Automobile Camouflage to Hide from Flock Cameras

Not sure it's practical, but it's certainly striking...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid on a Stick at the New York State Fair

Looks tasty. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Blog moderation policy...

Using a VM to Contain an AI Agent

It won't work: My suspicion was that GPT 5.6-Cyber would succeed, but the frequency and manner of its success removed all doubt. We have to reassess sandboxing quality for capable AI agents, and in general the software stack with which they interact. An off-the-shelf VM is not enough to contain a...

Security Vulnerability in a Voting System

It's a vulnerability that allows someone to recover the order of ballots cast, newly exploited with AI tools. Nearly four years since the original vulnerability was disclosed, I was still able to use it to analyze voter behavior in Georgia one of the 21 states that uses affected scanners in the...

AI Coding Agents Are Installing Unknown/Untrusted Code on Corporate Networks

We cannot forget that AI coding agents are not yet trustworthy: Researchers at a stealth startup in Israel scanned 6,214 live domains belonging to defense contractors, Fortune 500, and Big Tech companies. Of the 8,265 llms.txt and llms-full.txt files they found many sites hosted both an llms.txt...

Researching Employment Scams

Researchers built a fake company to study fake employee scams...

AI Agents Are Now Emailing Me with Their Security Concerns

I received the two emails below earlier in the month. They're vaguely coherent. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that the corpus that AIs are training on contain data suggesting that I am someone to write to with random computer and network security problems. After all, I observe that behavior ...

Wireless Routers as Motion Detectors

Comcast has added motion detection as a feature to its wireless routers: The feature sends push notifications to users when motion is detected near a connected device, such as a TV or printer. It has different settings for when people are home, asleep, or away. The Xfinity app also lets users see...

What’s the Scam?

To subscribe to my monthly email newsletter, you have to enter your information on the webpage, and then reply to an automatically generated email. This is, of course, to prevent people from subscribing addresses other than their own. Starting last weekend, I have been receiving a lot of individu...

Leaked Russian Cyber-Operations Training Materials

This is interesting: The records describe a force-generation mechanism for several General Staff components, including the GRU, Main Operational Directorate, and 8th Directorate, which is associated with protected communications, cryptography, and information security. … The reporting also linked...

Rewiring Democracy Series on The Renovator

Nathan E. Sanders and I are writing a series of essays on real-world examples of democratic technologies for The Renovator. I haven't been posting the full text on the blog because they're a bit long, but here are links. Part 1 is about the Japanese digital democracy party, Team Mirai. Part 2 is...

Is Someone Hacking DoD Refrigerators?

It sure seems like it. The stores confirmed to be affected include Fort Irwin, Calif.; F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyo.; Fort Huachuca, Ariz.; Naval Station Newport, R.I.; Columbus Air Force Base, Miss.; and Travis Air Force Base, Calif., according to announcements made online by each installatio...

Hiding Prompt Injection in Legal Filing

Someone hid AI instructions into a legal filing. Alternate link...

Friday Squid Blogging: Truckload of Squid Spills in Rhode Island

Ugh: A tractor-trailer rollover sent a truckload of squid spilling into a Rhode Island roadway, leaving a stench as they sat in the road for hours in the summer heat. Local authorities have dubbed it the "Squidpocalypse of '26." That would be twenty tons of squid. As usual, you can also use this...

AI Doesn’t Mean the End of Mathematics—at Least Not Yet

This essay was written with Kasra Rafi, and originally appeared in The Guardian. Earlier this month, about 40 top mathematicians gathered at OpenAI's offices to discuss the future of their profession. The meeting was off-the-record, but if recent articles by mathematicians are any guide, it was...

LLM-Based Social Engineering Scams

OpenAI disrupted a social engineering group from Cambodia that used ChatGPT. Its scope is impressive: The network simultaneously conducted multiple types of scams, often blending elements from different schemes. For instance, operators used dating personas to build trust before introducing...

Spyware for Babies

The New York Times has a long article alt link on surveillance systems aimed at babies. They are increasingly using AI. Nanit and its rivals want to own 24/7 health tracking for the sub-four-foot set. And their already astonishing levels of baby data collection are just the beginning. Nanit...

Black Hat State of Security Vendors

Andy Ellis has a roundup of the security vendors at Black Hat this year. Key Takeaways: We have entered into an AI world. While nearly half of booths didn't directly mention AI or agents in their taglines, the effects of AI are everywhere. Multiple spaces Identity, SaaS, AppSec, Data have almost...

