Taking Down Booters: The Cat-and-Mouse Game, blog post for our USENIX Security paper https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2025/09/06/taking-down-booters-the-cat-and-mouse-game/ #DDoS #USENIXSecurity #Cybercrime #NetworkSecurity (also this is my first USENIX Security paper after many many rejections for other papers, and it got an Honourable Mention Award! :-)
Taking Down Booters: The Cat-and-Mouse Game | Light Blue Touchpaper

VNC RFB Signal Statistics

This interactive time-series plot is a measure our observed VNC RFB signals data.

That tickle of interest in academia is back again because of #usenixsecurity.
Today, Konrad will present the corresponding paper at #usenixsecurity 2025, one of the top international conferences in security research. If you are at the conference, make sure to come by (Track 2, 2.00pm - 3.30pm) and talk to Konrad about his awesome work.
2/3

Really interesting #usenixsecurity talk from Dr. Ben Adida at VotingWorks https://www.voting.works/about on ballot counting resilience.

Main point was paper ballots that can be hand counted is best, but if you must machine count it should rely on paper ballots, be open source, and include features to minimize or flag human error.

About VotingWorks

Not cool.

"We have determined that a bad actor has generated false slides and exploited USENIX’s slide collection process to submit them as though they belong to legitimate authors."

#usenixsecurity

At USENIX Security? Then check out:

Studying the Use of CVEs in Academia, won distinguished paper award https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity25/presentation/schloegel

Discovering and Exploiting Vulnerable Tunnelling Hosts, won most innovative research Pwnie @ DEFCON https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity25/presentation/beitis

Big thanks to all co-authors!! #usenixsecurity

In the LLM security lightning talk track. Shocker: most public models are a security nightmare and it's wild to me that we're handing these to regular end users after decades of trying to lock down their risks on the web. #usenixsecurity
Sitting down at #usenixsecurity opening session. If you want to talk Amazon Science I'll be in random sessions or on and off at the Amazon booth.

🚂 Murder on the JNI Express 🚂

Hercule Poirot solved murders.
Droidot solves... memory corruption.

On the Android Express, every app is a suspect and their outdated native C/C++ libraries are hiding skeletons in the .so closet.

We investigated 3,967 of the most popular apps, following every JNI call like a trail of footprints in the snow.

Our case file:
🕵️‍♂️ 4,282 crashes
🔓 34 confirmed vulnerabilities
📜 3 CVEs

The culprit?
Buggy libraries traveling incognito between apps.

Interested? Check out https://nebelwelt.net/blog/2025/0813-droidot.html or meet us this week at #usenixsecurity!

Droidot: Vulnerable Native Libraries on Android

Android is a complex platform with diverse, concurrently running services. Looking at user-space the assumption is that each app is isolated from...