Security Vulnerability in Smart Electric Outlets

A security vulnerability in Belkin's Wemo Insight "smartplugs" allows hackers to not only take over the plug, but use it as a jumping-off point to attack everything else on the network. From the Register: The bug underscores the primary risk posed by IoT devices and connected appliances. Because...

Don't Fear the TSA Cutting Airport Security. Be Glad That They're Talking about It.

Last week, CNN reported that the Transportation Security Administration is considering eliminating security at U.S. airports that fly only smaller planes -- 60 seats or fewer. Passengers connecting to larger planes would clear security at their destinations. To be clear, the TSA has put forth no...

New Data Privacy Regulations

When Marc Zuckerberg testified before both the House and the Senate last month, it became immediately obvious that few US lawmakers had any appetite to regulate the pervasive surveillance taking place on the Internet. Right now, the only way we can force these companies to take our privacy more...

Accessing Cell Phone Location Information

The New York Times is reporting about a company called Securus Technologies that gives police the ability to track cell phone locations without a warrant: The service can find the whereabouts of almost any cellphone in the country within seconds. It does this by going through a system typically...

Dan Geer on the Dangers of Computer-Only Systems

A good warning, delivered in classic Dan Geer style...

Two New Papers on the Encryption Debate

Seems like everyone is writing about encryption and backdoors this season. "Policy Approaches to the Encryption Debate," R Street Policy Study 133, by Charles Duan, Arthur Rizer, Zach Graves and Mike Godwin. "Encryption Policy in Democratic Regimes," East West Institute. I recently blogged about...

Internet Security Threats at the Olympics

There are a lot: The cybersecurity company McAfee recently uncovered a cyber operation, dubbed Operation GoldDragon, attacking South Korean organizations related to the Winter Olympics. McAfee believes the attack came from a nation state that speaks Korean, although it has no definitive proof tha...

XKCD's Smartphone Security System

Funny...

Vulnerability in Amazon Key

Amazon Key is an IoT door lock that can enable one-time access codes for delivery people. To further secure that system, Amazon sells Cloud Cam, a camera that watches the door to ensure that delivery people don't abuse their one-time access privilege. Cloud Cam has been hacked: But now security...

Security Vulnerabilities in AT&T Routers

They're actually Arris routers, sold or given away by AT&T.; There are several security vulnerabilities, some of them very serious. They can be fixed, but because these are routers it takes some skill. We don't know how many routers are affected, and estimates range from thousands to 138,000. Amo...

Fighting Leakers at Apple

Apple is fighting its own battle against leakers, using people and tactics from the NSA. According to the hour-long presentation, Apple's Global Security team employs an undisclosed number of investigators around the world to prevent information from reaching competitors, counterfeiters, and the...

Stealing Voice Prints

This article feels like hyperbole: The scam has arrived in Australia after being used in the United States and Britain. The scammer may ask several times "can you hear me?", to which people would usually reply "yes." The scammer is then believed to record the "yes" response and end the call. That...

Securing Elections

Technology can do a lot more to make our elections more secure and reliable, and to ensure that participation in the democratic process is available to all. There are three parts to this process. First, the voter registration process can be improved. The whole process can be streamlined. People...

Fitbit Evidence Used in Murder Investigation

Fitbit evidence is cited in an arrest warrant, stating that the device monitored steps by the victim after the suspect claimed she died...

Protecting Privacy in an AI Era

Daniel Solove argues in the Wall Street Journal alternate link that giving people control of their personal data is not an effective way to regulate privacy in this era. Instead, we need to hold companies accountable for their actions, similar to what we do with food and drug companies. Measures...

One Million Passports Leaked Online

A database of almost a million passports from around the world was leaked online. Note what happened. A high-value credential--a passport--was used in an ancillary low-value authentication system: ID verification for cannabis dispensaries. And it's the low-value system that got hacked, putting th...

Hacking a Robot Vacuum

Someone tries to remote control his own DJI Romo vacuum, and ends up controlling 7,000 of them from all around the world. The IoT is horribly insecure, but we already knew that...

