I spent the past few days going down various fascinating rabbit holes using a nifty new service called Decryptads.com, which scrapes a metric ton of adtech data from websites and apps about who they allow to collect data and serve ads.
A search in DecryptAds for the hugely popular sports network espn.com, e.g. reveals 143 ad partners and 19 registered data broker domains are listed within its ads.txt and app-ads.txt files. That data broker information is gradually becoming available because four states — California, Oregon, Texas and Vermont — have recently passed laws requiring data brokers to register if they buy or sell data on consumers from those states. DecryptAds reports that almost half of those data brokers are collecting geolocation data from espn.com visitors who aren’t blocking ads, while another three disclose that they collect device fingerprints and sensitive personal information.
DecryptAds also makes it easy to learn the beneficiaries and national origins of the advertising firms lurking in apps and websites, displaying a conspicuous warning when adtech partners of an app or website are based in “geo-risk” areas like China and Russia, or in countries with strong financial and political ties to both — such as Cyprus and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
According to DecryptAds, espn.com works with four different advertising entities that are based in either Russia, China or the UAE, including the adtech firm Between Digital, which lists a New York address. However, the dossier on Between Digital flags them as a Russian firm, showing that their publisher offers (PDF) are processed through Alfa Bank, Russia’s largest private commercial bank and one of several financial institutions placed under U.S. sanctions in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine.
A search for several top U.S. military news websites — including armytimes.com, airforcetimes.com, defensenews.com, navytimes.com, marinecorpstimes.com and federaltimes.com — shows they all allow Between Digital to serve ads and track users, as well as two entities in the UAE and another in the ownership secrecy haven of Panama. DecryptAds reports that Between Digital is collecting ad data on approximately 55,000 partner websites.
This service is a gold mine for security researchers, journalists and anyone interested in privacy, adtech, AI slop sites, residential proxies, malvertising, etc. Want to read more? Check out today's story:
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/08/whos-tracking-you-use-this-new-service-to-find-out/
You’re Back In The Room (Citrix NetScaler Pre-Auth RCE CVE-2026-8452(?)) - watchTowr Labs https://labs.watchtowr.com/youre-back-in-the-room-citrix-netscaler-pre-auth-rce-cve-2026-8452/
During yesterday's solar eclipse, Spanish Olympic skateboarder Danny Leon performed a jump, timing the trick with the moon passing in front of the sun. Leon shared the epic stunt on his social media accounts and called it ‘the move of his life.’
RE: https://hachyderm.io/@tailscale/117083224760630723
I wrote about finding an SQLite bug for the Tailscale blog!
I learnt so much from working on this series of incidents, and I’m proud of the outcome and the story we can finally tell. 🥰
This is cool! https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/skitter-creek-bath-salts
It's 2026 and on Windows Server 2025, attempting to create a TLS certificate will default to a 1024 bit key and you have to find this menu and expand it to change it.
Let’s call it „beg4shell“. At least now everyone can be a vulnerability researcher.
I self-host now: this account runs on my own server and my own domain, @mbr
The old instance is shutting down and the auto-migration only carried a fraction of you across. If you can read this, you're already in the right place.
Everyone else has to re-follow by hand. Please BOOST this to help me get back everyone :)
#Fediverse #SelfHosted #Mastodon #mbr #masterbootrecord
Rob Pike received the 2026 USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award! https://www.usenix.org/about/awards/flame
Did you read our latest publication?
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