Hello, welcome to the Monday, June 26, 2017 edition of the Sandcent Storm Center's Stormcast. My name is Johannes Ulrich, and the I'm recording from Columbia, Maryland. I think I mentioned it in Friday's podcast that we got a number of emails with fake DDoS extortions. Apparently it is very common. I haven't received one

personally yet, but we received a number of these emails. They're pretty much spam. For example,

some of them appear to be sent to the who is contacts of the respective domains, others just to random addresses. Ignore them. At this point,

there is no evidence that any of them resulted in an actual DDoS attack. And given that,

it's travel and vacation season. I wrote up some thoughts about traveling with your laptop. Looks like the laptop ban is pretty

much off the table. Haven't heard anything about this, so unless you're traveling to very specific

countries, you will be able to take your laptop with you in the airplane's cabin. But then again,

once you're at your destination, staying at a hotel,

you probably aren't going to carry the laptop around with you. So unless you're one of those

weird people that can survive without a laptop during your vacation, the diary that I wrote up

has some ideas about how to keep your data

secure while traveling.

Over the last few years, there have been a number of attacks that used what's called

a site channel attack in order to remotely extract cryptographic keys.

Typically that involves monitoring power consumption or

electromagnetic radiation emitted from a PC. Well, typically that does require quite expensive

research equipment in order to pick up these signals. Fox IT now managed to do it with essentially

relatively cheap software-defined radios, but only over a few inches distance. On the other hand,

you could still probably a mountain attack like this by, for example, mounting a sensor at the underside

of a desk or something like this, and then extract cryptographic keys from a PC or a laptop

being used on the top of the desk. How well an attack like this will work in a real-life

environment, of course, is still somewhat

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