On Flock License Plate Tracking Cameras

A recent story of a writer who was mistakenly identified, tracked, and arrested using data from Flock cameras has gone viral. The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM , not 34 10 DTM. But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into...

The Language of AI Could Change How Humans Speak

Because of the way they are trained, large language models capture only a slice of human language. They're trained on the written word, from textbooks to social media posts, and our speech as captured in movies and on television. These models have minimal access to the unscripted conversations we...

Papa Johns Surveillance-Based Advertising

Papa Johns is spying on people's buying activities to predict when they are low on food: The pizza chain recently tapped NBCUniversal, Instacart and the dentsu-owned media agency Carat for help reaching consumers when they're low on groceries--and thus more likely to be swayed by a mouth-watering...

Is “Hackback” Official US Cybersecurity Strategy?

The 2026 US "Cyber Strategy for America" document is mostly the same thing we've seen out of the White House for over a decade, but with a more aggressive tone. But one sentence stood out: "We will unleash the private sector by creating incentives to identify and disrupt adversary networks and...

Hacked App Part of US/Israeli Propaganda Campaign Against Iran

Wired has the story: Shortly after the first set of explosions, Iranians received bursts of notifications on their phones. They came not from the government advising caution, but from an apparently hacked prayer-timing app called BadeSaba Calendar that has been downloaded more than 5 million time...

AI and the 2024 US Elections

For years now, AI has undermined the public's ability to trust what it sees, hears, and reads. The Republican National Committee released a provocative ad offering an "AI-generated look into the country's possible future if Joe Biden is re-elected," showing apocalyptic, machine-made images of...

Israel’s Pager Attacks and Supply Chain Vulnerabilities

Israel's brazen attacks on Hezbollah last week, in which hundreds of pagers and two-way radios exploded and killed at least 37 people, graphically illustrated a threat that cybersecurity experts have been warning about for years: Our international supply chains for computerized equipment leave us...

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...

Security and Human Behavior (SHB) 2024

This week, I hosted the seventeenth Workshop on Security and Human Behavior at the Harvard Kennedy School. This is the first workshop since our co-founder, Ross Anderson, died unexpectedly. SHB is a small, annual, invitational workshop of people studying various aspects of the human side of...

The Privacy Disaster of Modern Smart Cars

Article based on a Mozilla report...

Bots Are Better than Humans at Solving CAPTCHAs

Interesting research: "An Empirical Study & Evaluation of Modern CAPTCHAs": Abstract: For nearly two decades, CAPTCHAS have been widely used as a means of protection against bots. Throughout the years, as their use grew, techniques to defeat or bypass CAPTCHAS have continued to improve. Meanwhile...

The Need for Trustworthy AI

If you ask Alexa, Amazons voice assistant AI system, whether Amazon is a monopoly, it responds by saying it doesnt know. It doesnt take much to make it lambaste the other tech giants, but its silent about its own corporate parents misdeeds. When Alexa responds in this way, its obvious that it is...

Hacking the Layoff Process

My latest book, A Hackers Mind, is filled with stories about the rich and powerful hacking systems, but it was hard to find stories of the hacking by the less powerful. Heres one I just found. An article on how layoffs at big companies work inadvertently suggests an employee hack to avoid being...

High-School Graduation Prank Hack

This is a fun story, detailing the hack a group of high school students perpetrated against an Illinois school district, hacking 500 screens across a bunch of schools. During the process, the group broke into the school’s IT systems; repurposed software used to monitor students’ computers;...

Hyundai Uses Example Keys for Encryption System

This is a dumb crypto mistake I had not previously encountered: A developer says it was possible to run their own software on the car infotainment hardware after discovering the vehicles manufacturer had secured its system using keys that were not only publicly known but had been lifted from...