AI Found Twelve New Vulnerabilities in OpenSSL

The title of the post is"What AI Security Research Looks Like When It Works," and I agree: In the latest OpenSSL security release on January 27, 2026, twelve new zero-day vulnerabilities meaning unknown to the maintainers at time of disclosure were announced. Our AI system is responsible for the...

We Are Still Unable to Secure LLMs from Malicious Inputs

Nice indirect prompt injection attack: Bargury's attack starts with a poisoned document, which is shared to a potential victim's Google Drive. Bargury says a victim could have also uploaded a compromised file to their own account. It looks like an official document on company meeting policies. Bu...

The NSA Has a Long-Lost Lecture by Adm. Grace Hopper

The NSA has a video recording of a 1982 lecture by Adm. Grace Hopper titled "Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People." The agency is so far refusing to release it. Basically, the recording is in an obscure video format. People at the NSA cant easily watch it, so they cant redac...

Using LLMs to Exploit Vulnerabilities

Interesting research: "Teams of LLM Agents can Exploit Zero-Day Vulnerabilities." Abstract: LLM agents have become increasingly sophisticated, especially in the realm of cybersecurity. Researchers have shown that LLM agents can exploit real-world vulnerabilities when given a description of the...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Mating Strategies

Some squids are "consorts," others are "sneakers." The species is healthiest when individuals have different strategies randomly. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here...

New Lattice Cryptanalytic Technique

A new paper presents a polynomial-time quantum algorithm for solving certain hard lattice problems. This could be a big deal for post-quantum cryptographic algorithms, since many of them base their security on hard lattice problems. A few things to note. One, this paper has not yet been peer...

Security Vulnerability of HTML Emails

This is a newly discovered email vulnerability: The email your manager received and forwarded to you was something completely innocent, such as a potential customer asking a few questions. All that email was supposed to achieve was being forwarded to you. However, the moment the email appeared in...

Former Uber CISO Appealing His Conviction

Joe Sullivan, Ubers CEO during their 2016 data breach, is appealing his conviction. Prosecutors charged Sullivan, whom Uber hired as CISO after the 2014 breach, of withholding information about the 2016 incident from the FTC even as its investigators were scrutinizing the companys data security a...

Hacking the High School Grading System

Interesting New York Times article about high-school students hacking the grading system. Whats not helping? The policies many school districts are adopting that make it nearly impossible for low-performing students to fail--they have a grading floor under them, they know it, and that allows them...

Microsoft Signing Key Stolen by Chinese

A bunch of networks, including US Government networks, have been hacked by the Chinese. The hackers used forged authentication tokens to access user email, using a stolen Microsoft Azure account consumer signing key. Congress wants answers. The phrase "negligent security practices" is being tosse...

Friday Squid Blogging: 2023 Squid Oil Global Market Report

I had no idea that squid contain sufficient oil to be worth extracting. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here...

Security Risks of New .zip and .mov Domains

Researchers are worried about Googles .zip and .mov domains, because they are confusing. Mistaking a URL for a filename could be a security vulnerability...

NIST Draft Document on Post-Quantum Cryptography Guidance

NIST has released a draft of Special Publication1800-38A: "Migration to Post-Quantum Cryptography: Preparation for Considering the Implementation and Adoption of Quantum Safe Cryptography." Its only four pages long, and it doesnt have a lot of detail--more "volumes" are coming, with more...

Another Malware with Persistence

Heres a piece of Chinese malware that infects SonicWall security appliances and survives firmware updates. On Thursday, security firm Mandiant published a report that said threat actors with a suspected nexus to China were engaged in a campaign to maintain long-term persistence by running malware...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Processing Facility

This video of a modern large squid processing ship is a bit gory, but also interesting. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I havent covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here...

The FBI Identified a Tor User

No details, though: According to the complaint against him, Al-Azhari allegedly visited a dark web site that hosts "unofficial propaganda and photographs related to ISIS" multiple times on May 14, 2019. In virtue of being a dark web site--­that is, one hosted on the Tor anonymity network--­it...

