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...

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...

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...

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...

Is “Hackback” Official US Cybersecurity Strategy?

The 2026 US "Cyber Strategy for America" document is mostly the same thing we've seen out of the White House for over a decade, but with a more aggressive tone. But one sentence stood out: "We will unleash the private sector by creating incentives to identify and disrupt adversary networks and...

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...

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...

Chinese-Owned VPNs

One one my biggest worries about VPNs is the amount of trust users need to place in them, and how opaque most of them are about who owns them and what sorts of data they retain. A new study found that many commercials VPNS are often surreptitiously owned by Chinese companies. It would be hard for...

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...

How to Leak to a Journalist

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

More Countries are Demanding Backdoors to Encrypted Apps

Last month, I wrote about the UK forcing Apple to break its Advanced Data Protection encryption in iCloud. More recently, both Sweden and France are contemplating mandating backdoors. Both initiatives are attempting to scare people into supporting backdoors, which are--of course--are terrible ide...

Friday Squid Blogging: Eating Bioluminescent Squid

Firefly squid is now a delicacy in New York. Blog moderation policy...

UK Is Ordering Apple to Break Its Own Encryption

The Washington Post is reporting that the UK government has served Apple with a "technical capability notice" as defined by the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act, requiring it to break the Advanced Data Protection encryption in iCloud for the benefit of law enforcement. This is a big deal, and...

New VPN Backdoor

A newly discovered VPN backdoor uses some interesting tactics to avoid detection: When threat actors use backdoor malware to gain access to a network, they want to make sure all their hard work can't be leveraged by competing groups or detected by defenders. One countermeasure is to equip the...

AI and the 2024 Elections

It's been the biggest year for elections in human history: 2024 is a "super-cycle" year in which 3.7 billion eligible voters in 72 countries had the chance to go the polls. These are also the first AI elections, where many feared that deepfakes and artificial intelligence-generated misinformation...

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...

Demo of AES GCM Misuse Problems

This is really neat demo of the security problems arising from reusing nonces with a symmetric cipher in GCM mode...

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...

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...

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...

Dan Solove on Privacy Regulation

Law professor Dan Solove has a new article on privacy regulation. In his email to me, he writes: "I’ve been pondering privacy consent for more than a decade, and I think I finally made a breakthrough with this article." His mini-abstract: In this Article I argue that most of the time, privacy...

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...

Smuggling Gold by Disguising it as Machine Parts

Someone got caught trying to smuggle 322 pounds of gold thats about a quarter of a cubic foot out of Hong Kong. It was disguised as machine parts: On March 27, customs officials x-rayed two air compressors and discovered that they contained gold that had been "concealed in the integral parts" of...

Friday Squid Blogging: SqUID Bots

Theyre AI warehouse robots. 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...

AI and Trust

Watch the Video on YouTube.com A 15-minute talk by Bruce Schneier...

Automakers Are Sharing Driver Data with Insurers without Consent

Kasmir Hill has the story: Modern cars are internet-enabled, allowing access to services like navigation, roadside assistance and car apps that drivers can connect to their vehicles to locate them or unlock them remotely. In recent years, automakers, including G.M., Honda, Kia and Hyundai, have...

EU Court of Human Rights Rejects Encryption Backdoors

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that breaking end-to-end encryption by adding backdoors violates human rights: Seemingly most critically, the Russian government told the ECHR that any intrusion on private lives resulting from decrypting messages was "necessary" to combat terrorism in...

Friday Squid Blogging: A Penguin Named “Squid”

Amusing story about a penguin named "Squid." 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...

Facebook’s Extensive Surveillance Network

Consumer Reports is reporting that Facebook has built a massive surveillance network: Using a panel of 709 volunteers who shared archives of their Facebook data, Consumer Reports found that a total of 186,892 companies sent data about them to the social network. On average, each participant in th...

Quantum Computing Skeptics

Interesting article. I am also skeptical that we are going to see useful quantum computers anytime soon. Since at least 2019, I have been saying that this is hard. And that we dont know if its "land a person on the surface of the moon" hard, or "land a person on the surface of the sun" hard. They...

Side Channels Are Common

Really interesting research: "Lend Me Your Ear: Passive Remote Physical Side Channels on PCs." Abstract: We show that built-in sensors in commodity PCs, such as microphones, inadvertently capture electromagnetic side-channel leakage from ongoing computation. Moreover, this information is often...

Speaking to the CIA’s Creative Writing Group

This is a fascinating story. Last spring, a friend of a friend visited my office and invited me to Langley to speak to Invisible Ink, the CIAs creative writing group. I asked Vivian not her real name what she wanted me to talk about. She said that the topic of the talk was entirely up to me. I...