NIST’s Post-Quantum Cryptography Standards

Quantum computing is a completely new paradigm for computers. A quantum computer uses quantum properties such as superposition, which allows a qubit a quantum bit to be neither 0 nor 1, but something much more complicated. In theory, such a computer can solve problems too complex for conventional...

Apple’s Lockdown Mode

Apple has introduced lockdown mode for high-risk users who are concerned about nation-state attacks. It trades reduced functionality for increased security in a very interesting way...

Security and Human Behavior (SHB) 2022

Today is the second day of the fifteenth Workshop on Security and Human Behavior, hosted by Ross Anderson and Alice Hutchings at the University of Cambridge. After two years of having this conference remotely on Zoom, its nice to be back together in person. SHB is a small, annual, invitational...

Friday Squid Blogging: Strawberry Squid

Pretty pictures of a strawberry squid Histioteuthis heteropsis. 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...

Teaching Cybersecurity to Children

A new draft of an Australian educational curriculum proposes teaching children as young as five cybersecurity: The proposed curriculum aims to teach five-year-old children -- an age at which Australian kids first attend school -- not to share information such as date of birth or full names with...

Phone Cloning Scam

A newspaper in Malaysia is reporting on a cell phone cloning scam. The scammer convinces the victim to lend them their cell phone, and the scammer quickly clones it. Whats clever about this scam is that the victim is an Uber driver and the scammer is the passenger, so the driver is naturally busy...

Determining Key Shape from Sound

Its not yet very accurate or practical, but under ideal conditions it is possible to figure out the shape of a house key by listening to it being used. Listen to Your Key: Towards Acoustics-based Physical Key Inference Abstract: Physical locks are one of the most prevalent mechanisms for securing...

New iMessage Security Features

Apple has added added security features to mitigate the risk of zero-click iMessage attacks. Apple did not document the changes but Groß said he fiddled around with the newest iOS 14 and found that Apple shipped a "significant refactoring of iMessage processing" that severely cripples the usual...

New Zealand Election Fraud

It seems that this election season has not gone without fraud. In New Zealand, a vote for "Bird of the Year" has been marred by fraudulent votes: More than 1,500 fraudulent votes were cast in the early hours of Monday in the countrys annual bird election, briefly pushing the Little-Spotted Kiwi t...

Reverse-Engineering the Redactions in the Ghislaine Maxwell Deposition

Slate magazine was able to cleverly read the Ghislaine Maxwell deposition and reverse-engineer many of the redacted names. Weve long known that redacting is hard in the modern age, but most of the failures to date have been a result of not realizing that covering digital text with a black bar...

CEO of NS8 Charged with Securities Fraud

The founder and CEO of the Internet security company NS8 has been arrested and "charged in a Complaint in Manhattan federal court with securities fraud, fraud in the offer and sale of securities, and wire fraud." I admit that Ive never even heard of the company before...

Cybercrime in the Age of COVID-19

The Cambridge Cybercrime Centre has a series of papers on cybercrime during the coronavirus pandemic. EDITED TO ADD 8/12: Interpol report...

On the Twitter Hack

Twitter was hacked this week. Not a few people's Twitter accounts, but all of Twitter. Someone compromised the entire Twitter network, probably by stealing the log-in credentials of one of Twitter's system administrators. Those are the people trusted to ensure that Twitter functions smoothly. The...

Half a Million IoT Passwords Leaked

It is amazing that this sort of thing can still happen: ...the list was compiled by scanning the entire internet for devices that were exposing their Telnet port. The hacker then tried using 1 factory-set default usernames and passwords, or 2 custom, but easy-to-guess password combinations. Telne...

Analyzing IoT Security Best Practices

New research: "Best Practices for IoT Security: What Does That Even Mean?" by Christopher Bellman and Paul C. van Oorschot: Abstract: Best practices for Internet of Things IoT security have recently attracted considerable attention worldwide from industry and governments, while academic research...

