If you get SMS messages on your phone and think you have two-factor authentication, you’re kidding yourself. That’s the message Nick Weaver and David Kris extract from two stories we cover in this week’s episode of The Cyberlaw Podcast – DOJ’s indictment of a couple of kids whose hacker chops are modest but whose social engineering skillz are remarkable. They used those skills to bribe or bamboozle phone companies into changing the phone numbers of their victims, allowing them to intercept all the two-factor authentication they needed to steal boatloads of cryptocurrency. For those with better hacking chops than social skills, there’s always exploitation of SS7 vulnerabilities, which allow interception of text messages without all the muss and fuss of changing SIM cards.

Continue Reading Episode 250: We give you Weaver

Doing our best to avoid turning this into the Applelaw podcast, episode 105 begins with Maury Shenk unpacking the new US-EU Privacy Shield details.  His take: more hassles for companies accused of noncompliance, more detailed privacy disclosures and compliance obligations for most members, and a modicum of pain for the intelligence community, but it’s still basically the same framework as the Safe Harbor.
Continue Reading Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast – Interview with Robin Weisman and Peter Van Valkenburgh