available, but they wouldn’t download using the official software. Out comes WireShark and mitmproxy. That allowed [Remy] to eavesdrop on what was going on between the box and its home server. From there he could intercept the downloaded software image, which in turn yielded to scrutiny. There was one executable, but since the device mounted as a drive, he was able to rename that executable and put his own in using the same name.

The device turns out to run Windows CE. It could even run DOOM! Once he was into the box with a file manager, it was fairly straightforward to add newer software and even update the maps using OpenStreetMaps.

This is a great example of how a little ingenuity and open source tools can extend the life of consumer electronics. It isn’t always as easy to find an entry point into some device like this. Then again, sometimes it’s a little easier than maybe it should be.

We’d all but forgotten Windows CE. We see many people using WireShark, but fewer running mitmproxy. It sure is useful.

hackaday.com/2025/07/30/one-ma…

I responsabili del Python Package Index (PyPI) hanno emesso un avviso su una campagna di phishing rivolta agli utenti. Gli aggressori mirano a reindirizzare le vittime verso siti falsi camuffati da PyPI e a rubare le loro credenziali. Gli aggressori avrebbero inviato email con oggetto “[PyPI] Verifica email” provenienti da noreply@pypj[.]org. In altre parole, il dominio imita pypi.org e la lettera “j” sostituisce la “i”.

“Non si tratta di una violazione della sicurezza di PyPI in sé, ma piuttosto di un tentativo di phishing e di abuso della fiducia che gli utenti ripongono in PyPI”, scrive Mike Fiedler, amministratore di PyPI. Le email contengono un link e invitano gli utenti a cliccarci sopra per verificare il proprio indirizzo email. Il link porta a un sito di phishing mascherato da PyPI e progettato per raccogliere credenziali.

Si noti che, dopo aver inserito i dati sul sito falso, la richiesta viene inviata al sito PyPI legittimo. Questo consente di ingannare le vittime e convincerle che tutto sia in regola, sebbene in realtà le loro credenziali cadano nelle mani degli aggressori.

PyPI ha affermato di stare già valutando possibili metodi per contrastare l’attacco. Nel frattempo, i responsabili hanno invitato gli utenti a controllare attentamente gli URL nei loro browser prima di effettuare l’accesso e ad astenersi dal cliccare sui link se hanno ricevuto email simili in passato.

“Se hai già seguito il link e inserito le tue credenziali, ti consigliamo di cambiare immediatamente la password PyPI”, scrive Fidler. “Controlla la cronologia di sicurezza del tuo account per verificare se ci sono anomalie.”

Al momento non è chiaro chi sia dietro questa campagna, ma è molto simile agli attacchi di phishing che hanno colpito gli utenti di npm nelle ultime settimane. Ricordiamo che, nel caso di npm, gli aggressori utilizzano anche il typosquatting con il dominio npnjs[.]com (invece del vero npmjs.com). Gli aggressori inviano anche email agli sviluppatori in merito alla presunta necessità di verificare il loro indirizzo email per rubarne le credenziali.

Questi attacchi hanno compromesso numerosi pacchetti popolari, alcuni dei quali vengono scaricati 30 milioni di volte a settimana.

L'articolo Dopo NPM, ora è il turno di PyPI: Fate attenzione utenti Python a questa nuova campagna di phishing proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

Negli ultimi giorni, diversi Centri di Assistenza Fiscale (CAF) italiani — tra cui CAF CIA, CAF UIL e CAF CISL — stanno segnalando un’ondata di messaggi SMS sospetti inviati direttamente ai loro clienti. A riportarlo a Red Hot Cyber è stata una segnalazione da parte di Massimo Tenaglia del CED Nazionale, Caf Cia srl.

La truffa del CAF via SMS

Il testo del messaggio, come mostrato anche nell’immagine di copertina, invita l’utente a contattare urgentemente un presunto “CAF Centro Assistenza Formativa” a un numero a pagamento che inizia con 893, prefisso noto per i servizi a sovrapprezzo.

«Si prega di contattare con urgenza i nostri uffici CAF Centro Assistenza Formativa al numero 8938939903 per comunicazioni che la riguardano»

La modalità del tentativo di frode è chiara: sfruttare la fiducia che i contribuenti ripongono nei CAF per indurre la vittima a chiamare un numero a pagamento, generando così guadagni illeciti per i truffatori.

