Facebook's currency Libra faces financial, privacy pushback
June 19, 2019 | Mae Anderson, Frank Bajak, Macy Gordon,Angela Charlton
Press
Still, Facebook is sure to face an onslaught of liability concerns when it comes to anti-money laundering and identity verification, said Nicholas Weaver, a senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute.
NSA warns Microsoft Windows users of cyber-attack risk
June 5, 2019 | Tara McKelvey, BBC News
The vulnerability in the older versions of Microsoft Windows, wrote the International Computer Science Institute's Nicholas Weaver, means that bad actors could "gain complete control of the remote system".
Startup Cuts Network Clutter With 'Lean NFV'
May 30, 2019 | Mitch Wagner, Light Reading
Nefeli, launched in 2017 with a $10 million series A funding round, is co-founded by company chairman Scott Shenker, who was previously the initial CEO of Nicira, an early software-defined networking company that sold to VMware for $1.26 billion in 2012. Another co-founder is CTO Sylvia Ratnasamy, an associate professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, where her work focuses on the design and implementation of networked systems.
The Improbable Rise of Huawei
March 25, 2019 | Keith Johnson, Elias Groll
To satisfy the demands of law enforcement, telecommunications networks are typically built to enable some type of wiretapping function. Such abilities have in the past been subverted by intelligence agencies to snoop on calls and scoop up data, so using Chinese-designed equipment for such networks practically represents an invitation to Beijing to spy, “since the infrastructure itself is designed to support such meddling,” argued Nicholas Weaver, a senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute.
Android users' security and privacy at risk from shadowy ecosystem of pre-installed software, study warns
March 25, 2019 | Natasha Lomas
The study, which was carried out by researchers at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) and the IMDEA Networks Institute, in collaboration with the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at Berkeley (USA) and Stony Brook University of New York (US), encompassed more than 82,000 pre-installed Android apps across more than 1,700 devices manufactured by 214 brands, according to the IMDEA institute.
Fire (and lots of it): Berkeley researcher on the only way to fix cryptocurrency
February 4, 2019 | Dan Goodin, Ars Technica
Nicholas Weaver made no bones about it: he really, really dislikes cryptocurrencies. Speaking at the Enigma security conference in Burlingame, California, last week, the researcher at UC Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute characterized bitcoin and its many follow-on digital currencies as energy-sucking leeches with no redeeming qualities.
This Time It’s Russia’s Emails Getting Leaked
January 24, 2019 | Kevin Poulsen, The Daily Beast
“A lot of what WikiLeaks will do is organize and re-publish information that’s appeared elsewhere,” said Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute. “They’ve never done that with anything out of Russia.”
When Chinese hackers declared war on the rest of us
January 10, 2019 | James Griffiths, MIT Technology Review
Weaver is a network-security expert at the International Computer Science Institute, a research center in Berkeley, California. Together with other researchers, he helped pinpoint the targets of the attack: two GitHub-hosted projects connected to GreatFire.org, a China-based anti-censorship organization.
Arrest of Top Huawei Executive Could Roil Trade Talks with China
December 7, 2018 | Elias Groll, Foreign Policy
“Cell phone networks are deliberately insecure in order to enable wiretapping,” said Nick Weaver, a staff researcher at the International Computer Science Institute. “Using Chinese-built infrastructure is just asking to say, ‘Let Chinese intelligence conduct wiretaps,’ since the infrastructure itself is designed to support such meddling.”
Republicans hired the same cybersecurity firm as the hacked DNC, but it's not clear that was a bad idea
December 6, 2018 | Steven Nelson, Washington Examiner
“Their reputation is warranted and they are very good. They have worked for both parties for years now,” said Nicholas Weaver, a computer security expert at the University of California, Berkeley. “Criticism of CrowdStrike's job in both cases is unfair. They are an incident response team: You bring them in AFTER the manure has hit the 3 MW wind turbine. So it is unfair to complain about a mess,” Weaver said in an email.