Like the title says, the December 1/8 issue of Time has a pretty interesting article on the life of Alan Turing, with some discussion of the Enigma machine and Colossus.

I thought this was a well written article because the author is informative without being too dry in her descriptions. Blogs do tend to be more conversational and this one is no exception. The academic focus on this relatively historic topic is still present, but the article is written for a wider audience than the academic community.

An app circulated among the protesters in Hong Kong that supposedly was for coordinating protest efforts, but was in reality a phishing attack that would track keystrokes, messages, and identity information of devices it was installed on. Many signs point to the Chinese government as the origin of the malware, though. Not the first time a government has done something like planting spies and monitoring protestors. We saw this in Little Brother too, with the DHS spies on the Xnet.

For longer ciphers, Kasiski analysis is useful for determining possible keywords using a modified frequency analysis and repetition analysis. This is an online tool to find repeat sequences in a ciphertext, and can be used to quickly decrypt a Vigenere ciphertext.

Bernoulli numbers are a sequence of numbers important to the field of number theory, trigonometric expansions, and analysis. Ada Lovelace wrote a theoretical program to calculate these that would work on Charles Babbage's unfinished Analytical Engine. It's pretty interesting how Lovelace was a "leading figure" in the now massively male-dominated computer programming field, but didn't receive recognition for her work until fairly recently.

A more user-friendly way to work on monoalphabetic substitution ciphers, includes frequency charts

Interesting that ~35% of 1000 surveyed have upped the strength of their passwords, but only 6% turned on two-factor ID, which was a major cause of the iCloud hacks going undetected for so long.