Il dubbio che preoccupa gli operatori

Ciò che rende questa vicenda particolarmente preoccupante è che i numeri destinatari degli SMS risultano essere effettivamente clienti reali dei CAF coinvolti, persone che hanno usufruito di servizi fiscali come 730, ISEE o dichiarazioni dei redditi. Questo dettaglio fa sorgere il sospetto che non si tratti di un’azione casuale, ma che dietro ci possa essere una vera e propria esfiltrazione di dati: qualcuno potrebbe aver avuto accesso ai database dei CAF o, più probabilmente, a quelli delle software house che forniscono le piattaforme informatiche utilizzate dai centri di assistenza fiscale per la gestione delle pratiche.

Un operatore del settore ci ha scritto in modo informale per condividere queste preoccupazioni:

“La cosa strana che abbiamo riscontrato è che i numeri di telefono destinatari di questi SMS sono proprio dei clienti dei relativi CAF a cui sono stati svolti questi servizi. Siccome ci siamo informati presso i nostri fornitori di servizi a livello informatico e sembra non ci sia nessuna violazione di dati, voi che siete sempre attenti a scovare questi attacchi con tentativi di esfiltrazione di dati, siete al corrente di attività criminale magari nei confronti di software house che lavorano per i CAF?”

Ipotesi e scenari

Se davvero ci fosse stata una compromissione, non è detto che i CAF siano stati direttamente violati: molto più probabile che i dati siano stati sottratti da fornitori terzi che possono gestire:

• software per l’elaborazione dei modelli fiscali,
• portali per la gestione degli appuntamenti,
• piattaforme cloud usate per la conservazione dei documenti.

Questa modalità rispecchia quanto già accaduto in altri settori, dove i cybercriminali hanno colpito i fornitori tecnologici per ottenere dati sensibili su larga scala.

Inoltre, va ricordato che nel mondo cybercriminale combo di dati (cioè elenchi aggregati di numeri di telefono, email e altre informazioni) sono costantemente in vendita su forum e marketplace underground a prezzi bassissimi.
Un attacco mirato ai clienti di CAF potrebbe quindi essere alimentato anche da dati aggregati provenienti da precedenti data breach o sottratti tramite malware come gli infostealer, che raccolgono informazioni direttamente dai dispositivi compromessi degli utenti.

Non è quindi semplice risalire all’origine dell’esfiltrazione: i dati potrebbero aver fatto diversi “giri” nel tempo, passando attraverso rivendite, scambi o correlazioni con altre compromissioni passate.
Questo rende ancora più difficile individuare con certezza il momento e il luogo in cui le informazioni siano state sottratte, aumentando il rischio per gli utenti finali.

Cosa possiamo fare

• Non chiamare numeri sospetti, specialmente se iniziano con prefissi a sovrapprezzo come 893 o 899.
• Segnalare immediatamente questi SMS ai CAF di riferimento e alle autorità competenti.
• I CAF, dal canto loro, dovrebbero avvisare i propri clienti con messaggi ufficiali e valutare insieme ai fornitori tecnologici eventuali anomalie nei sistemi informatici.

Conclusione

Questa campagna di phishing via SMS sarebbe l’ennesima dimostrazione di come i dati personali possano diventare un’arma nelle mani dei cybercriminali. È importante che i CAF, i fornitori di software e le autorità collaborino per accertare l’origine del problema e proteggere la privacy dei cittadini.

La sicurezza informatica, però, non è fatta solo di tecnologie e controlli: sta diventando giorno dopo giorno una vera e propria cultura, e così deve essere trattata.
Perché anche disponendo dei migliori strumenti di difesa, il social engineering e l’interazione umana resteranno sempre un passo avanti: il bersaglio finale siamo sempre noi, persone che ogni giorno usano il digitale per lavoro o nella vita privata.

Per questo motivo, la consapevolezza del rischio rimane l’arma più potente, e il prodotto migliore su cui investire davvero.
Formazione, sensibilizzazione e attenzione quotidiana possono fare la differenza tra cadere vittima di un attacco e saperlo riconoscere in tempo.

