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 Legal Risks of Security Research

Sunoo Park and Kendra Albert have published "A Researcher’s Guide to Some Legal Risks of Security Research." From a summary: Such risk extends beyond anti-hacking laws, implicating copyright law and anti-circumvention provisions DMCA §1201, electronic privacy law ECPA, and cryptography export...

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...

How the FIN7 Cybercrime Gang Operates

The Grugq has written an excellent essay on how the Russian cybercriminal gang FIN7 operates. An excerpt: The secret of FIN7’s success is their operational art of cyber crime. They managed their resources and operations effectively, allowing them to successfully attack and exploit hundreds of...

Cory Doctorow on The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Cory Doctorow has writtten an extended rebuttal of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. He summarized the argument on Twitter. Shorter summary: it's not the surveillance part, it's the fact that these companies are monopolies. I think it's both. Surveillance capitalism has some...

ILOVEYOU Virus

It's the twentieth anniversary of the ILOVEYOU virus, and here are three interesting articles about it and its effects on software design...

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...

Cheating in Bird Racing

I've previously written about people cheating in marathon racing by driving -- or otherwise getting near the end of the race by faster means than running. In China, two people were convicted of cheating in a pigeon race: The essence of the plan involved training the pigeons to believe they had tw...

Security and Human Behavior (SHB 2018)

I'm at Carnegie Mellon University, at the eleventh Workshop on Security and Human Behavior. SHB is a small invitational gathering of people studying various aspects of the human side of security, organized each year by Alessandro Acquisti, Ross Anderson, and myself. The 50 or so people in the roo...

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...

Security Planner

Security Planner is a custom security advice tool from Citizen Lab. Answer a few questions, and it gives you a few simple things you can do to improve your security. It's not meant to be comprehensive, but instead to give people things they can actually do to immediately improve their security. I...

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...

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...

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...

Unidentified Flock Cameras in Florida

St. Lucie County in Florida discovered alt link a dozen Flock cameras whose ownership it can't identify, and that the county government had not permitted. I am reminded of the decade-old story of StingRay cell phone surveillance devices in Washington, DC, whose operators were also unknown. My gue...

Malicious npm Packages That Evade Defenses

This is an impressive piece of malware. Its sophistication says nation-state to me, but there is no direct evidence and certainly no attribution...

AI Coding Agents Are Installing Unknown/Untrusted Code on Corporate Networks

We cannot forget that AI coding agents are not yet trustworthy: Researchers at a stealth startup in Israel scanned 6,214 live domains belonging to defense contractors, Fortune 500, and Big Tech companies. Of the 8,265 llms.txt and llms-full.txt files they found many sites hosted both an llms.txt...

Vulnerabilities in Car Anti-Theft Device

This is disturbing: …a team of security researchers at UC San Diego, who found that a model of aftermarket car alarm known as the KARR Security System, installed in more than 2 million vehicles across the US by their estimate, can let any hacker within Bluetooth range send radio commands to...

AI and Liability

Earlier this month, a German court ruled that Google is liable for its AI search summaries. Rejecting defenses like "users can check for themselves," and that they generally know "that information generated with AI should not be blindly trusted," the court held that the AI's summaries are...

Anthropic’s Project Glasswing Update

In April, Anthropic initated Project Glasswing. The idea was to let companies use their new model to find and fix vulnerabilities in their own software. It was a fantastic PR move, and so many press outlets have uncritically parroted Anthropic's claims that it's now common wisdom that Mythos is...

On AI Security

Good report: Executive Summary: Let's say you wanted to make sure that your AI is secure. Can you just maximize the security and privacy benchmark and call it a day? Nope, because benchmarks don't actually work for measuring AI capabilities even when they are NOT emergent systemic properties like...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m giving a virtual talk on “The Security of Trust in the Age of AI,” hosted by the Financial Women’s Association of New York, at 6:00 PM ET on May 21, 2026. I’m speaking at the Potsdam Conference on National Cybersecurity at the...

A Ransomware Negotiator Was Working for a Ransomware Gang

Someone pleaded guilty to secretly working for a ransomware gang as he negotiated ransomware payments for clients...

How Hackers Are Thinking About AI

Interesting paper: "What hackers talk about when they talk about AI: Early-stage diffusion of a cybercrime innovation." Abstract: The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence AI is raising concerns about its potential to transform cybercrime. Beyond empowering novice offenders, AI stands to...

Cybersecurity in the Age of Instant Software

AI is rapidly changing how software is written, deployed, and used. Trends point to a future where AIs can write custom software quickly and easily: "instant software." Taken to an extreme, it might become easier for a user to have an AI write an application on demand--a spreadsheet, for...

Sen. Wyden Warns of Another Section 702 Abuse

Sen. Ron Wyden is warning us of an abuse of Section 702: Wyden took to the Senate floor to deliver a lengthy speech, ostensibly about the since approved with support of many Democrats nomination of Joshua Rudd to lead the NSA. Wyden was protesting that nomination, but in the context of Rudd being...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Fishing in Peru

Peru has increased its squid catch limit. The article says "giant squid," but they can't possibly mean that. 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...

