3025 matches found
Apple AirTags Are Being Used to Track People and Cars
This development suprises no one who has been paying attention: Researchers now believe AirTags, which are equipped with Bluetooth technology, could be revealing a more widespread problem of tech-enabled tracking. They emit a digital signal that can be detected by devices running Apples mobile...
Smart Contract Bug Results in $31 Million Loss
A hacker stole $31 million from the blockchain company MonoX Finance , by exploiting a bug in software the service uses to draft smart contracts. Specifically, the hack used the same token as both the tokenIn and tokenOut, which are methods for exchanging the value of one token for another. MonoX...
Apple Sues NSO Group
Piling more on NSO Groups legal troubles, Apple is suing it: The complaint provides new information on how NSO Group infected victims’ devices with its Pegasus spyware. To prevent further abuse and harm to its users, Apple is also seeking a permanent injunction to ban NSO Group from using any App...
New Rowhammer Technique
Rowhammer is an attack technique involving accessing -- thats "hammering" -- rows of bits in memory, millions of times per second, with the intent of causing bits in neighboring rows to flip. This is a side-channel attack, and the result can be all sorts of mayhem. Well, there is a new enhancemen...
Wire Fraud Scam Upgraded with Bitcoin
The FBI has issued a bulletin describing a bitcoin variant of a wire fraud scam: As the agency describes it, the scammer will contact their victim and somehow convince them that they need to send money, either with promises of love, further riches, or by impersonating an actual institution like a...
Book Sale: Click Here to Kill Everybody and Data and Goliath
For a limited time, I am selling signed copies of Click Here to Kill Everybody and Data and Goliath, both in paperback, for just $6 each plus shipping. I have 500 copies of each book available. When theyre gone, the sale is over and the price will revert to normal. Order here and here. Please be...
New York Times Journalist Hacked with NSO Spyware
Citizen Lab is reporting that a New York Times journalist was hacked with the NSO Groups spyware Pegasus, probably by the Saudis. The world needs to do something about these cyberweapons arms manufacturers. This kind of thing isnt enough; NSO Group is an Israeli company...
Using Machine Learning to Guess PINs from Video
Researchers trained a machine-learning system on videos of people typing their PINs into ATMs: By using three tries, which is typically the maximum allowed number of attempts before the card is withheld, the researchers reconstructed the correct sequence for 5-digit PINs 30% of the time, and...
Backdoor in Zyxel Firewalls and Gateways
This is bad: More than 100,000 Zyxel firewalls, VPN gateways, and access point controllers contain a hardcoded admin-level backdoor account that can grant attackers root access to devices via either the SSH interface or the web administration panel. … Installing patches removes the backdoor...
Privacy Analysis of Ambient Light Sensors
Interesting privacy analysis of the Ambient Light Sensor API. And a blog post. Especially note the "Lessons Learned" section...
Insider Attack on the Carnegie Library
Greg Priore, the person in charge of the rare book room at the Carnegie Library, stole from it for almost two decades before getting caught. It's a perennial problem: trusted insiders have to be trusted...
North Korea ATM Hack
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA published a long and technical alert describing a North Korea hacking scheme against ATMs in a bunch of countries worldwide: This joint advisory is the result of analytic efforts among the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agenc...
Collecting and Selling Mobile Phone Location Data
The Wall Street Journal has an article about a company called Anomaly Six LLC that has an SDK that's used by "more than 500 mobile applications." Through that SDK, the company collects location data from users, which it then sells. Anomaly Six is a federal contractor that provides...
CIA Network Exposed through Insecure Communications System
Interesting story of a CIA intelligence network in China that was exposed partly because of a computer security failure: Although they used some of the same coding, the interim system and the main covert communication platform used in China at this time were supposed to be clearly separated. In...
New Report on Chinese Intelligence Cyber-Operations
The company ProtectWise just published a long report linking a bunch of Chinese cyber-operations over the past few years. The always interesting gruqq has some interesting commentary on the group and its tactics. Lots of detailed information in the report, but I admit that I have never heard of...
NIST Issues Call for "Lightweight Cryptography" Algorithms
This is interesting: Creating these defenses is the goal of NIST's lightweight cryptography initiative, which aims to develop cryptographic algorithm standards that can work within the confines of a simple electronic device. Many of the sensors, actuators and other micromachines that will functio...
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...
E-Mailing Private HTTPS Keys
I don't know what to make of this story: The email was sent on Tuesday by the CEO of Trustico, a UK-based reseller of TLS certificates issued by the browser-trusted certificate authorities Comodo and, until recently, Symantec. It was sent to Jeremy Rowley, an executive vice president at DigiCert,...
Signed Malware
Stuxnet famously used legitimate digital certificates to sign its malware. A research paper from last year found that the practice is much more common than previously thought. Now, researchers have presented proof that digitally signed malware is much more common than previously believed. What's...
Spectre and Meltdown Attacks Against Microprocessors
The security of pretty much every computer on the planet has just gotten a lot worse, and the only real solution -- which of course is not a solution -- is to throw them all away and buy new ones. On Wednesday, researchers just announced a series of major security vulnerabilities in the...
