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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Thermal Batteries from Squid Proteins

Researchers are making thermal batteries from "a synthetic material thats derived from squid ring teeth protein." 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...

Ransomware Payments Are Down

Chainalysis reports that worldwide ransomware payments were down in 2022. Ransomware attackers extorted at least $456.8 million from victims in 2022, down from $765.6 million the year before. As always, we have to caveat these findings by noting that the true totals are much higher, as there are...

Sirius XM Software Vulnerability

This is new: Newly revealed research shows that a number of major car brands, including Honda, Nissan, Infiniti, and Acura, were affected by a previously undisclosed security bug that would have allowed a savvy hacker to hijack vehicles and steal user data. According to researchers, the bug was i...

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...

Cold War Bugging of Soviet Facilities

Found documents in Poland detail US spying operations against the former Soviet Union. The file details a number of bugs found at Soviet diplomatic facilities in Washington, D.C., New York, and San Francisco, as well as in a Russian government-owned vacation compound, apartments used by Russia...

Friday Squid Blogging: Another Giant Squid Washes Up on New Zealand Beach

This one has chewed-up tentacles. Note that this is a different squid than the one that recently washed up on a South African beach. 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...

Security and Cheap Complexity

Ive been saying that complexity is the worst enemy of security for a long time now. Heres me in 1999. And its been true for a long time. In 2018, Thomas Dullien of Googles Project Zero talked about "cheap complexity." Andrew Appel summarizes: The anomaly of cheap complexity. For most of human...

$23 Million YouTube Royalties Scam

Scammers were able to convince YouTube that other peoples music was their own. They successfully stole $23 million before they were caught. No one knows how common this scam is, and how much money total is being stolen in this way. Presumably this is not an uncommon fraud. While the size of the...

Apple’s Lockdown Mode

I havent written about Apples Lockdown Mode yet, mostly because I havent delved into the details. This is how Apple describes it: Lockdown Mode offers an extreme, optional level of security for the very few users who, because of who they are or what they do, may be personally targeted by some of...

NSO Group’s Pegasus Spyware Used against Thailand Pro-Democracy Activists and Leaders

Yet another basic human rights violation, courtesy of NSO Group: Citizen Lab has the details: Key Findings We discovered an extensive espionage campaign targeting Thai pro-democracy protesters, and activists calling for reforms to the monarchy. We forensically confirmed that at least 30 individua...

Ecuador’s Attempt to Resettle Edward Snowden

Someone hacked the Ecuadorian embassy in Moscow and found a document related to Ecuadors 2013 efforts to bring Edward Snowden there. If you remember, Snowden was traveling from Hong Kong to somewhere when the US revoked his passport, stranding him in Russia. In the document, Ecuador asks Russia t...

Twitter Used Two-Factor Login Details for Ad Targeting

Twitter was fined $150 million for using phone numbers and email addresses collected for two-factor authentication for ad targeting...

Me on Public-Interest Tech

Back in November 2020, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, I gave a virtual talk at the International Symposium on Technology and Society: "The Story of the Internet and How it Broke Bad: A Call for Public-Interest Technologists." It was something I was really proud of, and its finally up on...

Manipulating Machine-Learning Systems through the Order of the Training Data

Yet another adversarial ML attack: Most deep neural networks are trained by stochastic gradient descent. Now “stochastic” is a fancy Greek word for “random”; it means that the training data are fed into the model in random order. So what happens if the bad guys can cause the order to be not rando...

The Onion on Google Map Surveillance

"Google Maps Adds Shortcuts through Houses of People Google Knows Arent Home Right Now." Excellent satire...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squidmobile

The Squidmobile. 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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Ten-Foot Long Squid Washed onto Japanese Shore — ALIVE

This is rare: An about 3-meter-long giant squid was found stranded on a beach here on April 20, in what local authorities said was a rare occurrence. At around 10 a.m., a nearby resident spotted the squid at Ugu beach in Obama, Fukui Prefecture, on the Sea of Japan coast. According to the Obama...

Russian Cyberattack against Ukrainian Power Grid Prevented

A Russian cyberweapon, similar to the one used in 2016, was detected and removed before it could be used. Key points: ESET researchers collaborated with CERT-UA to analyze the attack against the Ukrainian energy company The destructive actions were scheduled for 2022-04-08 but artifacts suggest...

Stealing Bicycles by Swapping QR Codes

This is a clever hack against those bike-rental kiosks: Theyre stealing Citi Bikes by switching the QR scan codes on two bicycles near each other at a docking station, then waiting for an unsuspecting cyclist to try to unlock a bike with his or her smartphone app. The app doesnt work for the ride...

China’s Olympics App Is Horribly Insecure

China is mandating that athletes download and use a health and travel app when they attend the Winter Olympics next month. Citizen Lab examined the app and found it riddled with security holes. Key Findings: MY2022, an app mandated for use by all attendees of the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing, ha...

Ransomware Attacks against Water Treatment Plants

According to a report from CISA last week, there were three ransomware attacks against water treatment plants last year. WWS Sector cyber intrusions from 2019 to early 2021 include: In August 2021, malicious cyber actors used Ghost variant ransomware against a California-based WWS facility. The...

A Death Due to Ransomware

The Wall Street Journal is reporting on a babys death at an Alabama hospital in 2019, which they argue was a direct result of the ransomware attack the hospital was undergoing. Amid the hack, fewer eyes were on the heart monitors -- normally tracked on a large screen at the nurses station, in...

More Detail on the Juniper Hack and the NSA PRNG Backdoor

We knew the basics of this story, but its good to have more detail. Heres me in 2015 about this Juniper hack. Heres me in 2007 on the NSA backdoor...