Apple Is Finally Encrypting iCloud Backups

After way too many years, Apple is finally encrypting iCloud backups: Based on a screenshot from Apple, these categories are covered when you flip on Advanced Data Protection: device backups, messages backups, iCloud Drive, Notes, Photos, Reminders, Safari bookmarks, Siri Shortcuts, Voice Memos,...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: Im speaking as part of a Geneva Centre for Security Policy course on Cyber Security in the Context of International Security, online, on September 22, 2022. Im speaking at IT-Security INSIDE 2022 in Zurich, Switzerland, on Septembe...

Friday Squid Blogging: Bathyteuthis berryi Holding Eggs

Image and video of a Bathyteuthis berryi carrying a few hundred eggs, taken at a depth of 4,650 feet. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here...

Samsung Encryption Flaw

Researchers have found a major encryption flaw in 100 million Samsung Galaxy phones. From the abstract: In this work, we expose the cryptographic design and implementation of Androids Hardware-Backed Keystore in Samsungs Galaxy S8, S9, S10, S20, and S21 flagship devices. We reversed-engineered an...

Tracking Secret German Organizations with Apple AirTags

A German activist is trying to track down a secret government intelligence agency. One of her research techniques is to mail Apple AirTags to see where they actually end up: Wittmann says that everyone she spoke to denied being part of this intelligence agency. But what she describes as a "good...

Testing Faraday Cages

Matt Blaze tested a variety of Faraday cages for phones, both commercial and homemade. The bottom line: A quick and likely reliable "go/no go test" can be done with an Apple AirTag and an iPhone: drop the AirTag in the bag under test, and see if the phone can locate it and activate its alarm bewa...

“Crypto” Means “Cryptography,” Not “Cryptocurrency”

I have long been annoyed that the word "crypto" has been co-opted by the blockchain people, and no longer refers to "cryptography." Im not the only one...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: Im speaking on "Securing a World of Physically Capable Computers" at @Hack on November 29, 2021. The list is maintained on this page...

Friday Squid Blogging: New Giant Squid Video

New video of a large squid in the Red Sea at about 2,800 feet. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here...

Recovering Real Faces from Face-Generation ML System

New paper: "This Person Probably Exists. Identity Membership Attacks Against GAN Generated Faces. Abstract: Recently, generative adversarial networks GANs have achieved stunning realism, fooling even human observers. Indeed, the popular tongue-in-cheek website http://thispersondoesnotexist.com,...

Check What Information Your Browser Leaks

These two sites tell you what sorts of information youre leaking from your browser...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m keynoting CIISec Live—an all-online event—September 15-16, 2021. I’m speaking at the Infosecurity Magazine EMEA Autumn Online Summit on September 21, 2021. I’m speaking at the Cybersecurity and Data Privacy Law Conference in...

The Story of Colossus

Nice video of a talk by Chris Shore on the history of Colossus...

No, RSA Is Not Broken

I have been seeing this paper by cryptographer Peter Schnorr making the rounds: "Fast Factoring Integers by SVP Algorithms." It describes a new factoring method, and its abstract ends with the provocative sentence: "This destroys the RSA cryptosystem." It does not. At best, its an improvement in...

Undermining Democracy

Last Thursday, Rudy Giuliani, a Trump campaign lawyer, alleged a widespread voting conspiracy involving Venezuela, Cuba, and China. Another lawyer, Sidney Powell, argued that Mr. Trump won in a landslide, the entire election in swing states should be overturned and the legislatures should make su...

Cybersecurity Visuals

The Hewlett Foundation just announced its top five ideas in its Cybersecurity Visuals Challenge. The problem Hewlett is trying to solve is the dearth of good visuals for cybersecurity. A Google Images Search demonstrates the problem: locks, fingerprints, hands on laptops, scary looking hackers in...

Iranian Government Hacking Android

The New York Times wrote about a still-unreleased report from Chckpoint and the Miaan Group: The reports, which were reviewed by The New York Times in advance of their release, say that the hackers have successfully infiltrated what were thought to be secure mobile phones and computers belonging ...