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...

Rethinking Democracy for the Age of AI

There is a lot written about technologys threats to democracy. Polarization. Artificial intelligence. The concentration of wealth and power. I have a more general story: The political and economic systems of governance that were created in the mid-18th century are poorly suited for the 21st...

AI and the Indian Election

As India concluded the worlds largest election on June 5, 2024, with over 640 million votes counted, observers could assess how the various parties and factions used artificial intelligence technologies--and what lessons that holds for the rest of the world. The campaigns made extensive use of AI...

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...

Privacy Implications of Tracking Wireless Access Points

Brian Krebs reports on research into geolocating routers: Apple and the satellite-based broadband service Starlink each recently took steps to address new research into the potential security and privacy implications of how their services geolocate devices. Researchers from the University of...

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...

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,...

Surveillance through Push Notifications

The Washington Post is reporting on the FBIs increasing use of push notification data--"push tokens"--to identify people. The police can request this data from companies like Apple and Google without a warrant. The investigative technique goes back years. Court orders that were issued in 2019 to...

A Cyber Insurance Backstop

In the first week of January, the pharmaceutical giant Merck quietly settled its years-long lawsuit over whether or not its property and casualty insurers would cover a $700 million claim filed after the devastating NotPetya cyberattack in 2017. The malware ultimately infected more than 40,000 of...

Improving Shor’s Algorithm

We dont have a useful quantum computer yet, but we do have quantum algorithms. Shors algorithm has the potential to factor large numbers faster than otherwise possible, which--if the run times are actually feasible--could break both the RSA and Diffie-Hellman public-key algorithms. Now, computer...

Friday Squid Blogging: Sqids

Theyre short unique strings: Sqids pronounced "squids" is an open-source library that lets you generate YouTube-looking IDs from numbers. These IDs are short, can be generated from a custom alphabet and are guaranteed to be collision-free. I havent dug into the details enough to know how they can...

AI Is Scarily Good at Guessing the Location of Random Photos

Wow: To test PIGEONs performance, I gave it five personal photos from a trip I took across America years ago, none of which have been published online. Some photos were snapped in cities, but a few were taken in places nowhere near roads or other easily recognizable landmarks. That didnt seem to...

New iPhone Security Features to Protect Stolen Devices

Apple is rolling out a new "Stolen Device Protection" feature that seems well thought out: When Stolen Device Protection is turned on, Face ID or Touch ID authentication is required for additional actions, including viewing passwords or passkeys stored in iCloud Keychain, applying for a new Apple...

Google Stops Collecting Location Data from Maps

Google Maps now stores location data locally on your device, meaning that Google no longer has that data to turn over to the police...

LitterDrifter USB Worm

A new worm that spreads via USB sticks is infecting computers in Ukraine and beyond. The group­--known by many names, including Gamaredon, Primitive Bear, ACTINIUM, Armageddon, and Shuckworm--has been active since at least 2014 and has been attributed to Russia’s Federal Security Service by the...

How .tk Became a TLD for Scammers

Sad story of Tokelau, and how its top-level domain "became the unwitting host to the dark underworld by providing a never-ending supply of domain names that could be weaponized against internet users. Scammers began using .tk websites to do everything from harvesting passwords and payment...

Friday Squid Blogging: The History and Morality of US Squid Consumption

Really interesting article. 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...

Decoupling for Security

This is an excerpt from a longer paper. You can read the whole thing complete with sidebars and illustrations here. Our message is simple: it is possible to get the best of both worlds. We can and should get the benefits of the cloud while taking security back into our own hands. Here we outline ...

Hacking Scandinavian Alcohol Tax

The islands of Åland are an important tax hack: Although Åland is part of the Republic of Finland, it has its own autonomous parliament. In areas where Åland has its own legislation, the group of islands essentially operates as an independent nation. This allows Scandinavians to avoid the...

Deepfake Election Interference in Slovakia

Well designed and well timed deepfake or two Slovakian politicians discussing how to rig the election: Šimečka and Denník N immediately denounced the audio as fake. The fact-checking department of news agency AFP said the audio showed signs of being manipulated using AI. But the recording was...

UK Electoral Commission Hacked

The UK Electoral Commission discovered last year that it was hacked the year before. Thats fourteen months between the hack and the discovery. It doesnt know who was behind the hack. We worked with external security experts and the National Cyber Security Centre to investigate and secure our...

Fooling an AI Article Writer

World of Warcraft players wrote about a fictional game element, "Glorbo," on a subreddit for the game, trying to entice an AI bot to write an article about it. It worked: And it…worked. Zleague auto-published a post titled "World of Warcraft Players Excited For Glorbo’s Introduction." … That is…a...