LLMs Generate Predictable Passwords

LLMs are bad at generating passwords: There are strong noticeable patterns among these 50 passwords that can be seen easily: All of the passwords start with a letter, usually uppercase G, almost always followed by the digit 7. Character choices are highly uneven ­ for example, L , 9, m, 2, $ and...

Prompt Injection Via Road Signs

Interesting research: "CHAI: Command Hijacking Against Embodied AI." Abstract: Embodied Artificial Intelligence AI promises to handle edge cases in robotic vehicle systems where data is scarce by using common-sense reasoning grounded in perception and action to generalize beyond training...

LLMs are Getting a Lot Better and Faster at Finding and Exploiting Zero-Days

This is amazing: Opus 4.6 is notably better at finding high-severity vulnerabilities than previous models and a sign of how quickly things are moving. Security teams have been automating vulnerability discovery for years, investing heavily in fuzzing infrastructure and custom harnesses to find bu...

First Wap: A Surveillance Computer You’ve Never Heard Of

Mother Jones has a long article on surveillance arms manufacturers, their wares, and how they avoid export control laws: Operating from their base in Jakarta, where permissive export laws have allowed their surveillance business to flourish, First Wap's European founders and executives have quiet...

Surveying the Global Spyware Market

The Atlantic Council has published its second annual report: "Mythical Beasts: Diving into the depths of the global spyware market." Too much good detail to summarize, but here are two items: First, the authors found that the number of US-based investors in spyware has notably increased in the pa...

Encryption Backdoor in Military/Police Radios

I wrote about this in 2023. Here's the story: Three Dutch security analysts discovered the vulnerabilities­--five in total--­in a European radio standard called TETRA Terrestrial Trunked Radio, which is used in radios made by Motorola, Damm, Hytera, and others. The standard has been used in radio...

Hearing on the Federal Government and AI

On Thursday I testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform at a hearing titled "The Federal Government in the Age of Artificial Intelligence." The other speakers mostly talked about how cool AI was--and sometimes about how cool their own company was--but I was asked by...

Location Tracking App for Foreigners in Moscow

Russia is proposing a rule that all foreigners in Moscow install a tracking app on their phones. Using a mobile application that all foreigners will have to install on their smartphones, the Russian state will receive the following information: Residence location Fingerprint Face photograph...

CVE Program Almost Unfunded

Mitre's CVE's program--which provides common naming and other informational resources about cybersecurity vulnerabilities--was about to be cancelled, as the US Department of Homeland Security failed to renew the contact. It was funded for eleven more months at the last minute. This is a big deal...

Rational Astrologies and Security

John Kelsey and I wrote a short paper for the Rossfest Festschrift: "Rational Astrologies and Security": There is another non-security way that designers can spend their security budget: on making their own lives easier. Many of these fall into the category of what has been called rational...

More Research Showing AI Breaking the Rules

These researchers had LLMs play chess against better opponents. When they couldn't win, they sometimes resorted to cheating. Researchers gave the models a seemingly impossible task: to win against Stockfish, which is one of the strongest chess engines in the world and a much better player than an...

Biden Signs New Cybersecurity Order

President Biden has signed a new cybersecurity order. It has a bunch of provisions, most notably using the US governments procurement power to improve cybersecurity practices industry-wide. Some details: The core of the executive order is an array of mandates for protecting government networks...

On the Cyber Safety Review Board

When an airplane crashes, impartial investigatory bodies leap into action, empowered by law to unearth what happened and why. But there is no such empowered and impartial body to investigate CrowdStrikes faulty update that recently unfolded, ensnarling banks, airlines, and emergency services to t...

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...

IBM Sells Cybersecurity Group

IBM is selling its QRadar product suite to Palo Alto Networks, for an undisclosed--but probably surprisingly small--sum. I have a personal connection to this. In 2016, IBM bought Resilient Systems, the startup I was a part of. It became part if IBMs cybersecurity offerings, mostly and weirdly...

Zero-Trust DNS

Microsoft is working on a promising-looking protocol to lock down DNS. ZTDNS aims to solve this decades-old problem by integrating the Windows DNS engine with the Windows Filtering Platform--the core component of the Windows Firewall--directly into client devices. Jake Williams, VP of research an...

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,...

PIN-Stealing Android Malware

This is an old piece of malware--the Chameleon Android banking Trojan--that now disables biometric authentication in order to steal the PIN: The second notable new feature is the ability to interrupt biometric operations on the device, like fingerprint and face unlock, by using the Accessibility...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Spyware in India

Apple has warned leaders of the opposition government in India that their phones are being spied on: Multiple top leaders of India’s opposition parties and several journalists have received a notification from Apple, saying that "Apple believes you are being targeted by state-sponsored attackers...