3091 matches found
Possible new Cellebrite iPhone Radio Zero-Day
Justin.sh is reporting on a confidential Cellebrite document that has been leaked to him: Cellebrite calls it Advanced Unlocks AU from here on, not to be confused with the "advanced unlocking services" they've marketed for years. A press release from earlier this year confirms AU is a new product...
Training AIs to Solve CAPTCHAs
Interesting research: Abstract : Vision-language models VLMs can solve visual CAPTCHAs without task-specific training, but the agents built on them approach every challenge from scratch. For such an agent, the hundredth instance of a familiar puzzle costs as much time and compute as the first...
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Before the Chicxulub Meteor Impact
New research shows that squid lived all around the globe even before the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction event. 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...
Backdooring Open-Weight AI Models
This is a problem: Any open model whose weights have been edited can carry a backdoor, whether it's a task-specific fine-tune, a merged adapter or an abliterated build. We have abliterated models in the title because it's the most popular reason people download modified weights without verifying...
Measuring Human Cryptanalysis Effort
Matthew Green has a new site that tries to estimate the number of cryptanalyst-hours that have been spent analyzing different public-key algorithms: Abstract: We estimate how much public cryptanalysis each public-key assumption has received, using the literature itself as the instrument. From...
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at ATTENTION: Democracy, Rebuilt in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The event runs October 21–23, 2026, and my talk is on Wednesday, October 21. I’m speaking at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, at 5 PM ...
The Future of AI Cryptanalysis
Matthew Green has been writing a rather pessimistic series of posts about the potential for AI systems to vastly outperform humans in cryptanalysis of both symmetric and public-key ciphers. I am more optimistic than he is. That is, I have stronger faith in the over-engineering cryptographers tend...
Cyberattack on Connected Fridges in France
Another IoT cyberattack, this one in France: Hackers gained control of the software that regulates the temperatures of the refrigeration units, forcing some to warm to 50C 120F overnight, according to one supermarket chain affected. … Normally, supermarket freezers go through a short period of...
FBI Arrests Suspect in FBI-Hacking Case
In September, hackers from a group called ShinyHunters announced that they stole a trove of FBI data about its own agents. It was an intelligence disaster. Last week, the FBI arrested alternate link someone associated with that crime...
Friday Squid Blogging: I Caught a Squid
On Wednesday I spent a day fishing, on a small boat out of Gloucester, MA. We caught many cod none of which we could keep, and a bunch of hake and mackerel all of which we could keep. And…I caught a squid! Near as I can tell, it's a longfin squid, sometimes called a Boston squid Doryteuthis Ameri...
How Technology Empowers—and Imperils—Dictators
This essay was written with Seva Gunitsky, and originally appeared inForeign Affairs. Two weeks after Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in March 2022, the Russian TV Channel One editor Marina Ovsyannikova burst onto the set of the evening newscast. She held up a hand-drawn sign behind the...
Apple’s Verified Photography System
Apple just released a system called "Reference Image." It can verify the image is exactly as taken by an iPhone--new models only--without tying it to a specific iPhone or photographer. It can also verify that multiple images came from the same iPhone. Other industry solutions require a photograph...
Possible Vulnerability in Apple’s Automatic Reboot
404Media is reporting alternate link that a cyber-weapons arms manufacturer is exploiting a vulnerability in iOS to bypass its automatic reboot security feature. This is the feature that automatically puts an iPhone into a more secure state if it hasn't been used for 72 hours. The new technology ...
Another Historic Cipher Falls to AI
This one is from 1809, written by Napoleon's nephew...
Friday Squid Blogging: EU is Trying to Fight Unregulated Squid Fishing
The EU is recommending import controls to combat unregulated squid fishing in the Southwest Atlantic. I'm not optimistic. 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...
Unidentified Flock Cameras in Florida
St. Lucie County in Florida discovered alt link a dozen Flock cameras whose ownership it can't identify, and that the county government had not permitted. I am reminded of the decade-old story of StingRay cell phone surveillance devices in Washington, DC, whose operators were also unknown. My gue...
How American Political Campaigns Are Using AI—and What They’re Spending on the Tools
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared inThe Guardian. New campaign finance disclosure data shines a light on which US political campaigns are using AI tools and how much they are spending on them. Candidates', parties' and committees' spending reveals that AI is...
Connected Cars Are a Surveillance Platform
Researchers at Northeastern University, in collaboration with Consumer Reports , evaluated how much modern cars spy in their drivers: The new Northeastern study shows, for the first time, data flowing among the vehicles, the vehicle apps you download when you buy your car, and third-party...
I Want Better Reporting on AI Genie Behavior
AI systems are regularly completing tasks in ways that their prompters don't want or intend. Some of them are disturbing, and some of them are dangerous. This is something I've been calling "genie behavior," because I think that really gets at the core of what's happening. I wish the popular pres...
Using Device Linking to Eavesdrop on WhatsApp and Signal
Modern messaging apps allow users to link their phone accounts to their computer desktop. Eavesdroppers are taking advantage of this capability: Apps such as WhatsApp Web and Signal Desktop allow people to use their accounts on other devices, such as laptops or desktop computers. Germany's Custom...
New Attack Against RSA
ArsTechnica is reporting on a "new" attack against RSA, one that bypasses factoring. First, this attack isn't new. The original research is from 2007. What is new is the implementation. Second, it is a forgery attack. It allows an attacker to forge digital signatures. It does not recover the...
