Month: May 2020

Enlarge / Multispectral imaging has revealed hidden text on four Dead Sea Scroll fragments previously believed to be blank. (credit: University of Manchester)

The 16 purported fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Museum of the Bible might be fakes, but at least four such fragments housed at the University of Manchester in the UK are the real deal. For decades, those fragments were presumed to be blank, but a new analysis has revealed the existence of actual text, most likely a passage from the book of Ezekiel.

These ancient Hebrew texts—roughly 900 full and partial scrolls in all, stored in clay jars—were first discovered scattered in various caves near what was once the settlement of Qumran, just north of the Dead Sea, by Bedouin shepherds in 1946-1947. Qumran was destroyed by the Romans, circa 73 CE, and historians believe the scrolls were hidden in the caves by a sect called the Essenes to protect them from being destroyed. The natural limestone and conditions within the caves helped preserve the scrolls for millennia; they date back to between the third century BC and the first century CE.

The scrolls are understandably of great historical and archaeological interest. Several of the parchments have been carbon dated, and synchrotron radiation, among other techniques, has been used to shed light on the properties of the ink used for the text.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich & Hannah Lawson)

Last year, Sergio Caltagirone found himself in a tough spot. While traveling, his phone broke and stopped working completely. With no access to his Google and Microsoft authenticator apps, he lost access to two-factor authentication when he needed it most—when he was logging in from IP addresses not recognized by the 30 to 40 sites he had enrolled.

“I had a whole bunch of sites [that] I had to go through a massively long account restoration process because I lost my 2FA,” said Caltagirone, who is senior VP of threat intelligence at security firm Dragos. “Every time, I had to contact customer service. I had different levels of requirements I had to go through for them to effectively disable 2FA on my account. Some required address verification. [For others,] I had to send a last bill. The number of those I went through was just insane.”

Thin blades

The experience shows the double-edged sword of multi-factor authentication. Requiring users to enter a password that’s pseudorandomly generated every 30 seconds makes account takeovers significantly harder, even when an attacker has phished or otherwise obtained the password. But in the event that second factor (in this case, the “something you have,” that is, the phone) isn’t available, that same protection can block legitimate users from logging in for unacceptably long periods of time.