Tracking People via Bluetooth on Their Phones

Weve always known that phones--and the people carrying them--can be uniquely identified from their Bluetooth signatures, and that we need security techniques to prevent that. This new research shows that thats not enough. Computer scientists at the University of California San Diego proved in a...

Smartphones and Civilians in Wartime

Interesting article about civilians using smartphones to assist their militaries in wartime, and how that blurs the important legal distinction between combatants and non-combatants: The principle of distinction between the two roles is a critical cornerstone of international humanitarian law­--t...

Remotely Controlling Touchscreens

Researchers have demonstrated controlling touchscreens at a distance, at least in a laboratory setting: The core idea is to take advantage of the electromagnetic signals to execute basic touch events such as taps and swipes into targeted locations of the touchscreen with the goal of taking over...

Malware-Infested Smart Card Reader

Brian Krebs has an interesting story of a smart ID card reader with a malware-infested Windows driver, and US government employees who inadvertently buy and use them. But by all accounts, the potential attack surface here is enormous, as many federal employees clearly will purchase these readers...

Attacks on Managed Service Providers Expected to Increase

CISA, NSA, FBI, and similar organizations in the other Five Eyes countries are warning that attacks on MSPs--as a vector to their customers--are likely to increase. No details about what this prediction is based on. Makes sense, though. The SolarWinds attack was incredibly successful for the...

15.3 Million Request-Per-Second DDoS Attack

Cloudflare is reporting a large DDoS attack against an unnamed company "operating a crypto launchpad." While this isnt the largest application-layer attack weve seen, it is the largest weve seen over HTTPS. HTTPS DDoS attacks are more expensive in terms of required computational resources because...

De-anonymizing Bitcoin

Andy Greenberg wrote a long article -- an excerpt from his new book -- on how law enforcement de-anonymized bitcoin transactions to take down a global child porn ring. Within a few years of Bitcoins arrival, academic security researchers -- and then companies like Chainalysis -- began to tear...

Where’s the Russia-Ukraine Cyberwar?

It has been interesting to notice how unimportant and ineffective cyber operations have been in the Russia-Ukraine war. Russia launched a wiper against Ukraine at the beginning, but it was found and neutered. Near as I can tell, the only thing that worked was the disabling of regional KA-SAT SATC...

Details of an NSA Hacking Operation

Pangu Lab in China just published a report of a hacking operation by the Equation Group aka the NSA. It noticed the hack in 2013, and was able to map it with Equation Group tools published by the Shadow Brokers aka some Russian group. …the scope of victims exceeded 287 targets in 45 countries,...

Vulnerability in Stalkerware Apps

TechCrunch is reporting -- but not describing in detail -- a vulnerability in a series of stalkerware apps that exposes personal information of the victims. The vulnerability isnt in the apps installed on the victims phones, but in the website the stalker goes to view the information the app...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Videos

Here are six beautiful squid videos. I know nothing more about them. 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. EDITED TO ADD 2/25: This post accidentally went live on Wednesday, two days...

Privacy Violating COVID Tests

A good lesson in reading the fine print: Cignpost Diagnostics, which trades as ExpressTest and offers £35 tests for holidaymakers, said it holds the right to analyse samples from seals to "learn more about human health" -- and sell information on to third parties. Individuals are required to give...

Vendors are Fixing Security Flaws Faster

Googles Project Zero is reporting that software vendors are patching their code faster. tl;dr In 2021, vendors took an average of 52 days to fix security vulnerabilities reported from Project Zero. This is a significant acceleration from an average of about 80 days 3 years ago. In addition to the...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at IT-S Now 2022 in Vienna on June 2, 2022. I’m speaking at the 14th International Conference on Cyber Conflict, CyCon 2022, in Tallinn, Estonia on June 3, 2022. I’m speaking at the RSA Conference 2022 in San Francisco...

On the Irish Health Services Executive Hack

A detailed report of the 2021 ransomware attack against Ireland’s Health Services Executive lists some really bad security practices: The report notes that: The HSE did not have a Chief Information Security Officer CISO or a “single responsible owner for cybersecurity at either senior executive o...

Breaking 256-bit Elliptic Curve Encryption with a Quantum Computer

Researchers have calculated the quantum computer size necessary to break 256-bit elliptic curve public-key cryptography: Finally, we calculate the number of physical qubits required to break the 256-bit elliptic curve encryption of keys in the Bitcoin network within the small available time frame...

Hacking the Sony Playstation 5

I just dont think its possible to create a hack-proof computer system, especially when the system is physically in the hands of the hackers. The Sony Playstation 5 is the latest example: Hackers may have just made some big strides towards possibly jailbreaking the PlayStation 5 over the weekend,...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Eating Maine Shrimp

Squid are eating Maine shrimp, causing a collapse of the ecosystem. This seems to be a result of climate change. Maines shrimp fishery has been closed for nearly a decade since the stocks collapse in 2013. Scientists are now saying a species of squid that came into the Gulf of Maine during a...

Alaska’s Department of Health and Social Services Hack

Apparently, a nation-state hacked Alaskas Department of Health and Social Services. Not sure why Alaskas Department of Health and Social Services is of any interest to a nation-state, but thats probably just my failure of imagination...

Security Risks of Relying on a Single Smartphone

Isracard used a single cell phone to communicate with credit card clients, and receive documents via WhatsApp. An employee stole the phone. He reformatted the phone and replaced the SIM card, which was oddly the best possible outcome, given the circumstances. Using the data to steal money would...

