CIA's Pandemic Toolkit

WikiLeaks is still dumping CIA cyberweapons on the Internet. Its latest dump is something called "Pandemic": The Pandemic leak does not explain what the CIA's initial infection vector is, but does describe it as a persistent implant. "As the name suggests, a single computer on a local network wit...

Using Ultrasonic Beacons to Track Users

I've previously written about ad networks using ultrasonic communications to jump from one device to another. The idea is for devices like televisions to play ultrasonic codes in advertisements and for nearby smartphones to detect them. This way the two devices can be linked. Creepy, yes. And als...

Why Is the TSA Scanning Paper?

I've been reading a bunch of anecdotal reports that the TSA is starting to scan paper separately: A passenger going through security at Kansas City International Airport MCI recently was asked by security officers to remove all paper products from his bag. Everything from books to Post-It Notes,...

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...

Cybersecurity and the Gap Between Skill and Ability

Last week, national security agencies from the Five Eyes--that's the rich, English-language-speaking countries club--jointly released a statement warning of the increasing cyber risks of AI models: in particular, their ability to autonomously hack into systems and networks. The statement was more...

Friday Squid Blogging: Bigfin Squid

Article about the bigfin 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...

What Anthropic’s Mythos Means for the Future of Cybersecurity

Two weeks ago, Anthropic announced that its new model, Claude Mythos Preview, can autonomously find and weaponize software vulnerabilities, turning them into working exploits without expert guidance. These were vulnerabilities in key software like operating systems and internet infrastructure tha...

Backdoor in XZ Utils That Almost Happened

Last week, the Internet dodged a major nation-state attack that would have had catastrophic cybersecurity repercussions worldwide. It’s a catastrophe that didn’t happen, so it won’t get much attention--but it should. There’s an important moral to the story of the attack and its discovery: The...

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...

Declassified NSA Newsletters

Through a 2010 FOIA request yes, it took that long, we have copies of the NSAs KRYPTOS Society Newsletter, "Tales of the Krypt," from 1994 to 2003. There are many interesting things in the 800 pages of newsletter. There are many redactions. And a 1994 review of Applied Cryptography by redacted:...

Magic Security Dust

Adam Shostack is selling magic security dust. Its about time someone is commercializing this essential technology...

Deepfake Fraud

A deepfake video conference call--with everyone else on the call a fake--fooled a finance worker into sending $25M to the criminals account...

Friday Squid Blogging: New Foods from Squid Fins

We only eat about half of a squid, ignoring the fins. A group of researchers is working to change that. 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...

Ben Rothke’s Review of A Hacker’s Mind

Ben Rothke chose A Hackers Mind as "the best information security book of 2023."...

Ten Ways AI Will Change Democracy

Artificial intelligence will change so many aspects of society, largely in ways that we cannot conceive of yet. Democracy, and the systems of governance that surround it, will be no exception. In this short essay, I want to move beyond the "AI-generated disinformation" trope and speculate on some...

The Privacy Disaster of Modern Smart Cars

Article based on a Mozilla report...

Online Retail Hack

Selling miniature replicas to unsuspecting shoppers: Online marketplaces sell tiny pink cowboy hats. They also sell miniature pencil sharpeners, palm-size kitchen utensils, scaled-down books and camping chairs so small they evoke the Stonehenge scene in "This Is Spinal Tap." Many of the minuscule...

Malicious Ads in Bing Chat

Malicious ads are creeping into chatbots...

New Revelations from the Snowden Documents

Jake Appelbaums PhD thesis contains several new revelations from the classified NSA documents provided to journalists by Edward Snowden. Nothing major, but a few more tidbits. Kind of amazing that that all happened ten years ago. At this point, those documents are more historical than anything...

Applying AI to License Plate Surveillance

License plate scanners arent new. Neither is using them for bulk surveillance. Whats new is that AI is being used on the data, identifying "suspicious" vehicle behavior: Typically, Automatic License Plate Recognition ALPR technology is used to search for plates linked to specific crimes. But in...

White House Announces AI Cybersecurity Challenge

At Black Hat last week, the White House announced an AI Cyber Challenge. Gizmodo reports: The new AI cyber challenge which is being abbreviated "AIxCC" will have a number of different phases. Interested would-be competitors can now submit their proposals to the Small Business Innovation Research...

Zoom Can Spy on Your Calls and Use the Conversation to Train AI, But Says That It Won’t

This is why we need regulation: Zoom updated its Terms of Service in March, spelling out that the company reserves the right to train AI on user data with no mention of a way to opt out. On Monday, the company said in a blog post that theres no need to worry about that. Zoom execs swear the compa...

PIPEDREAM Malware against Industrial Control Systems

Another nation-state malware, Russian in origin: In the early stages of the war in Ukraine in 2022, PIPEDREAM, a known malware was quietly on the brink of wiping out a handful of critical U.S. electric and liquid natural gas sites. PIPEDREAM is an attack toolkit with unmatched and unprecedented...