Criminal Deception in Silicon Valley

Interesting paper: Abstract: With entrepreneurial fraud cases on the rise, we investigate how entrepreneurs carry out criminal deception , employing deceptive means to defraud audiences. Analyzing court data from Silicon Valley ventures and their founders prosecuted for fraud between 2000 and 202...

Friday Squid Blogging: Neon Flying Squid

The neon flying squid can fly in formation. The shoal of about 100 squid rose unexpectedly from a patch of the Pacific Ocean around 370 miles from Tokyo and glided near the boat for about 30 metres. The astonished researchers were the first to capture photographs of such a thing, which looked lik...

AI Is Learning to Write Genetic Code

This sort of research is both exciting and terrifying: The two models in question were told to generate complete genomes for a viable bacteriophage--a type of virus able to infect and replicate itself inside bacteria, destroying them from the inside. Using an existing bacteriophage as an...

More Incidents of AIs Going Rogue in Cybersecurity Challenges

The AI Security Institute has a new report of AI systems engaging in "unsanctioned behavior"--what I have been calling "genie behavior--while being tested on their cybersecurity capabilities. The incident stemmed from a single evaluation where agents were given a task of solving a cyber security...

Detailed Timeline of OpenAI’s Cyberattack on Hugging Face

OpenAI presented details of its AI's model's cyberattack on Hugging Face at Black Hat last week. Simon Willison details the timeline. It's really interesting to read through--and really impressive cyberoffense work...

Police Are Hiding Their Use of Flock Surveillance Cameras

A usage policy for Flock license plate reader cameras tells police not to talk about the cameras: When cops use Flock to arrest someone in Wapello County, Iowa, they don't want them to know. A usage policy for the automated license plate reader cameras in the county tells police, in no uncertain...

ICE Collecting DNA Samples

ICE collected nearly a million DNA samples last year...

LLMs and Contextual Integrity

I have been thinking a lot about AI and integrity. Part of that is contextual integrity. I recently found two papers on the topic. "CIMemories: A Compositional Benchmark for Contextual Integrity of Persistent Memory in LLMs": Abstract: Large Language Models LLMs increasingly use persistent memory...

Hacking Public Wi-Fi DNS to Steal Credentials

Criminals are hacking into public Wi-Fi devices--at hotels, conference centers, and so on--around the world and changing their DNS settings. The goal is to redirect users to fake login pages and steal their credentials...

Friday Squid Blogging: Searching for the Colossal Squid

Fascinating video about searching for life undersea. The video basically makes the point that our bright white searchlights are scaring everything away, and that red light is more neutral. That, plus bait to attract sea creatures, is teaching us a lot about what's going on down there. Lots of...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking, signing books, and participating in panel discussions at LAcon V in Anaheim, California, USA. My full schedule is here. I'm speaking online via Zoom at a League of Women Voters event on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, at...

If the Markets Reject OpenAI and Anthropic, the US Should Nationalize Them

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared inThe Guardian. OpenAI, and then Anthropic, were each formed by AI developers who feared unrestrained corporate AI development--specifically, that companies like Google and Meta would steer the technology towards deleterious,...

Separating AI’s Technological Problems from Its Capitalism Problems

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared inTech Policy Press. AI represents the first time we humans can do cognitive work outside of our bodies at scale. The only comparable moment is the early years of the industrial revolution, when new technologies like the steam...

Prompt Injections for Defense

This seems to work: Researchers from Tracebit on Monday said they found that placing prompt injections alongside passwords, cryptographic keys, and other secrets stored on Amazon Web Services was often all that was needed to shut down attacks from AI hacking agents. The prompts direct the attacki...

AI Genie in the Wild

When I give talks about AI genies, I use this sort of example as a hypothetical. It's happened. The story is from Australia. Someone named Andrew tasked OpenClaw to book gym classes for him. And…. Minutes later, his AI agent reported it had discovered a way to book Andrew into classes several wee...

AI for Military Support

Interesting empirical research: "Black Box Warfare: Human Judgment and Military Decision-Making in the Age of AI." Abstract: How is AI transforming decision-making in modern conflict? This study provides a unique empirical window into that question by deploying a high-fidelity replica of an AI...

