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...

Jumping Air Gaps

Nice profile of Mordechai Guri, who researches a variety of clever ways to steal data over air-gapped computers. Guri and his fellow Ben-Gurion researchers have shown, for instance, that it's possible to trick a fully offline computer into leaking data to another nearby device via the noise its...

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...

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...

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...

Advances in Ad Blocking

Ad blockers represent the largest consumer boycott in human history. They're also an arms race between the blockers and the blocker blockers. This article discusses a new ad-blocking technology that represents another advance in this arms race. I don't think it will "put an end to the ad-blocking...

Leaked Russian Cyber-Operations Training Materials

This is interesting: The records describe a force-generation mechanism for several General Staff components, including the GRU, Main Operational Directorate, and 8th Directorate, which is associated with protected communications, cryptography, and information security. … The reporting also linked...

Black Hat State of Security Vendors

Andy Ellis has a roundup of the security vendors at Black Hat this year. Key Takeaways: We have entered into an AI world. While nearly half of booths didn't directly mention AI or agents in their taglines, the effects of AI are everywhere. Multiple spaces Identity, SaaS, AppSec, Data have almost...

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...

The Chinese Control the Majority of Argentina’s Squid Fleet

Chinese companies control nearly two-thirds of Argentina’s own squid fleet...

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...

Chilling Effects

Younger Americans have soured on the second Donald Trump presidency, but they are not protesting it. Despite an unpopular Iran war and an even more unpopular Trump administration, college campus protests nationwide have gone silent. And at many schools, student activism is virtually nonexistent...

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...

LLMs and Text-in-Text Steganography

Turns out that LLMs are really good at hiding text messages in other text messages...

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...

AI Found Twelve New Vulnerabilities in OpenSSL

The title of the post is"What AI Security Research Looks Like When It Works," and I agree: In the latest OpenSSL security release on January 27, 2026, twelve new zero-day vulnerabilities meaning unknown to the maintainers at time of disclosure were announced. Our AI system is responsible for the...

Time-of-Check Time-of-Use Attacks Against LLMs

This is a nice piece of research: "Mind the Gap: Time-of-Check to Time-of-Use Vulnerabilities in LLM-Enabled Agents".: Abstract: Large Language Model LLM-enabled agents are rapidly emerging across a wide range of applications, but their deployment introduces vulnerabilities with security...

Google’s Advanced Protection Now on Android

Google has extended its Advanced Protection features to Android devices. It's not for everybody, but something to be considered by high-risk users. Wired article, behind a paywall...

Chinese AI Submersible

A Chinese company has developed an AI-piloted submersible that can reach speeds "similar to a destroyer or a US Navy torpedo," dive "up to 60 metres underwater," and "remain static for more than a month, like the stealth capabilities of a nuclear submarine." In case you're worried about the...

How to Leak to a Journalist

Neiman Lab has some good advice on how to leak a story to a journalist...

On Generative AI Security

Microsoft's AI Red Team just published "Lessons from Red Teaming 100 Generative AI Products." Their blog post lists "three takeaways," but the eight lessons in the report itself are more useful: 1. Understand what the system can do and where it is applied. 2. You don't have to compute gradients t...

Remotely Exploding Pagers

Wow. It seems they all exploded simultaneously, which means they were triggered. Were they each tampered with physically, or did someone figure out how to trigger a thermal runaway remotely? Supply chain attack? Malicious code update, or natural vulnerability? I have no idea, but I expect we will...

The State of Ransomware

Palo Alto Networks published its semi-annual report on ransomware. From the Executive Summary: Unit 42 monitors ransomware and extortion leak sites closely to keep tabs on threat activity. We reviewed compromise announcements from 53 dedicated leak sites in the first half of 2024 and found 1,762...