More on NIST’s Post-Quantum Cryptography

Back in July, NIST selected third-round algorithms for its post-quantum cryptography standard. Recently, Daniel Apon of NIST gave a talk detailing the selection criteria. Interesting stuff. NOTE: Were in the process of moving this blog to WordPress. Comments will be disabled until the move is...

Hacking a Power Supply

This hack targets the firmware on modern power supplies. Yes, power supplies are also computers. Normally, when a phone is connected to a power brick with support for fast charging, the phone and the power adapter communicate with each other to determine the proper amount of electricity that can ...

Traffic Analysis of Home Security Cameras

Interesting research on home security cameras with cloud storage. Basically, attackers can learn very basic information about what's going on in front of the camera, and infer when there is someone home. News article. Slashdot thread...

The Security Value of Inefficiency

For decades, we have prized efficiency in our economy. We strive for it. We reward it. In normal times, that's a good thing. Running just at the margins is efficient. A single just-in-time global supply chain is efficient. Consolidation is efficient. And that's all profitable. Inefficiency, on th...

Yet Another IoT Cybersecurity Document

This one is from NIST: "Considerations for Managing Internet of Things IoT Cybersecurity and Privacy Risks." It's still in draft. Remember, there are many others...

Quantum Computing and Cryptography

Quantum computing is a new way of computing -- one that could allow humankind to perform computations that are simply impossible using today's computing technologies. It allows for very fast searching, something that would break some of the encryption algorithms we use today. And it allows us to...

Friday Squid Blogging: Kraken Pie

Pretty, but contains no actual squid ingredients. 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...

Uber Drivers Hacking the System to Cause Surge Pricing

Interesting story about Uber drivers who have figured out how to game the company's algorithms to cause surge pricing: According to the study. drivers manipulate Uber's algorithm by logging out of the app at the same time, making it think that there is a shortage of cars. ... The study said drive...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squids from Space Video Game

An early preview. 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...

Safety and Security and the Internet of Things

Ross Anderson blogged about his new paper on security and safety concerns about the Internet of Things. See also this short video. It's very much along the lines of what I've been writing...

Surveillance Intermediaries

Interesting law-journal article: "Surveillance Intermediaries," by Alan Z. Rozenshtein. Abstract:Apple's 2016 fight against a court order commanding it to help the FBI unlock the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino terrorists exemplifies how central the question of regulating government...

Friday Squid Blogging: Searching for the Colossal Squid

Fascinating video about searching for life undersea. The video basically makes the point that our bright white searchlights are scaring everything away, and that red light is more neutral. That, plus bait to attract sea creatures, is teaching us a lot about what's going on down there. Lots of...

Some Claude Chats Are Searchable on Google

And it's personal information alternate link: The exposed data includes an AI-powered therapy app that someone appears to have vibe-coded, notes on meetings, and a dashboard someone made apparently to analyze medical billing data. Exposed chats reportedly include private cryptocurrency wallet key...

Anthropic’s Fable 5 Model Jailbroken Within Days

Fable 5 is the supposed safe version of Anthropic's Mythos Preview, with guardrails to ensure that it can't be used to create cyberattacks. Well, that restriction was bypassed within days...

Friday Squid Blogging: Victims of Unregulated Squid Fishing

Dolphins, sharks, turtles, and human workers are all victims of unregulated squid fishing fleets. Another news article. 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...

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...

Microsoft Threatening Security Researcher

An anonymous security researcher called "Nightmare Eclipse" has been publishing a series of significant security exploits against Microsoft Windows--including one that breaks BitLocker. Microsoft has threatened legal action against the researcher. Lots of recriminations are being traded back and...

How Dangerous Is Anthropic’s Mythos AI?

Last month, Anthropic made a remarkable announcement about its new model, Claude Mythos Preview: it was so good at finding security vulnerabilities in software that the company would not release it to the general public. Instead, it would only be available to a select group of companies to scan a...

Copy.Fail Linux Vulnerability

This is the worst Linux vulnerability in years. TL;DR copy.fail is a Linux kernel local privilege escalation, not a browser or clipboard attack. Disclosed by Theori on 29 April 2026 with a working PoC. It abuses the kernel crypto API AFALG sockets plus splice to write four bytes at a time straigh...

DarkSword Malware

DarkSword is a sophisticated piece of malware--probably government designed--that targets iOS. Google Threat Intelligence Group GTIG has identified a new iOS full-chain exploit that leveraged multiple zero-day vulnerabilities to fully compromise devices. Based on toolmarks in recovered payloads, ...

South Korean Police Accidentally Post Cryptocurrency Wallet Password

An expensive mistake: Someone jumped at the opportunity to steal $4.4 million in crypto assets after South Korea's National Tax Service exposed publicly the mnemonic recovery phrase of a seized cryptocurrency wallet. The funds were stored in a Ledger cold wallet seized in law enforcement raids at...

Backdoor in Notepad++

Hackers associated with the Chinese government used a Trojaned version of Notepad++ to deliver malware to selected users. Notepad++ said that officials with the unnamed provider hosting the update infrastructure consulted with incident responders and found that it remained compromised until...

Four Ways AI Is Being Used to Strengthen Democracies Worldwide

Democracy is colliding with the technologies of artificial intelligence. Judging from the audience reaction at the recent World Forum on Democracy in Strasbourg, the general expectation is that democracy will be the worse for it. We have another narrative. Yes, there are risks to democracy from A...

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...

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...

Communications Backdoor in Chinese Power Inverters

This is a weird story: U.S. energy officials are reassessing the risk posed by Chinese-made devices that play a critical role in renewable energy infrastructure after unexplained communication equipment was found inside some of them, two people familiar with the matter said. … Over the past nine...