Python Now Has a Post-Quantum Encryption Library

This is good: Post-quantum cryptography is now one pip-install away for the entire Python ecosystem. With funding from the Sovereign Tech Agency, we implemented support for ML-KEM, the NIST-standard key-establishment primitive, and ML-DSA, the NIST-standard digital-signature primitive, in...

Friday Squid Blogging: Arctic Bobtail Squid Video

Nice video of the Arctic bobtail squid. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Blog moderation policy...

ICE Is Buying Access to Credit Card Records

Through data brokers, ICE is buying the information you provided to open a credit card...

Adversarial Clothing Designed to Fool Facial Recognition Systems

There are many companies manufacturing adversarial clothing designed to confuse facial recognition systems. It's a cool idea, but I worry that it's mostly security theater: "Our patterns play with that chaos, confuse algorithms and make it way harder to pin you down," he said. Bell, however, said...

Vulnerabilities in Car Anti-Theft Device

This is disturbing: …a team of security researchers at UC San Diego, who found that a model of aftermarket car alarm known as the KARR Security System, installed in more than 2 million vehicles across the US by their estimate, can let any hacker within Bluetooth range send radio commands to...

Iran Cyberattacks Against Minnesota Water Systems

Attribution is preliminary, and so far it seems no real damage. And it seems like this is a campaign that has targeted at least seven states. And, because this is where the US is right now, Trump doesn't believe it's Iran and thinks Minnesota…I guess…hacked itself. "I think I blame it on Minnesot...

Some Claude Chats Are Searchable on Google

And it's personal information alternate link: The exposed data includes an AI-powered therapy app that someone appears to have vibe-coded, notes on meetings, and a dashboard someone made apparently to analyze medical billing data. Exposed chats reportedly include private cryptocurrency wallet key...

More on the OpenAI Agent’s Attack on Hugging Face

Hugging Face has published a detailed timeline of the attack. From the summary: The agent was running an internal OpenAI cyber-capability evaluation based on the ExploitGym benchmark, which tasks an AI agent with finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities. OpenAI ran this on its own...

The OpenAI Hack Shows the Genie Is Out of the Bottle

This essay originally appeared inForeign Policy. Earlier this month, two of OpenAI's models broke out of their containment sandbox and attacked another AI company. The story is kind of wild. OpenAI was running security tests on two of its models: GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased model that is almost...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Helps Discover New Marine Species

The Squid is a new scientific machine: One of the technological breakthroughs was the onboard use of a spinning wheel confocal microscope, nicknamed the Squid, which uses lasers to scan microscopic details of how organisms are put together. "That opens up a whole new world of exploring. We could...

Anthropic’s Opus 5 Is Better at Resisting Prompt Injection

The chart is interesting. On the IPI benchmark, Opus 5 improved over Opus 4.8, reducing the probability of an attacker succeeding within 15 attempts from 5.5% to 2.0%, and from 0.5% to 0.2% on 1 attempt. It also improved on Sonnet 5 5.9% at k=15 and Mythos 5 2.6%, making it the most robust model...

Facial Recognition at Madison Square Garden

Last month, the story broke alternate link that Madison Square Garden uses facial recognition software on everyone entering the facility, and--among other groups--flags activists that oppose using facial recognition. Turns out that the system was shut off for Taylor Swift's wedding. Evan Greer--o...

American Being Prosecuted for Wiping His Phone Before Handing It Over to Border Officials

He's being prosecuted for giving border officials a code that wiped his phone: The case centers on a feature included in GrapheneOS, a custom Android operating system that runs in place of the software on most modern Google Pixel devices. Tunick's attorneys confirmed GrapheneOS was running on his...

Should You Use AI for a Task? Here’s a Simple Way to Decide

This essay originally appeared inThe Guardian. I teach public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Munk School at the University of Toronto. And it will come as no surprise to you that my students regularly use AI to complete their writing assignments. Doing so is a waste of their tuition...

Measuring the Tendency of AI Agents to Go Rogue

This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared inThe Guardian. In July, Hugging Face, a company that hosts much of the world's AI software and open-source AI models, was hacked. A malicious dataset had been used to run code on one of its servers. Whoever was behind it captur...

Long-Lived Vulnerability in Microsoft Secure Boot

Microsoft's Secure Boot has had a serious vulnerability for most of its existence. An industry-wide standard Microsoft invented to protect Windows, and later Linux, devices from firmware infections has been trivial to bypass for 13 of its 14 years of existence. The discovery was made by researche...