Friday Squid Blogging: Participatory Squid Dissection in October in Tennessee
I feel like someone who reads this blog will want to go to this: Families are invited to dive into the fascinating world of marine biology during an exciting, hands-on Family Squid Dissection at the Hands-On Science Center. Designed for curious learners of all ages, this unique experience combine...
On Anthropic’s AI Misuse Report
Earlier this month, Anthropic published a long report detailing all of the Claude misuses it detected. Daniel Meissler usefully summarized the report into 117 findings. A few of the highlights: AI agents increasingly handled reconnaissance, exploitation, data theft, propaganda production,...
Malicious npm Packages That Evade Defenses
This is an impressive piece of malware. Its sophistication says nation-state to me, but there is no direct evidence and certainly no attribution...
Research on Models Engaging in Genie-Like Behavior
New paper: "Self-Jailbreaking: Language Models Can Reason Themselves Out of Safety Alignment After Benign Reasoning Training." Abstract: We discover a novel and surprising phenomenon of unintentional misalignment in reasoning language models RLMs, which we call self-jailbreaking. Specifically,...
GPT-6 Astra Breaks an Old Enigma Message
This is pretty amazing: However, the most astonishing thing about this break is that the GPT6 Astra did it entirely on its own. Carter Leffer only directed GPT6 Astra to see if it could break any of the unbroken Enigma messages published on the Crypto Cellar Research web page. After analysing t...
Reverse-Engineering Flock Cameras
Hackers captured a Flock camera and got a look alternate link at the software: While much of the automatic license plate reader's ALPR most sensitive storage remained encrypted and inaccessible, the joint analysis of the recovered data shows that software running on the device explicitly detects...
Friday Squid Blogging: On Squid Egg Sacs
Short essay about squid egg sacs. 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...
Are AIs Still Struggling with CAPTCHAs?
Anthropic's recent security-incident document contains a bit about how CAPTCHAs are still frustrating Claude. In the transcript, the Claude model that is so powerful that Anthropic is gatekeeping access to it appeared to slam its virtual head against the wall solving a simple image identification...
How Candidates Could Use AI for Good
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared inThe Guardian. There are plenty of signs that AI will make all of our experiences of the US midterm elections worse. Voters have anxiety about AI's impacts on the country. Politicos are using AI deepfakes to spread lies. The...
Fake CAPTCHA Scams
New variant of an old scam: Use the framing of a CAPTCHA to get an unsuspecting user to download and run a malicious program...
25 Years of Mass Surveillance Is Enough
This essay was written with Cindy Cohn, and originally appeared inLawfare. One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 is the government-wide shift from targeted surveillance--such as individual wiretaps or pen register/trap and trace orders--to mass surveillance techniques--suc...
On the NSA’s Supercomputer from the 1960s
Really interesting story about Harvest, a specialized code breaking computer built in the 1960s by IBM for the NSA...
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking online via Zoom at a League of Women Voters event on Tuesday, September 22, 2026 at 5 PM ET. I’m speaking at CanSecWest 2026 in Vancouver, Canada. The conference runs September 30–October 1, 2026; the time of my talk i...
Using AI for Weapons Development
Last week, Anthropic released a long and detailed document describing current misuses of their Claude models. I'm still reading it, but I wanted to flag this: We identified a cell of threat actors based in northern Yemen running three weapons development programs: a guided rocket that used a...
Microsoft’s Patching
Once a month, Microsoft pushes a security update to all Windows users. Tomorrow's is a new record: Microsoft's patch for September is a doozy, with a record number of roughly 972 vulnerabilities fixed and 112 of them meeting the high critical-severity threshold. It was only two months ago that...
Friday Squid Blogging: Rotting Squid on a Beached California Boat
Smells awful: But an estimated 30 to 50 tons of dead squid remain inside the boat's catch tank, where they have been decomposing for days. "That is nasty. I wouldn't want to do that," said commercial fisherman Dick Ogg of the Bodega Bay Fishermen's Marketing Association. Ogg said anyone familiar...
My Talk at DEF CON
Last month, I gave a talk at DEF CON on AI hacking: what happens when AIs become hackers. It's a combination of the potentialities I raised in my 2022 book A Hacker 's Mind and the lessons we're learning from current AI models engaging in hacking behavior. I'm really proud of the talk, and the fa...
Cliff Stoll’s DEF CON Talk
In August, Cliff Stoll gave a talk at DEF CON, remembering the wily hacker he stalked forty years ago. Great fun...
AIs Compress Exploit Timeline
Give an AI agent a mere rumor of an exploit, and it's enough for them to find it. What's worse, I found I could use my own agents to find the exploit just by knowing roughly what it was about and so could have been exploiting it well before the public patch was available! Given that just the rumo...
Driver’s License Data for Sale
A database of 153 million drivers licenses is for sale on the dark web. Brian Krebs has more detail...
Claude Fable Solves a Historical Cipher
Claude Fable 5.1 solved a 370-year-old cipher in forty-four minutes. This tracks with what I wrote about AIs doing mathematics: It's good at things that involve lots of searching and testing. EDITED TO ADD 9/14: I'm not sure if this result is correct. The blog comments have more discussion...
AIs as Modern Genies
This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared inLawfare. In April, an artificial intelligence AI agent conducting a routine task at a company hit a snag, tried to solve it, and soon ended up deleting the company’s database along with all of its backups. In July, OpenAI aske...
Stealing AI Reasoning Traces
Interesting research: "Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs": Abstract: Leading large language model providers now conceal their models' step-by-step reasoning, or chain-of-thought, to protect intellectual property and limit information leakage. Rather than storing these traces...
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...