Breaking a Password Manager

Interesting story of breaking the security of the RoboForm password manager in order to recover a cryptocurrency wallet password. Grand and Bruno spent months reverse engineering the version of the RoboForm program that they thought Michael had used in 2013 and found that the pseudo-random number...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: Im giving a webinar via Zoom on Wednesday, May 22, at 11:00 AM ET. The topic is "Should the USG Establish a Publicly Funded AI Option?" The list is maintained on this page...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: Im speaking twice at RSA Conference 2024 in San Francisco. Ill be on a panel on software liability on May 6, 2024 at 8:30 AM, and Im giving a keynote on AI and democracy on May 7, 2024 at 2:25 PM. The list is maintained on this pag...

Security Vulnerability in Saflok’s RFID-Based Keycard Locks

Its pretty devastating: Today, Ian Carroll, Lennert Wouters, and a team of other security researchers are revealing a hotel keycard hacking technique they call Unsaflok. The technique is a collection of security vulnerabilities that would allow a hacker to almost instantly open several models of...

Licensing AI Engineers

The debate over professionalizing software engineers is decades old. The basic idea is that, like lawyers and architects, there should be some professional licensing requirement for software engineers. Heres a law journal article recommending the same idea for AI engineers. This Article proposes...

Friday Squid Blogging: New Species of Squid Discovered

A new species of squid was discovered, along with about a hundred other species. 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...

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...

How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI

Artificial intelligence AI has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration will drive the next era of growth, wealth, and human flourishing. Its a scary metaphor. Throughout American history, the drive for expansion and the very concept of terrain u...

Microsoft Is Spying on Users of Its AI Tools

Microsoft announced that it caught Chinese, Russian, and Iranian hackers using its AI tools--presumably coding tools--to improve their hacking abilities. From their report: In collaboration with OpenAI, we are sharing threat intelligence showing detected state affiliated adversaries--tracked as...

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...

Microsoft is Soft-Launching Security Copilot

Microsoft has announced an early access program for its LLM-based security chatbot assistant: Security Copilot. I am curious whether this thing is actually useful...

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...

AI and Microdirectives

Imagine a future in which AIs automatically interpret--and enforce--laws. All day and every day, you constantly receive highly personalized instructions for how to comply with the law, sent directly by your government and law enforcement. Youre told how to cross the street, how fast to drive on t...

Belgian Tax Hack

Heres a fascinating tax hack from Belgium listen to the details here, episode 484 of "No Such Thing as a Fish," at 28:00. Basically, its about a music festival on the border between Belgium and Holland. The stage was in Holland, but the crowd was in Belgium. When the copyright collector came...

On the Catastrophic Risk of AI

Earlier this week, I signed on to a short group statement, coordinated by the Center for AI Safety: Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war. The press coverage has been extensive, and surprising t...

Friday Squid Blogging: “Mediterranean Beef Squid” Hoax

The viral video of the "Mediterranean beef squid"is a hoax. Its not even a deep fake; its a plastic toy. 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...

Security Risks of AI

Stanford and Georgetown have a new report on the security risks of AI--particularly adversarial machine learning--based on a workshop they held on the topic. Jim Dempsey, one of the workshop organizers, wrote a blog post on the report: As a first step, our report recommends the inclusion of AI...

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...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking on “Cybersecurity Thinking to Reinvent Democracy” at RSA Conference 2023 in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, April 25, 2023, at 9:40 AM PT. I’m speaking at IT-S Now 2023 in Vienna, Austria, on June 2, 2023 at 8:3...

Hacking Suicide

Heres a religious hack: You want to commit suicide, but its a mortal sin: your soul goes straight to hell, forever. So what you do is murder someone. That will get you executed, but if you confess your sins to a priest beforehand you avoid hell. Problem solved. This was actually a problem in the...

FBI Advising People to Avoid Public Charging Stations

The FBI is warning people against using public phone-charging stations, worrying that the combination power-data port can be used to inject malware onto the devices: Avoid using free charging stations in airports, hotels, or shopping centers. Bad actors have figured out ways to use public USB por...

UK Runs Fake DDoS-for-Hire Sites

Brian Krebs is reporting that the UKs National Crime Agency is setting up fake DDoS-for-hire sites as part of a sting operation: The NCA says all of its fake so-called "booter" or "stresser" sites -­ which have so far been accessed by several thousand people--have been created to look like they...