2017 Tesla Hack

Interesting story of a class break against the entire Tesla fleet...

Seny Kamara on "Crypto for the People"

Seny Kamara gave an excellent keynote talk this year at the online CRYPTO Conference. He talked about solving real-world crypto problems for marginalized communities around the world, instead of crypto problems for governments and corporations. Well worth watching and listening to...

Yet Another Biometric: Bioacoustic Signatures

Sound waves through the body are unique enough to be a biometric: "Modeling allowed us to infer what structures or material features of the human body actually differentiated people," explains Joo Yong Sim, one of the ETRI researchers who conducted the study. "For example, we could see how the...

Vaccine for Emotet Malware

Interesting story of a vaccine for the Emotet malware: Through trial and error and thanks to subsequent Emotet updates that refined how the new persistence mechanism worked, Quinn was able to put together a tiny PowerShell script that exploited the registry key mechanism to crash Emotet itself. T...

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...

Eavesdropping on Sound Using Variations in Light Bulbs

New research is able to recover sound waves in a room by observing minute changes in the room's light bulbs. This technique works from a distance, even from a building across the street through a window. Details: In an experiment using three different telescopes with different lens diameters from...

Availability Attacks against Neural Networks

New research on using specially crafted inputs to slow down machine-learning neural network systems: Sponge Examples: Energy-Latency Attacks on Neural Networks shows how to find adversarial examples that cause a DNN to burn more energy, take more time, or both. They affect a wide range of DNN...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I'm being interviewed on "Hacking in the Public Interest" as part of the Black Hat Webcast Series, on Thursday, April 16, 2020 at 2:00 PM EDT. The list is maintained on this page...

A "Department of Cybersecurity"

Presidential candidate John Delaney has announced a plan to create a Department of Cybersecurity. I have long been in favor of a new federal agency to deal with Internet -- and especially Internet of Things -- security. The devil is in the details, of course, and it's really easy to get this wron...

Using In-Game Purchases to Launder Money

Evidence that stolen credit cards are being used to purchase items in games like Clash of Clans, which are then resold for cash...

The DMCA and its Chilling Effects on Research

The Center for Democracy and Technology has a good summary of the current state of the DMCA's chilling effects on security research. To underline the nature of chilling effects on hacking and security research, CDT has worked to describe how tinkerers, hackers, and security researchers of all typ...

New KRACK Attack Against Wi-Fi Encryption

Mathy Vanhoef has just published a devastating attack against WPA2, the 14-year-old encryption protocol used by pretty much all wi-fi systems. Its an interesting attack, where the attacker forces the protocol to reuse a key. The authors call this attack KRACK, for Key Reinstallation Attacks This ...

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 ...

Millennials and Secret Leaking

I hesitate to blog this, because it's an example of everything that's wrong with pop psychology. Malcolm Harris writes about millennials, and has a theory of why millennials leak secrets. My guess is that you could write a similar essay about every named generation, every age group, and so on...

Spear Phishing Attacks

Really interesting research: "Unpacking Spear Phishing Susceptibility," by Zinaida Benenson, Freya Gassmann, and Robert Landwirth. Abstract: We report the results of a field experiment where we sent to over 1200 university students an email or a Facebook message with a link to non-existing party...

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...

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...

Hacking Meta’s AI Chatbot

Hackers are convincing Meta's AI support chatbot to let them take over other peoples' accounts: A video posted on X showed the step-by-step process to hack someone's Instagram account. The hacker allegedly used a VPN to spoof the targets' presumed location to avoid triggering Instagram's automate...

Vulnerability Disclosure in the Age of AI

New article: "Responsible Disclosure in the Age of AI: A Call for Urgent Action," by Melissa Hathaway. Abstract: Artificial intelligence is fundamentally reshaping the balance between vulnerability discovery and remediation. Frontier AI models are now capable of autonomously identifying exploitab...

Rowhammer Attack Against NVIDIA Chips

A new rowhammer attack gives complete control of NVIDIA CPUs. On Thursday, two research teams, working independently of each other, demonstrated attacks against two cards from Nvidia’s Ampere generation that take GPU rowhammering into new--­and potentially much more consequential--­territory: GDD...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: New “Squid” Sneaker

I did not know Adidas sold a sneaker called "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...

Generative AI as a Cybercrime Assistant

Anthropic reports on a Claude user: We recently disrupted a sophisticated cybercriminal that used Claude Code to commit large-scale theft and extortion of personal data. The actor targeted at least 17 distinct organizations, including in healthcare, the emergency services, and government and...

Thousands of WordPress Websites Infected with Malware

The malware includes four separate backdoors: Creating four backdoors facilitates the attackers having multiple points of re-entry should one be detected and removed. A unique case we haven't seen before. Which introduces another type of attack made possibly by abusing websites that don't monitor...

Personal AI Assistants and Privacy

Microsoft is trying to create a personal digital assistant: At a Build conference event on Monday, Microsoft revealed a new AI-powered feature called "Recall" for Copilot+ PCs that will allow Windows 11 users to search and retrieve their past activities on their PC. To make it work, Recall record...