Facial Scanning by Burger King in Brazil

In 2000, I wrote: "If McDonalds offered three free Big Macs for a DNA sample, there would be lines around the block." Burger King in Brazil is almost there, offering discounts in exchange for a facial scan. From a marketing video: "At the end of the year, its Friday every day, and the hangover...

Data Exfiltration Using Indirect Prompt Injection

Interesting attack on a LLM: In Writer, users can enter a ChatGPT-like session to edit or create their documents. In this chat session, the LLM can retrieve information from sources on the web to assist users in creation of their documents. We show that attackers can prepare websites that, when a...

New Windows/Linux Firmware Attack

Interesting attack based on malicious pre-OS logo images: LogoFAIL is a constellation of two dozen newly discovered vulnerabilities that have lurked for years, if not decades, in Unified Extensible Firmware Interfaces responsible for booting modern devices that run Windows or Linux…. The...

AI and Mass Spying

Spying and surveillance are different but related things. If I hired a private detective to spy on you, that detective could hide a bug in your home or car, tap your phone, and listen to what you said. At the end, I would get a report of all the conversations you had and the contents of those...

Secret White House Warrantless Surveillance Program

There seems to be no end to warrantless surveillance: According to the letter, a surveillance program now known as Data Analytical Services DAS has for more than a decade allowed federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to mine the details of Americans’ calls, analyzing the phone record...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Nebula

Pretty photograph. The Squid Nebula is shown in blue, indicating doubly ionized oxygen--­which is when you ionize your oxygen once and then ionize it again just to make sure. In all seriousness, it likely indicates a low-mass star nearing the end of its life. As usual, you can also use this squid...

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...

Using Hacked LastPass Keys to Steal Cryptocurrency

Remember last November, when hackers broke into the network for LastPass--a password database--and stole password vaults with both encrypted and plaintext data for over 25 million users? Well, theyre now using that data break into crypto wallets and drain them: $35 million and counting, all going...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: Im speaking at swampUP 2023 in San Jose, California, on September 13, 2023 at 11:35 AM PT. The list is maintained on this page...

Practice Your Security Prompting Skills

Gandalf is an interactive LLM game where the goal is to get the chatbot to reveal its password. There are eight levels of difficulty, as the chatbot gets increasingly restrictive instructions as to how it will answer. Its a great teaching tool. I am stuck on Level 7. Feel free to give hints and...

Excel Data Forensics

In this detailed article about academic plagiarism are some interesting details about how to do data forensics on Excel files. It really needs the graphics to understand, so see the description at the link. And, yes, an author of a paper on dishonesty is being accused of dishonesty. Theres more...

AI as Sensemaking for Public Comments

Its become fashionable to think of artificial intelligence as an inherently dehumanizing technology, a ruthless force of automation that has unleashed legions of virtual skilled laborers in faceless form. But what if AI turns out to be the one tool able to identify what makes your ideas special,...

Chinese Hacking of US Critical Infrastructure

Everyone is writing about an interagency and international report on Chinese hacking of US critical infrastructure. Lots of interesting details about how the group, called Volt Typhoon, accesses target networks and evades detection...

Google Is Not Deleting Old YouTube Videos

Google has backtracked on its plan to delete inactive YouTube videos--at least for now. Of course, it could change its mind anytime it wants. It would be nice if this would get people to think about the vulnerabilities inherent in letting a for-profit monopoly decide what of human creativity is...

Building Trustworthy AI

We will all soon get into the habit of using AI tools for help with everyday problems and tasks. We should get in the habit of questioning the motives, incentives, and capabilities behind them, too. Imagine youre using an AI chatbot to plan a vacation. Did it suggest a particular resort because i...

Friday Squid Blogging: Colossal Squid

Interesting article on the colossal squid, which is larger than the giant squid. The article answers a vexing question: So why do we always hear about the giant squid and not the colossal squid? Well, part of it has to do with the fact that the giant squid was discovered and studied long before t...

FBI (and Others) Shut Down Genesis Market

Genesis Market is shut down: Active since 2018, Genesis Markets slogan was, "Our store sells bots with logs, cookies, and their real fingerprints." Customers could search for infected systems with a variety of options, including by Internet address or by specific domain names associated with stol...

North Korea Hacking Cryptocurrency Sites with 3CX Exploit

News: Researchers at Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky today revealed that they identified a small number of cryptocurrency-focused firms as at least some of the victims of the 3CX software supply-chain attack thats unfolded over the past week. Kaspersky declined to name any of those victim...