SolarWinds Detected Six Months Earlier

New reporting from Wired reveals that the Department of Justice detected the SolarWinds attack six months before Mandiant detected it in December 2020, but didnt realize what it detected--and so ignored it. WIRED can now confirm that the operation was actually discovered by the DOJ six months...

Car Thieves Hacking the CAN Bus

Car thieves are injecting malicious software into a cars network through wires in the headlights or taillights that fool the car into believing that the electronic key is nearby. News articles...

LLMs and Phishing

Heres an experiment being run by undergraduate computer science students everywhere: Ask ChatGPT to generate phishing emails, and test whether these are better at persuading victims to respond or click on the link than the usual spam. Its an interesting experiment, and the results are likely to...

Successful Hack of Time-Triggered Ethernet

Time-triggered Ethernet TTE is used in spacecraft, basically to use the same hardware to process traffic with different timing and criticality. Researchers have defeated it: On Tuesday, researchers published findings that, for the first time, break TTEs isolation guarantees. The result is PCspooF...

Friday Squid Blogging: New Squid Species

Seems like they are being discovered all the time: In the past, the DEEPEND crew has discovered three new species of Bathyteuthids, a type of squid that lives in depths between 700 and 2,000 meters. The findings were validated and published in 2020. Another new squid species description is...

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...

Apple’s Private Relay Is Being Blocked

Some European cell phone carriers, and now T-Mobile, are blocking Apples Private Relay anonymous browsing feature. This could be an interesting battle to watch. Slashdot thread...

Friday Squid Blogging: Bobtail Squid and Vibrio Bacteria

Research on the Vibrio bacteria and its co-evolution with its bobtail squid hosts. 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...

Determining What Video Conference Participants Are Typing from Watching Shoulder Movements

Accuracy isnt great, but that it can be done at all is impressive. Murtuza Jadiwala, a computer science professor heading the research project, said his team was able to identify the contents of texts by examining body movement of the participants. Specifically, they focused on the movement of...

2020 Workshop on Economics of Information Security

The Workshop on Economics of Information Security will be online this year. Register here...

COVID-19 and Acedia

Note: This isnt my usual essay topic. Still, I want to put it on my blog. Six months into the pandemic with no end in sight, many of us have been feeling a sense of unease that goes beyond anxiety or distress. Its a nameless feeling that somehow makes it hard to go on with even the nice things we...

Security and Human Behavior (SHB) 2020

Today is the second day of the thirteenth Workshop on Security and Human Behavior. It's being hosted by the University of Cambridge, which in today's world means we're all meeting on Zoom. SHB is a small, annual, invitational workshop of people studying various aspects of the human side of...

Examining the US Cyber Budget

Jason Healey takes a detailed look at the US federal cybersecurity budget and reaches an important conclusion: the US keeps saying that we need to prioritize defense, but in fact we prioritize attack. To its credit, this budget does reveal an overall growth in cybersecurity funding of about 5...

Friday Squid Blogging: Human Cells with Squid-Like Transparency

I think we need more human organs with squid-like features. 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...

Used Tesla Components Contain Personal Information

Used Tesla components, sold on eBay, still contain personal information, even after a factory reset. This is a decades-old problem. It's a problem with used hard drives. It's a problem with used photocopiers and printers. It will be a problem with IoT devices. It'll be a problem with everything,...

Friday Squid Blogging: Piglet Squid Video

Really neat. 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...

G7 Comes Out in Favor of Encryption Backdoors

From a G7 meeting of interior ministers in Paris this month, an "outcome document": Encourage Internet companies to establish lawful access solutions for their products and services, including data that is encrypted, for law enforcement and competent authorities to access digital evidence, when i...

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...

Cheating in Bird Racing

I've previously written about people cheating in marathon racing by driving -- or otherwise getting near the end of the race by faster means than running. In China, two people were convicted of cheating in a pigeon race: The essence of the plan involved training the pigeons to believe they had tw...

John Mueller and Mark Stewart on the Risks of Terrorism

Another excellent paper by the Mueller/Stewart team: "Terrorism and Bathtubs: Comparing and Assessing the Risks": Abstract: The likelihood that anyone outside a war zone will be killed by an Islamist extremist terrorist is extremely small. In the United States, for example, some six people have...

Backdoors in Cisco Routers

We don't know if this is error or deliberate action, but five backdoors have been discovered already this year...

Department of Commerce Report on the Botnet Threat

Last month, the US Department of Commerce released a report on the threat of botnets and what to do about it. I note that it explicitly said that the IoT makes the threat worse, and that the solutions are largely economic. The Departments determined that the opportunities and challenges in workin...

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...

Dan Geer on the Dangers of Computer-Only Systems

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

Interesting Article on Marcus Hutchins

This is a good article on the complicated story of hacker Marcus Hutchins...

Websites Use Session-Replay Scripts to Eavesdrop on Every Keystroke and Mouse Movement

The security researchers at Princeton are posting You may know that most websites have third-party analytics scripts that record which pages you visit and the searches you make. But lately, more and more sites use "session replay" scripts. These scripts record your keystrokes, mouse movements, an...