Thermal Imaging as Security Theater

Seems like thermal imaging is the security theater technology of today. These features are so tempting that thermal cameras are being installed at an increasing pace. They're used in airports and other public transportation centers to screen travelers, increasingly used by companies to screen...

Story of Gus Weiss

This is a long and fascinating article about Gus Weiss, who masterminded a long campaign to feed technical disinformation to the Soviet Union, which may or may not have caused a massive pipeline explosion somewhere in Siberia in the 1980s, if in fact there even was a massive pipeline explosion...

Internet of Things Candle

There's a Kickstarter for an actual candle, with real fire, that you can control over the Internet. What could possibly go wrong?...

Privacy and Security of Data at Universities

Interesting paper: "Open Data, Grey Data, and Stewardship: Universities at the Privacy Frontier," by Christine Borgman: Abstract: As universities recognize the inherent value in the data they collect and hold, they encounter unforeseen challenges in stewarding those data in ways that balance...

Public Shaming of Companies for Bad Security

Troy Hunt makes some good points, with good examples...

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...

WPA3

Everyone is writing about the new WPA3 Wi-Fi security standard, and how it improves security over the current WPA2 standard. This summary is as good as any other: The first big new feature in WPA3 is protection against offline, password-guessing attacks. This is where an attacker captures data fr...

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...

FBI Increases Its Anti-Encryption Rhetoric

Earlier this month, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein gave a speech warning that a world with encryption is a world without law -- or something like that. The EFF's Kurt Opsahl takes it apart pretty thoroughly. Last week, FBI Director Christopher Wray said much the same thing. This is an ide...

Separating the Paranoid from the Hacked

Sad story of someone whose computer became owned by a griefer: The trouble began last year when he noticed strange things happening: files went missing from his computer; his Facebook picture was changed; and texts from his daughter didn't reach him or arrived changed. "Nobody believed me," says...

The Secret Code of Beatrix Potter

Interesting: As codes go, Potter's wasn't inordinately complicated. As Wiltshire explains, it was a "mono-alphabetic substitution cipher code," in which each letter of the alphabet was replaced by a symbol­ -- the kind of thing they teach you in Cub Scouts. The real trouble was Potter's own fluen...

Hacking the Galaxy S8's Iris Biometric

It was easy: The hackers took a medium range photo of their subject with a digital camera's night mode, and printed the infrared image. Then, presumably to give the image some depth, the hackers placed a contact lens on top of the printed picture...

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...

Automobile Camouflage to Hide from Flock Cameras

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

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...

Details of Alan Turing’s Voice Encryption System

Really interesting piece of cryptographic history: In November 2023, a large cache of his wartime papers--nicknamed the "Bayley papers"--was auctioned in London for almost half a million U.S. dollars. The previously unknown cache contains many sheets in Turing's own handwriting, telling of his...

Fast16 Malware

Researchers have reverse-engineered a piece of malware named Fast16. It's almost certainly state-sponsored, probably US in origin, and was deployed against Iran years before Stuxnet: "…the Fast16 malware was designed to carry out the most subtle form of sabotage ever seen in an in-the-wild malwar...

As the US Midterms Approach, AI Is Going to Emerge as a Key Issue Concerning Voters

In December, the Trump administration signed an executive order that neutered states' ability to regulate AI by ordering his administration to both sue and withhold funds from states that try to do so. This action pointedly supported industry lobbyists keen to avoid any constraints and consequenc...

The Rise of Large-Language-Model Optimization

The web has become so interwoven with everyday life that it is easy to forget what an extraordinary accomplishment and treasure it is. In just a few decades, much of human knowledge has been collectively written up and made available to anyone with an internet connection. But all of this is comin...

Google Pays $10M in Bug Bounties in 2023

BleepingComputer has the details. Its $2M less than in 2022, but its still a lot. The highest reward for a vulnerability report in 2023 was $113,337, while the total tally since the programs launch in 2010 has reached $59 million. For Android, the worlds most popular and widely used mobile...