L'articolo CAF, phishing e telefonate: il nuovo “modello unico” del Crimine Informatico. Fate Attenzione! proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

On a Friday afternoon in mid-June, independent journalist Jack Poulson made a curious discovery: An article that we published about the aggressive attempts of a San Francisco-based tech executive named Maury Blackman to censor Poulson’s reporting about his sealed domestic violence arrest had, itself, disappeared from Google search results.

After Poulson alerted us that day, we immediately investigated that weekend. Even when searching for the article’s exact headline – “Anatomy of a censorship campaign: A tech exec’s crusade to stifle journalism” – it didn’t appear on Google search. It did, however, show up atop results on other search engines like DuckDuckGo and Bing. No other articles published by Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) seemed to have been suppressed by Google.

A Google search conducted by FPF on June 17 of the exact headline didn’t return the article. Other FPF articles appeared normally.

(Screenshot)

The article removed from Google search reported on a sweeping, persistent effort by Blackman or his apparent representatives to silence reporting by Poulson and his nonprofit Tech Inquiry.

The censorship campaign started after Poulson reported in 2023 about the executive’s 2021 arrest on suspicion of domestic violence against his then-25-year-old girlfriend in San Francisco. Blackman, 53 at the time, was never charged or convicted, and the alleged victim recanted her statements. A California court sealed the arrest report in 2022.

Shortly after the publication of Poulson’s article, Blackman resigned as CEO of Premise Data Corp., a surveillance technology firm with U.S. military contracts.

When Blackman was still Premise’s CEO, the company hired a private investigation and security service firm, and filed legal requests in an attempt to unmask Poulson’s confidential sources. Someone claiming to represent Blackman submitted fraudulent Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown requests targeting Poulson’s article. Blackman’s attorneys also roped the San Francisco city attorney into an intimidation campaign against Poulson and Substack, which hosts his newsletter.

These tactics all failed.

But that wasn’t all. Blackman also filed a baseless defamation lawsuit against Poulson, his website hosts, and Tech Inquiry that was later dismissed on First Amendment grounds under California’s anti-SLAPP statute (SLAPP, a strategic lawsuit against public participation, refers to legal actions brought to chill speech). Blackman is appealing the dismissal.

And in April, Blackman even filed a lawsuit against the city of San Francisco for allegedly releasing the arrest report. One of the exhibits to a later filing included a May 2024 letter sent by Blackman’s lawyer to an individual that he thought was Poulson’s source, threatening legal action and demanding a $7.5 million settlement payment.

How Google search was exploited

There are several well-known tactics used to suppress or remove results from Google search. Copyright claims (legitimate and frivolous), court orders (real, forged, or otherwise fishy), and warning letters from government agencies have all been used to disappear search results from Google, sometimes as the result of the work of shady reputation management companies.

Our article, however, was vanished from Google search using a novel maneuver that apparently hasn’t been publicly well documented before: a sustained and coordinated abuse of Google’s “Refresh Outdated Content” tool. (In 2023, in response to a public support request flagging the abuse of the tool to de-index pages, Google’s search liaison said that the company would look into it further, but provided no additional information. The request has since been locked and the replies disabled.)

Google’s “Refresh Outdated Content” tool

(Screenshot)

This tool is supposed to allow those who are not a site’s owner to request the removal from search results of web pages that are no longer live (returning a “404 error”), or to request an update in search of web pages that display outdated or obsolete information in returned results.

However, a malicious actor could, until recently, disappear a legitimate article by submitting a removal request for a URL that resembled the target article but led to a “404 error.” By altering the capitalization of a URL slug, a malicious actor apparently could take advantage of a case-insensitivity bug in Google’s automated system of content removal.

That is exactly what happened to our article about the censorship campaign against Poulson. Someone reported an invalid variation of the article’s URL and requested its removal from Google search results. When Google’s crawler encountered the “404 error” following the report, it not only de-indexed the reported URL but also erroneously removed the live, valid article, possibly alongside every other variant of the URL, from search results.

Each time our original article was re-indexed by Google, someone submitted a new removal request for a slightly modified, oddly-capitalized version of the URL’s slug, triggering the same process, and so on. This cycle allowed the person or people submitting the reports to continuously suppress our article from search visibility — resulting in a game of digital Whac-A-Mole.

Nine removal requests targeting the same article on FPF’s site between May 7 and June 23, 2025.