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...

US Cyber Safety Review Board on the 2023 Microsoft Exchange Hack

The US Cyber Safety Review Board released a report on the summer 2023 hack of Microsoft Exchange by China. It was a serious attack by the Chinese government that accessed the emails of senior US government officials. From the executive summary: The Board finds that this intrusion was preventable...

Improving C++

C++ guru Herb Sutter writes about how we can improve the programming language for better security. The immediate problem "is" that it’s Too Easy By Default™ to write security and safety vulnerabilities in C++ that would have been caught by stricter enforcement of known rules for type, bounds,...

A Taxonomy of Prompt Injection Attacks

Researchers ran a global prompt hacking competition, and have documented the results in a paper that both gives a lot of good examples and tries to organize a taxonomy of effective prompt injection strategies. It seems as if the most common successful strategy is the "compound instruction attack,...

Documents about the NSA’s Banning of Furby Toys in the 1990s

Via a FOIA request, we have documents from the NSA about their banning of Furby toys. 404 Media has the story. EDITED TO ADD: The documents are now on Archive.org...

AI Bots on X (Twitter)

You can find them by searching for OpenAI chatbot warning messages, like: "Im sorry, I cannot provide a response as it goes against OpenAIs use case policy." I hadnt thought about this before: identifying bots by searching for distinctive bot phrases...

The Story of the Mirai Botnet

Over at Wired, Andy Greenberg has an excellent story about the creators of the 2016 Mirai botnet...

Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid from Newfoundland in the 1800s

Interesting article, with photographs. 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...

AI and Lossy Bottlenecks

Artificial intelligence is poised to upend much of society, removing human limitations inherent in many systems. One such limitation is information and logistical bottlenecks in decision-making. Traditionally, people have been forced to reduce complex choices to a small handful of options that do...

Using Generative AI for Surveillance

Generative AI is going to be a powerful tool for data analysis and summarization. Heres an example of it being used for sentiment analysis. My guess is that it isnt very good yet, but that it will get better...

Spaf on the Morris Worm

Gene Spafford wrote an essay reflecting on the Morris Worm of 1988--thirty-five years ago. His lessons from then are still applicable today...

The Future of Drone Warfare

Ukraine is using $400 drones to destroy tanks: Facing an enemy with superior numbers of troops and armor, the Ukrainian defenders are holding on with the help of tiny drones flown by operators like Firsov that, for a few hundred dollars, can deliver an explosive charge capable of destroying a...

Cisco Can’t Stop Using Hard-Coded Passwords

Theres a new Cisco vulnerability in its Emergency Responder product: This vulnerability is due to the presence of static user credentials for the root account that are typically reserved for use during development. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by using the account to log in to an...

LLM Summary of My Book Beyond Fear

Claude Anthropics LLM was given this prompt: Please summarize the themes and arguments of Bruce Schneiers book Beyond Fear. Im particularly interested in a taxonomy of his ethical arguments--please expand on that. Then lay out the most salient criticisms of the book. Claudes reply: Heres a brief...

December’s Reimagining Democracy Workshop

Imagine that weve all--all of us, all of society--landed on some alien planet, and we have to form a government: clean slate. We dont have any legacy systems from the US or any other country. We dont have any special or unique interests to perturb our thinking. How would we govern ourselves? Its...

Google Reportedly Disconnecting Employees from the Internet

Supposedly Google is starting a pilot program of disabling Internet connectivity from employee computers: The company will disable internet access on the select desktops, with the exception of internal web-based tools and Google-owned websites like Google Drive and Gmail. Some workers who need th...

Kevin Mitnick Died

Obituary...

Using the iPhone Recovery Key to Lock Owners Out of Their iPhones

This a good example of a security feature that can sometimes harm security: Apple introduced the optional recovery key in 2020 to protect users from online hackers. Users who turn on the recovery key, a unique 28-digit code, must provide it when they want to reset their Apple ID password. iPhone...

Bypassing a Theft Threat Model

Thieves cut through the wall of a coffee shop to get to an Apple store, bypassing the alarms in the process. I wrote about this kind of thing in 2000, in Secrets and Lies page 318: My favorite example is a band of California art thieves that would break into peoples houses by cutting a hole in...

Exploding USB Sticks

In case you dont have enough to worry about, people are hiding explosives--actual ones--in USB sticks: In the port city of Guayaquil, journalist Lenin Artieda of the Ecuavisa private TV station received an envelope containing a pen drive which exploded when he inserted it into a computer, his...

A Guide to Phishing Attacks

This is a good list of modern phishing techniques...

Friday Squid Blogging: China Bans Taiwanese Squid Imports

Today I have some squid geopolitical news. 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...

Man-in-the-Middle Phishing Attack

Heres a phishing campaign that uses a man-in-the-middle attack to defeat multi-factor authentication: Microsoft observed a campaign that inserted an attacker-controlled proxy site between the account users and the work server they attempted to log into. When the user entered a password into the...