Websites Grabbing User-Form Data Before It's Submitted
Websites are sending information prematurely: ...we discovered NaviStone's code on sites run by Acurian, Quicken Loans, a continuing education center, a clothing store for plus-sized women, and a host of other retailers. Using Javascript, those sites were transmitting information from people as...
Girl Scouts to Offer Merit Badges in Cybersecurity
The Girl Scouts are going to be offering 18 merit badges in cybersecurity, to scouts as young as five years old...
Article on the DAO Ethereum Hack
This is good...
Amazon Patents Measures to Prevent In-Store Comparison Shopping
Amazon has been issued a patent on security measures that prevents people from comparison shopping while in the store. It's not a particularly sophisticated patent -- it basically detects when you're using the in-store Wi-Fi to visit a competitor's site and then blocks access -- but it is an...
Security Flaws in 4G VoLTE
Research paper: "Subscribers remote geolocation and tracking using 4G VoLTE enabled Android phone," by Patrick Ventuzelo, Olivier Le Moal, and Thomas Coudray. Abstract: VoLTE Voice over LTE is a technology implemented by many operators over the world. Unlike previous 2G/3G technologies, VoLTE...
Chelsea Manning Profiled in New York Times Magazine
Interesting reading...
Ransomware and the Internet of Things
As devastating as the latest widespread ransomware attacks have been, it's a problem with a solution. If your copy of Windows is relatively current and you've kept it updated, your laptop is immune. It's only older unpatched systems on your computer that are vulnerable. Patching is how the comput...
Interview with Ross Anderson
Cybersecurity researcher Ross Anderson has a good interview on edge.org...
Anthropic’s Opus 5 Is Better at Resisting Prompt Injection
The chart is interesting. On the IPI benchmark, Opus 5 improved over Opus 4.8, reducing the probability of an attacker succeeding within 15 attempts from 5.5% to 2.0%, and from 0.5% to 0.2% on 1 attempt. It also improved on Sonnet 5 5.9% at k=15 and Mythos 5 2.6%, making it the most robust model...
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...
Papa Johns Surveillance-Based Advertising
Papa Johns is spying on people's buying activities to predict when they are low on food: The pizza chain recently tapped NBCUniversal, Instacart and the dentsu-owned media agency Carat for help reaching consumers when they're low on groceries--and thus more likely to be swayed by a mouth-watering...
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...
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...
As the US Midterms Approach, AI Is Going to Emerge as a Key Issue Concerning Voters
In December, the Trump administration signed an executive order that neutered states' ability to regulate AI by ordering his administration to both sue and withhold funds from states that try to do so. This action pointedly supported industry lobbyists keen to avoid any constraints and consequenc...
Hacking a Robot Vacuum
Someone tries to remote control his own DJI Romo vacuum, and ends up controlling 7,000 of them from all around the world. The IoT is horribly insecure, but we already knew that...
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m giving the Ross Anderson Lecture at the University of Cambridge’s Churchill College at 5:30 PM GMT on Thursday, March 19, 2026. I’m speaking at RSAC 2026 in San Francisco, California, USA, on Wednesday, March 25, 2026. I’m part...
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...
The NSA’s “Fifty Years of Mathematical Cryptanalysis (1937–1987)”
In response to a FOIA request, the NSA released "Fifty Years of Mathematical Cryptanalysis 1937-1987," by Glenn F. Stahly, with a lot of redactions. Weirdly, this is the second time the NSA has declassified the document. John Young got a copy in 2019. This one has a few less redactions. And nothi...
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...
AI and the 2024 US Elections
For years now, AI has undermined the public's ability to trust what it sees, hears, and reads. The Republican National Committee released a provocative ad offering an "AI-generated look into the country's possible future if Joe Biden is re-elected," showing apocalyptic, machine-made images of...
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...
AI and the Evolution of Social Media
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. A decade ago, social media was celebrated for sparking democratic uprisings in the Arab world and beyond. Now front pages are splashed with stories of social platforms’ role in misinformation, business conspiracy, malfeasance, and risks to mental health. In a 2022...
Improving the Cryptanalysis of Lattice-Based Public-Key Algorithms
The winner of the Best Paper Award at Crypto this year was a significant improvement to lattice-based cryptanalysis. This is important, because a bunch of NISTs post-quantum options base their security on lattice problems. I worry about standardizing on post-quantum algorithms too quickly. We are...
On Passkey Usability
Matt Burgess tries to only use passkeys. The results are mixed...
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...
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...
Cyberattack on Ukraine’s Kyivstar Seems to Be Russian Hacktivists
The Solntsepek group has taken credit for the attack. Theyre linked to the Russian military, so its unclear whether the attack was government directed or freelance. This is one of the most significant cyberattacks since Russia invaded in February 2022...
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...
Friday Squid Blogging: Unpatched Vulnerabilities in the Squid Caching Proxy
In a rare squid/security post, heres an article about unpatched vulnerabilities in the Squid caching proxy. 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...