Lightning Cable with Embedded Eavesdropping

Normal-looking cables USB-C, Lightning, and so on that exfiltrate data over a wireless network. I blogged about a previous prototype here...

Hacker-Themed Board Game

Black Hat is a hacker-themed board game...

California Proposition 24 Passes

Californias Proposition 24, aimed at improving the California Consumer Privacy Act, passed this week. Analyses are very mixed. I was very mixed on the proposition, but on the whole I supported it. The proposition has some serious flaws, and was watered down by industry, but voting for privacy fee...

Cryptanalysis of an Old Zip Encryption Algorithm

Mike Stay broke an old zipfile encryption algorithm to recover $300,000 in bitcoin. DefCon talk here...

Friday Squid Blogging: Fantastic Video of a Juvenile Giant Squid

It's amazing: Then, about 20 hours into the recording from the Medusa's fifth deployment, Dr. Robinson saw the sharp points of tentacles sneaking into the camera's view. "My heart felt like exploding," he said on Thursday, over a shaky phone connection from the ship's bridge. At first, the animal...

Stealing Nativity Displays

The New York Times is reporting on the security measures people are using to protect nativity displays...

Google Employees Use a Physical Token as Their Second Authentication Factor

Krebs on Security is reporting that all 85,000 Google employees use two-factor authentication with a physical token. A Google spokesperson said Security Keys now form the basis of all account access at Google. "We have had no reported or confirmed account takeovers since implementing security key...

IoT Inspector Tool from Princeton

Researchers at Princeton University have released IoT Inspector, a tool that analyzes the security and privacy of IoT devices by examining the data they send across the Internet. They've already used the tool to study a bunch of different IoT devices. From their blog post: Finding 3: Many IoT...

Amazon's Door Lock Is Amazon's Bid to Control Your Home

Interesting essay about Amazon's smart lock: When you add Amazon Key to your door, something more sneaky also happens: Amazon takes over. You can leave your keys at home and unlock your door with the Amazon Key app -- but it's really built for Amazon deliveries. To share online access with family...

ICE Collecting DNA Samples

ICE collected nearly a million DNA samples last year...

AI Genie in the Wild

When I give talks about AI genies, I use this sort of example as a hypothetical. It's happened. The story is from Australia. Someone named Andrew tasked OpenClaw to book gym classes for him. And…. Minutes later, his AI agent reported it had discovered a way to book Andrew into classes several wee...

More on the OpenAI Agent’s Attack on Hugging Face

Hugging Face has published a detailed timeline of the attack. From the summary: The agent was running an internal OpenAI cyber-capability evaluation based on the ExploitGym benchmark, which tasks an AI agent with finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities. OpenAI ran this on its own...

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...

NSO Group Hacking WhatsApp Despite Court Order

WhatsApp has caught the NSO Group phishing its users, in violation of a court order...

The Intersection of Encryption and AI

As part of their 20th Anniversary celebration, Dark Reading asked five cybersecurity industry leaders who wrote blogs or columns for them over the years to select their favorite piece and share their reflections on the topic today. This is my section. Renowned technologist and author Bruce Schnei...

FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report

The 2025 Internet Crime Report was published a few weeks ago, but I only just saw it. Lots of interesting statistics. Press release. News articles...

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...

Smart Glasses for the Authorities

ICE is developing its own version of smart glasses, with facial recognition tied to various databases...

Hiding Bluetooth Trackers in Mail

It was used to track a Dutch naval ship: Dutch journalist Just Vervaart, working for regional media network Omroep Gelderland, followed the directions posted on the Dutch government website and mailed a postcard with a hidden tracker inside. Because of this, they were able to track the ship for...

Hacked App Part of US/Israeli Propaganda Campaign Against Iran

Wired has the story: Shortly after the first set of explosions, Iranians received bursts of notifications on their phones. They came not from the government advising caution, but from an apparently hacked prayer-timing app called BadeSaba Calendar that has been downloaded more than 5 million time...

AIs are Getting Better at Finding and Exploiting Internet Vulnerabilities

Really interesting blog post from Anthropic: In a recent evaluation of AI models’ cyber capabilities, current Claude models can now succeed at multistage attacks on networks with dozens of hosts using only standard, open-source tools, instead of the custom tools needed by previous generations. Th...

Trojans Embedded in .svg Files

Porn sites are hiding code in .svg files: Unpacking the attack took work because much of the JavaScript in the .svg images was heavily obscured using a custom version of "JSFuck," a technique that uses only a handful of character types to encode JavaScript into a camouflaged wall of text. Once...

How the Solid Protocol Restores Digital Agency

The current state of digital identity is a mess. Your personal information is scattered across hundreds of locations: social media companies, IoT companies, government agencies, websites you have accounts on, and data brokers you've never heard of. These entities collect, store, and trade your...

The Age of Integrity

We need to talk about data integrity. Narrowly, the term refers to ensuring that data isn’t tampered with, either in transit or in storage. Manipulating account balances in bank databases, removing entries from criminal records, and murder by removing notations about allergies from medical record...

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...

Fake Student Fraud in Community Colleges

Reporting on the rise of fake students enrolling in community college courses: The bots' goal is to bilk state and federal financial aid money by enrolling in classes, and remaining enrolled in them, long enough for aid disbursements to go out. They often accomplish this by submitting AI-generate...

Regulating AI Behavior with a Hypervisor

Interesting research: "Guillotine: Hypervisors for Isolating Malicious AIs." Abstract :As AI models become more embedded in critical sectors like finance, healthcare, and the military, their inscrutable behavior poses ever-greater risks to society. To mitigate this risk, we propose Guillotine, a...

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...

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...