Friday Squid Blogging: Squid and Chips

The excellent Montreal chef Marc-Olivier Frappier, of Joe Beef fame, has created a squid and chips dish for Brit & Chips restaurant. 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...

Yacht Security

Turns out, multi-million dollar yachts are no more secure than anything else out there: The ease with which ocean-going oligarchs or other billionaires can be hijacked on the high seas was revealed at a superyacht conference held in a private members club in central London this week. ... Murray, ...

Facebook's Observations on Information Operations and the 2016 US Election

Facebook published paper on the information operations it has seen, as well as some observations regarding the recent US election. It's interesting reading...

France to Stop Certifying Non-Quantum-Safe Encryption

France is accelerating its transition to post-quantum encryption: France's cybersecurity agency ANSSI said on Tuesday it would stop certifying security products that lack quantum-resistant encryption, a move that will force government bodies and critical operators to shift away from older systems...

New Mexico’s Meta Ruling and Encryption

Mike Masnick points out that the recent New Mexico court ruling against Meta has some bad implications for end-to-end encryption, and security in general: If the "design choices create liability" framework seems worrying in the abstract, the New Mexico case provides a concrete example of where it...

AI Advertising Company Hacked

At least some of this is coming to light: Doublespeed, a startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz a16z that uses a phone farm to manage at least hundreds of AI-generated social media accounts and promote products has been hacked. The hack reveals what products the AI-generated accounts are promoting...

FBI Seizes BreachForums Website

The FBI has seized the BreachForums website, used by ransomware criminals to leak stolen corporate data. If law enforcement has gained access to the hacking forums backend data, as they claim, they would have email addresses, IP addresses, and private messages that could expose members and be use...

LLMs’ Data-Control Path Insecurity

Back in the 1960s, if you played a 2,600Hz tone into an AT&T pay phone, you could make calls without paying. A phone hacker named John Draper noticed that the plastic whistle that came free in a box of Captain Crunch cereal worked to make the right sound. That became his hacker name, and everyone...

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...

Magic Security Dust

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

CFPB’s Proposed Data Rules

In October, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau CFPB proposed a set of rules that if implemented would transform how financial institutions handle personal data about their customers. The rules put control of that data back in the hands of ordinary Americans, while at the same time undermini...

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...

The Hacker Tool to Get Personal Data from Credit Bureaus

The new site 404 Media has a good article on how hackers are cheaply getting personal information from credit bureaus: This is the result of a secret weapon criminals are selling access to online that appears to tap into an especially powerful set of data: the targets credit header. This is...

Remotely Stopping Polish Trains

Turns out that its easy to broadcast radio commands that force Polish trains to stop: …the saboteurs appear to have sent simple so-called "radio-stop" commands via radio frequency to the trains they targeted. Because the trains use a radio system that lacks encryption or authentication for those...

Hacking Food Labeling Laws

This article talks about new Mexican laws about food labeling, and the lengths to which food manufacturers are going to ensure that they are not effective. There are the typical high-pressure lobbying tactics and lawsuits. But theres also examples of companies hacking the laws: Companies like...

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...

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...

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...

Prompt Injection Attacks on Large Language Models

This is a good survey on prompt injection attacks on large language models like ChatGPT. Abstract: We are currently witnessing dramatic advances in the capabilities of Large Language Models LLMs. They are already being adopted in practice and integrated into many systems, including integrated...

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...

AirTags Are Used for Stalking Far More than Previously Reported

Ever since Apple introduced AirTags, security people have warned that they could be used for stalking. But while there have been a bunch of anecdotal stories, this is the first vaguely scientific survey: Motherboard requested records mentioning AirTags in a recent eight month period from dozens o...

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...

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...

Hardening Your VPN

The NSA and CISA have released a document on how to harden your VPN...

Michael Ellis as NSA General Counsel

Over at Lawfare, Susan Hennessey has an excellent primer on how Trump loyalist Michael Ellis got to be the NSA General Counsel, over the objections of NSA Director Paul Nakasone, and what Biden can and should do about it. While important details remain unclear, media accounts include numerous...

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...

Amazon Delivery Drivers Hacking Scheduling System

Amazon drivers -- all gig workers who dont work for the company -- are hanging cell phones in trees near Amazon delivery stations, fooling the system into thinking that they are closer than they actually are: The phones in trees seem to serve as master devices that dispatch routes to multiple...

Update on NIST's Post-Quantum Cryptography Program

NIST has posted an update on their post-quantum cryptography program: After spending more than three years examining new approaches to encryption and data protection that could defeat an assault from a quantum computer, the National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST has winnowed the 69...

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...

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...

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...

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...

CIA Exploits Against Wireless Routers

WikiLeaks has published CherryBlossom, the CIA's program to hack into wireless routers. The program is about a decade old. Four good news articles. Five. And a list of vulnerable routers...

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...

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...

Stealing Browsing History Using Your Phone's Ambient Light Sensor

There has been a flurry of research into using the various sensors on your phone to steal data in surprising ways. Here's another: using the phone's ambient light sensor to detect what's on the screen. It's a proof of concept, but the paper's general conclusions are correct: There is a lesson her...

MIT to Become Hotbed of AI Video Surveillance

It's a lot: According to information obtained by The Tech , MIT is spending over $3 million on more than 500 AI surveillance cameras in academic buildings, residence halls, and outdoor areas along Memorial Drive. Installation of the new cameras, along with the wiring and infrastructure that will...

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...

The FCC Wants to Eliminate Burner Phones

A proposed FCC rule would kill burner phones: phones whose accounts are not attached to a particular person. The FCC plans to do this by legally forcing the country's telecoms to store a wealth of personal information about essentially all phone customers, including a government issued...

Full-Face Masks to Frustrate Identification

This is going to be interesting. It's a video of someone trying on a variety of printed full-face masks. They won't fool anyone for long, but will survive casual scrutiny. And they're cheap and easy to swap...