3074 matches found
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...
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...
Messaging Service Wiretap Discovered through Expired TLS Cert
Fascinating story of a covert wiretap that was discovered because of an expired TLS certificate: The suspected man-in-the-middle attack was identified when the administrator of jabber.ru, the largest Russian XMPP service, received a notification that one of the servers’ certificates had expired...
Friday Squid Blogging: On Squid Intelligence
Article about squid intelligence. 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Banning TikTok
Congress is currently debating bills that would ban TikTok in the United States. We are here as technologists to tell you that this is a terrible idea and the side effects would be intolerable. Details matter. There are several ways Congress might ban TikTok, each with different efficacies and si...
Defending against AI Lobbyists
When is it time to start worrying about artificial intelligence interfering in our democracy? Maybe when an AI writes a letter to The New York Times opposing the regulation of its own technology. That happened last month. And because the letter was responding to an essay we wrote, were starting t...
Existential Risk and the Fermi Paradox
We know that complexity is the worst enemy of security, because it makes attack easier and defense harder. This becomes catastrophic as the effects of that attack become greater. In A Hackers Mind coming in February 2023, I write: Our societal systems, in general, may have grown fairer and more...
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...
Hackers Using Fake Police Data Requests against Tech Companies
Brian Krebs has a detailed post about hackers using fake police data requests to trick companies into handing over data. Virtually all major technology companies serving large numbers of users online have departments that routinely review and process such requests, which are typically granted as...
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...
Why I Hate Password Rules
The other day, I was creating a new account on the web. It was financial in nature, which means it gets one of my most secure passwords. I used Password Safe to generate this 16-character alphanumeric password: :s^Twd.J;3hzg=Q Which was rejected by the site, because it didnt meet its password...
Hardening Your VPN
The NSA and CISA have released a document on how to harden your VPN...
The Proliferation of Zero-days
The MIT Technology Review is reporting that 2021 is a blockbuster year for zero-day exploits: One contributing factor in the higher rate of reported zero-days is the rapid global proliferation of hacking tools. Powerful groups are all pouring heaps of cash into zero-days to use for themselves --...
Tetris: Chinese Espionage Tool
Im starting to see writings about a Chinese espionage tool that exploits website vulnerabilities to try and identify Chinese dissidents...
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...
2020 Was a Secure Election
Over at Lawfare: "2020 Is An Election Security Success Story So Far." What’s more, the voting itself was remarkably smooth. It was only a few months ago that professionals and analysts who monitor election administration were alarmed at how badly unprepared the country was for voting during a...
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...
The NSA is Refusing to Disclose its Policy on Backdooring Commercial Products
Senator Ron Wyden asked, and the NSA didnt answer: The NSA has long sought agreements with technology companies under which they would build special access for the spy agency into their products, according to disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and reporting by Reuters and others...
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...
New Privacy Features in iOS 14
A good rundown...
Friday Squid Blogging: After Squidnight
Review of a squid-related childrens book. 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...
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...
US Space Cybersecurity Directive
The Trump Administration just published "Space Policy Directive - 5": "Cybersecurity Principles for Space Systems." Its pretty general: Principles. a Space systems and their supporting infrastructure, including software, should be developed and operated using risk-based, cybersecurity-informed...
Hacking AI-Graded Tests
The company Edgenuity sells AI systems for grading tests. Turns out that they just search for keywords without doing any actual semantic analysis...
Smart Lock Vulnerability
Yet another Internet-connected door lock is insecure: Sold by retailers including Amazon, Walmart, and Home Depot, U-Tec's $139.99 UltraLoq is marketed as a "secure and versatile smart deadbolt that offers keyless entry via your Bluetooth-enabled smartphone and code." Users can share temporary...
Survey of Supply Chain Attacks
The Atlantic Council has a released a report that looks at the history of computer supply chain attacks. Key trends from their summary: 1. Deep Impact from State Actors: There were at least 27 different state attacks against the software supply chain including from Russia, China, North Korea, and...
NSA on Securing VPNs
The NSA's Central Security Service -- that's the part that's supposed to work on defense -- has released two documents a full and an abridged version on securing virtual private networks. Some of it is basic, but it contains good information. Maintaining a secure VPN tunnel can be complex and...
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...
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...
Gene Spafford on Internet Voting
Good interview...
Installing a Credit Card Skimmer on a POS Terminal
Watch how someone installs a credit card skimmer in just a couple of seconds. I don't know if the skimmer just records the data and is collected later, or if it transmits the data back to some base station...
Ceramic Knife Used in Israel Stabbing
I have no comment on the politics of this stabbing attack, and only note that the attacker used a ceramic knife -- that will go through metal detectors. I have used a ceramic knife in the kitchen. It's sharp. EDITED TO ADD 6/22: It looks like the knife had nothing to do with the attack discussed ...
New Technique to Hijack Social Media Accounts
Access Now has documented it being used against a Twitter user, but it also works against other social media accounts: With the Doubleswitch attack, a hijacker takes control of a victim's account through one of several attack vectors. People who have not enabled an app-based form of multifactor...
Safety and Security and the Internet of Things
Ross Anderson blogged about his new paper on security and safety concerns about the Internet of Things. See also this short video. It's very much along the lines of what I've been writing...
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Communications
In the oval squid Sepioteuthis lessoniana, males use body patterns to communicate with both females and other males: To gain insight into the visual communication associated with each behavior in terms of the body patterning's key components, the co-expression frequencies of two or more component...
Friday Squid Blogging: Video of Squid Attacking Another Squid
Wow, is this cool. 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...
First-Person Identity Theft Story
Harrowing story of an identity theft victim. Yes, the person made a mistake--they gave the scammer a two-factor authentication code that allowed the scammer to take over their email address. But the real story here is how, for many of us, the security of most of our accounts hangs on the security...
Cybersecurity Mission Creep in the US
Interesting paper: "Cybersecurity Mission Creep." Abstract: Cybersecurity is experiencing mission creep. Policymakers are casting more and more problems as issues of cybersecurity. So reframed, wildly different policy issues, from misinformation, to child social media safety laws, to antitrust...
Anthropic’s Fable and the State of AI
On June 9th, Anthropic released its Fable generative AI model. Three days later, the US government classified it as a dangerous munition, and used its export-control authority to prohibit any foreign nationals from accessing it. Unable to differentiate between Americans and foreigners, the compan...
AI Worm
Researchers have prototyped an AI-powered internet worm. The coolest thing about the prototype is that it carries its own LLM with it, and runs it on computers that have been broken into. This is the closest to John Brunner's original 1975 conception of a computer worm that I've seen...
Friday Squid Blogging: Another Squid
Someone named "Squid" seems to be a "West Country legend." 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...
FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report
The 2025 Internet Crime Report was published a few weeks ago, but I only just saw it. Lots of interesting statistics. Press release. News articles...
Bypassing On-Camera Age-Verification Checks
Some AI-based video age-verification checks can be fooled with a fake mustache...
DarkSword Malware
DarkSword is a sophisticated piece of malware--probably government designed--that targets iOS. Google Threat Intelligence Group GTIG has identified a new iOS full-chain exploit that leveraged multiple zero-day vulnerabilities to fully compromise devices. Based on toolmarks in recovered payloads, ...
On Microsoft’s Lousy Cloud Security
ProPublica has a scoop: In late 2024, the federal government's cybersecurity evaluators rendered a troubling verdict on one of Microsoft's biggest cloud computing offerings. The tech giant's "lack of proper detailed security documentation" left reviewers with a "lack of confidence in assessing th...