(Screenshot/Google Search Console)

Once we identified the pattern, we took action by canceling the active removal requests in our Google Search Console and manually re-indexing the article so it would reappear in Google search results.

But we weren’t the only targets of this de-indexing scheme. After we alerted Poulson about what we had found, he discovered that two of his articles were similarly targeted using the same Refresh Outdated Content tool during the same time frame as ours.

In total, the two Poulson articles were targeted using this method 21 times. Our article was targeted nine times. The attacks on both websites spanned the same period, May 7 to June 23, strongly suggesting that a single actor was behind the campaign and that the campaign was forced to an end once Google introduced its fix.

Google’s ‘rare’ response and fix

When we reached out about the removal of our article, a Google spokesperson confirmed the abuse to us in an emailed statement on June 27. Initially, the company told us that the Refresh Outdated Content tool “helps ensure our search results are up to date,” adding that they are “vigilant in monitoring abuse,” and that they have “relisted pages that were wrongly impacted for this specific issue.”

This vague response did not explain whether Google already knew about the vulnerability of its tool for abuse, and was unclear about whether only our and Poulson’s pages had been re-indexed, or other websites were also impacted by similar attacks.

In a response to another question about whether this vulnerability has been widely exploited and how many other web pages could have been improperly de-indexed as a result of the abuse of this tool, the spokesperson claimed that “the issue only impacted a tiny fraction of websites,” which is a very unhelpful answer given the internet’s 1 billion websites.

Upon pressing Google with another round of detailed questions about our findings, the company was more forthcoming: “Confirming that we’ve rolled out a fix to prevent this type of abuse of the ‘Refresh Outdated Content Tool,’ the spokesperson said, but added that they “won’t be able to share anymore on this.”

While Google did the right thing by fixing this vulnerability, it’s disappointing that the company is unwilling to be more transparent. Google says that it’s committed to maximizing access to information. If that’s true, it has an obligation to the public to be transparent about how its products can be misused in such a basic way to censor speech.

Did Google know about the problem before we alerted it? Is it aware of other methods used to maliciously de-index search results? The company isn’t saying. But at least now that Google has confirmed that they’ve introduced a universal fix to avoid further exploitation of that bug, we can reveal the scheme’s details.

Google allowing those other than sites’ owners to remove pages from Google search results “is obviously a huge problem,” said Jason Kelley, director of activism at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “The other issue is the lack of transparency from Google. Site owners would probably never find out if this feature was used to impact their search results, and probably never will find out that this had happened to them now that it’s corrected.”

Kelley described the company’s admission of the issue’s existence and taking it seriously as “rare.”

(EFF lawyers represented Poulson in the case.)

‘Legal failure’

Poulson told us it was “humbling” to realize that a 600-word article on the CEO of a surveillance firm could lead to such cascading censorship efforts, including the recent effort to “sabotage Google search results.”

“Blackman’s attempt to use the courts to scrub his felony arrest report and related news articles from the internet was not just a legal failure,” Susan Seager, a First Amendment lawyer who represents Tech Inquiry, told FPF. She added that his libel and privacy lawsuit against Poulson, Tech Inquiry, Substack, and Amazon Web Services “brought even more publicity to his arrest.”

On Tuesday, Poulson, Tech Inquiry, and Substack were awarded close to $400,000 in attorneys’ fees by the San Francisco Superior Court.

Who might be behind it?

Because Google does not document who submits removal requests through the Refresh Outdated Content tool, we have no way of knowing for certain who was behind the attempts to suppress search results featuring articles by us and Poulson.

We reached out to Blackman, who is now the CEO of a reputation management agency, ironically named The Transparency Company. We asked whether he or one of his associates reported our or Poulson’s articles using the Refresh Outdated Content tool or otherwise attempted to have Google de-index or suppress them. He didn’t respond to our requests for comment.

The good news is that all three articles — ours and Poulson’s — are restored on Google search, and Google claims to have fixed this problem. Plus, the new round of censorship inspired a new round of reporting, including the article you’re reading right now and a new article by Poulson, also published today.

Maybe now, anyone attempting to abuse legal or technical tools to censor journalism will learn the hard truth about the Streisand Effect: it will almost inevitably draw more attention, not less.

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