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Zakir Durumeric

@zakird.com

Internet Security, Trust, and Safety Researcher. Stanford CS Faculty, Censys Founder and Chief Scientist, ZMap Creator. https://zakird.com/

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Latest posts by Zakir Durumeric @zakird.com

Home - Computing Sciences Berkeley Lab's Computing Sciences Area increases our understanding of ourselves, our planet, and our universe through HPC, mathematics...

Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (‪@berkeleylab.lbl.gov‬) Computing Sciences (@cs.lbl.gov‬) is accepting applications for two distinguished postdoctoral fellowships: Luis W. Alvarez Fellowship, and Admiral Grace M. Hopper Fellowship. Applications due Oct. 24, 2025. More information: go.lbl.gov/2026.

26.08.2025 18:56 👍 2 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
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China has started filtering and censoring internet traffic taking place over the QUIC protocol.

The filtering started in April last year.

The Great Firewall now decrypts QUIC packets at scale and uses a separate blocklist for QUIC traffic, separate from its main filters

gfw.report/publications...

02.08.2025 22:31 👍 30 🔁 17 💬 0 📌 0
Here's a comprehensive alt text for the screen reader:

"Chart titled 'Spike-To-New CVE Delta Distribution' showing the time delay between GreyNoise tag spikes and corresponding CVE publications. The chart has two sections: an upper cumulative distribution curve and a lower scatter plot. The upper section shows that 50% of spike-to-new-CVE events happen within 3 weeks, and 80% occur within 6 weeks, with the curve reaching nearly 100% by week 31. The lower scatter plot displays individual data points color-coded by vendor (Cisco in blue, Fortinet in red, Juniper in green, Palo Alto Networks in purple, Citrix in orange, Ivanti in teal, MikroTik in yellow, and SonicWall in pink). Most data points cluster heavily in the first 6 weeks, with the highest concentration in weeks 0-3, then gradually decreasing density through week 31. The X-axis represents weeks (0-31) and the Y-axis shows percentage of spike events (0-100%).

Here's a comprehensive alt text for the screen reader: "Chart titled 'Spike-To-New CVE Delta Distribution' showing the time delay between GreyNoise tag spikes and corresponding CVE publications. The chart has two sections: an upper cumulative distribution curve and a lower scatter plot. The upper section shows that 50% of spike-to-new-CVE events happen within 3 weeks, and 80% occur within 6 weeks, with the curve reaching nearly 100% by week 31. The lower scatter plot displays individual data points color-coded by vendor (Cisco in blue, Fortinet in red, Juniper in green, Palo Alto Networks in purple, Citrix in orange, Ivanti in teal, MikroTik in yellow, and SonicWall in pink). Most data points cluster heavily in the first 6 weeks, with the highest concentration in weeks 0-3, then gradually decreasing density through week 31. The X-axis represents weeks (0-31) and the Y-axis shows percentage of spike events (0-100%).

Chart titled 'Hidden Signals Before The Storm' showing timeline relationships between GreyNoise tag spikes (white dots) and CVE publications (red dots) across 8 vendors from late 2024 through mid-2025. Organized in 8 sections: Cisco (7 vulnerabilities including Unified Directory Traversal, Prime RCE, ASA XSS), Fortinet (3 vulnerabilities including FortiOS Disclosure, Auth. Bypass), Juniper (2 JunOS REI vulnerabilities), Citrix (4 NetScaler-related vulnerabilities), Ivanti (8 vulnerabilities including Endpoint Manager RCE, EPMM Auth. Bypass variants), MikroTik (RouterOS Bruteforcer), Palo Alto Networks (6 PAN-OS vulnerabilities including RCE, Auth. Bypass), and SonicWall (4 vulnerabilities including SRA SQLi, SMA RCE). Pattern shows white spike dots consistently appearing weeks to months before red CVE publication dots across all vendors. Note indicates different X-axis scales per section.

Chart titled 'Hidden Signals Before The Storm' showing timeline relationships between GreyNoise tag spikes (white dots) and CVE publications (red dots) across 8 vendors from late 2024 through mid-2025. Organized in 8 sections: Cisco (7 vulnerabilities including Unified Directory Traversal, Prime RCE, ASA XSS), Fortinet (3 vulnerabilities including FortiOS Disclosure, Auth. Bypass), Juniper (2 JunOS REI vulnerabilities), Citrix (4 NetScaler-related vulnerabilities), Ivanti (8 vulnerabilities including Endpoint Manager RCE, EPMM Auth. Bypass variants), MikroTik (RouterOS Bruteforcer), Palo Alto Networks (6 PAN-OS vulnerabilities including RCE, Auth. Bypass), and SonicWall (4 vulnerabilities including SRA SQLi, SMA RCE). Pattern shows white spike dots consistently appearing weeks to months before red CVE publication dots across all vendors. Note indicates different X-axis scales per section.

🆕 GreyNoise Research: Early Warning Signals Before CVEs Drop

In our latest research, we examined dozens of incidents where attacker activity — often in the form of exploit attempts — spiked weeks before a new CVE was disclosed.