Kevin Mitnick Died

Obituary...

The AI Dividend

For four decades, Alaskans have opened their mailboxes to find checks waiting for them, their cut of the black gold beneath their feet. This is Alaskas Permanent Fund, funded by the states oil revenues and paid to every Alaskan each year. Were now in a different sort of resource rush, with...

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...

EFF on the UN Cybercrime Treaty

EFF has a good explainer on the problems with the new UN Cybercrime Treaty, currently being negotiated in Vienna. The draft treaty has the potential to rewrite criminal laws around the world, possibly adding over 30 criminal offenses and new expansive police powers for both domestic and...

Using LLMs to Create Bioweapons

Im not sure there are good ways to build guardrails to prevent this sort of thing: There is growing concern regarding the potential misuse of molecular machine learning models for harmful purposes. Specifically, the dual-use application of models for predicting cytotoxicity18 to create new poison...

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...

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 Hacker’s Mind Is Now Published

Tuesday was the official publication date of A Hackers Mind: How the Powerful Bend Societys Rules, and How to Bend them Back. It broke into the 2000s on the Amazon best-seller list. Reviews in the New York Times, Cory Doctorows blog, Science, and the Associated Press. I wrote essays related to th...

Computer Repair Technicians Are Stealing Your Data

Laptop technicians routinely violate the privacy of the people whose computers they repair: Researchers at University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, recovered logs from laptops after receiving overnight repairs from 12 commercial shops. The logs showed that technicians from six of the locations ha...

Regulating DAOs

In August, the US Treasurys Office of Foreign Assets Control OFAC sanctioned the cryptocurrency platform Tornado Cash, a virtual currency "mixer" designed to make it harder to trace cryptocurrency transactions--and a worldwide favorite money-laundering platform. Americans are now forbidden from...

Spyware Maker Intellexa Sued by Journalist

The Greek journalist Thanasis Koukakis was spied on by his own government, with a commercial spyware product called "Predator." That product is sold by a company in North Macedonia called Cytrox, which is in turn owned by an Israeli company called Intellexa. Koukakis is suing Intellexa. The lawsu...

Ring Gives Videos to Police without a Warrant or User Consent

Amazon has revealed that it gives police videos from its Ring doorbells without a warrant and without user consent. Ring recently revealed how often the answer to that question has been yes. The Amazon company responded to an inquiry from US Senator Ed Markey D-Mass., confirming that there have...

NIST Announces First Four Quantum-Resistant Cryptographic Algorithms

NISTs post-quantum computing cryptography standard process is entering its final phases. It announced the first four algorithms: For general encryption, used when we access secure websites, NIST has selected the CRYSTALS-Kyber algorithm. Among its advantages are comparatively small encryption key...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Street Art

Pretty. 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...

Developer Sabotages Open-Source Software Package

This is a big deal: A developer has been caught adding malicious code to a popular open-source package that wiped files on computers located in Russia and Belarus as part of a protest that has enraged many users and raised concerns about the safety of free and open source software. The applicatio...

Hacking Alexa through Alexa’s Speech

An Alexa can respond to voice commands it issues. This can be exploited: The attack works by using the devices speaker to issue voice commands. As long as the speech contains the device wake word usually "Alexa" or "Echo" followed by a permissible command, the Echo will carry it out, researchers...

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...

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...

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...

Defending Democracies Against Information Attacks

To better understand influence attacks, we proposed an approach that models democracy itself as an information system and explains how democracies are vulnerable to certain forms of information attacks that autocracies naturally resist. Our model combines ideas from both international security an...

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...

An Example of Deterrence in Cyberspace

In 2016, the US was successfully deterred from attacking Russia in cyberspace because of fears of Russian capabilities against the US. I have two citations for this. The first is from the book Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, by Michae...

Can Consumers' Online Data Be Protected?

Everything online is hackable. This is true for Equifax's data and the federal Office of Personal Management's data, which was hacked in 2015. If information is on a computer connected to the Internet, it is vulnerable. But just because everything is hackable doesn't mean everything will be hacke...

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...

Security Flaws in Children's Smart Watches

The Norwegian Consumer Council has published a report detailing a series of security and privacy flaws in smart watches marketed to children. Press release. News article. This is the same group that found all those security and privacy vulnerabilities in smart dolls. EDITED TO ADD 10/21: Slashdot...

IoT Cybersecurity: What's Plan B?

In August, four US Senators introduced a bill designed to improve Internet of Things IoT security. The IoT Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2017 is a modest piece of legislation. It doesn't regulate the IoT market. It doesn't single out any industries for particular attention, or force any...