One chart shows what we found (much more in the report):

31.07.2025 13:17 👍 8 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 2
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Stop Pretending Chatbots Have Feelings: Media's Dangerous AI Anthropomorphism Problem When AI causes harm, headlines blame the bot instead of the billion-dollar companies that built them. This anthropomorphic coverage is tech journalism at its worst.

Today's newsletter: The Wall Street Journal says ChatGPT had a "stunning moment of self reflection." NBC says Grok "issued an apology." This lazy language isn't just bad writing — it's helping tech companies dodge responsibility for real harm. www.readtpa.com/p/stop-prete...

21.07.2025 19:33 👍 1320 🔁 355 💬 14 📌 30
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Graphite Caught: First Forensic Confirmation of Paragon’s iOS Mercenary Spyware Finds Journalists Targeted - The Citizen Lab On April 29, 2025, a select group of iOS users were notified by Apple that they were targeted with advanced spyware. Among the group were two journalists who consented to the technical analysis of the...

ICYMI, yesterday we released a report providing a first look at how we found traces of spyware on two journalists' iPhones, traces which we can attribute with high confidence to Paragon's Graphite spyware:

13.06.2025 16:55 👍 47 🔁 27 💬 2 📌 0

Academics have discovered a local Great Firewall-like censorship system deployed exclusively in China's Henan region, working independently and about ten times more aggressively than China's main Great Firewall

gfw.report/publications...

13.05.2025 00:03 👍 7 🔁 4 💬 0 📌 0
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USENIX Security '25 Enigma Track Call for Participation Submissions due: Wednesday, March 5, 2025 Notification to submitters: Wednesday, May 7, 2025

Enigma will be back as a track at USENIX Security: https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity25/enigma-cfp

17.01.2025 11:45 👍 28 🔁 9 💬 1 📌 2

New paper that analyzes MrDeepFakes, the largest open marketplace for sexual deepfakes (to appear at USENIX Security). The work covers increased consumption, buyer/seller economics, depicted targets, creator motivations, community dynamics, video creation, and use of academic papers/tools.

18.01.2025 00:16 👍 5 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
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Release v2.0.0-RC1 · zmap/zdns v2.0.0 introduces several major changes for ZDNS. Highlights include: The largest change was a refactor to split ZDNS into a core library and a CLI wrapper that utilizes the library. With this cha...

We're excited to tag ZDNS 2.0-RC1! 🎉 The release is packed with fixes and features. It brings ZDNS into a stable semantically versioned state, breaks apart the CLI and resolver logic, and adds support for IPv6, DNSSEC, DOH, DOT, global CNAME/DNAME following, and logic to try every name servers.

27.12.2024 00:16 👍 7 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
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Liz Izhikevich Liz Izhikevich on the 2025 30 Under 30 - Science - Liz Izhikevich focuses on improving the internet's performance and security - on this world and in space.

Incredibly excited to see Liz Izhikevich named to the Forbes 30 under 30 today for her work on LEO satellite network performance! www.forbes.com/profile/liz-.... See the cornerstone work here: lizizhikevich.github.io/assets/paper... and lizizhikevich.github.io/assets/paper....

03.12.2024 15:57 👍 7 🔁 2 💬 1 📌 0
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Automated Hunting

There's a blog post with more details about the project and how it works here: censys.com/automated-hu....

27.11.2024 19:12 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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We released Censeye today, an open source CLI tool that makes it dramatically easier to pivot and find related assets when threat hunting on Censys instead of manually checking for potential identifying characteristics like an SSH host key. github.com/Censys-Resea...

27.11.2024 17:05 👍 28 🔁 14 💬 2 📌 1

When we first released ZMap, we drafted best practices for minimizing harm when conducting large active Internet measurements. 10 years later, with more experience and shifted norms, we have updated our recommendations for researchers in Section 6 of our recent ZMap retrospective.

26.11.2024 19:23 👍 13 🔁 7 💬 0 📌 0

Chrome has released some distribution of global traffic compared to site popularity data (zakird.com/papers/brows... Figure 1) if someone wants to do rough back of envelope calculations

25.11.2024 16:26 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

It's been a few years but that's not far off from what we saw in Firefox data when we analyzed: zakird.com/papers/lets-... (Figure 5). A lot of the long tail, though may be some more widespread adoption

25.11.2024 16:23 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

While there's been much work building improved models to more effectively detect threats and harassment, what users want out of these tools is more complex than what we're optimizing or evaluating for today.

23.11.2024 18:47 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Last week at CSCW, Catherine Han presented our work on journalists' unmet needs for protecting against harassment online. While the work targeted Twitter/X, it surfaces several nuances in users' needs that span future platforms as well (e.g., not wanting to filter out threats or visibly block users)

23.11.2024 18:38 👍 30 🔁 9 💬 2 📌 2
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Let's Encrypt Stats Please note that the Let's Encrypt Growth and Let's Encrypt Certificates Issued Per Day charts are undergoing updates and may not reflect the most recent data. Let's Encrypt Growth Percentage of Web…

Let's Encrypt is now used by more than 500,000,000 websites!!! I could not be more happy and proud of everyone who has played a part in this colossal contribution to online safety, integrity, and confidentiality:

23.11.2024 01:15 👍 158 🔁 32 💬 5 📌 0