Using Pupil Reflection in Smartphone Camera Selfies

Researchers are using the reflection of the smartphone in the pupils of faces taken as selfies to infer information about how the phone is being used: For now, the research is focusing on six different ways a user can hold a device like a smartphone: with both hands, just the left, or just the...

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...

Industrial Control System Malware Discovered

The Department of Energy, CISA, the FBI, and the NSA jointly issued an advisory describing a sophisticated piece of malware called Pipedream thats designed to attack a wide range of industrial control systems. This is clearly from a government, but no attribution is given. Theres also no indicati...

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...

US Critical Infrastructure Companies Will Have to Report When They Are Hacked

This will be law soon: Companies critical to U.S. national interests will now have to report when theyre hacked or they pay ransomware, according to new rules approved by Congress. … The reporting requirement legislation was approved by the House and the Senate on Thursday and is expected to be...

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,...

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...

Linux-Targeted Malware Increased by 35%

Crowdstrike is reporting that malware targeting Linux has increased considerably in 2021: Malware targeting Linux systems increased by 35% in 2021 compared to 2020. XorDDoS, Mirai and Mozi malware families accounted for over 22% of Linux-targeted threats observed by CrowdStrike in 2021. Ten times...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m giving an online-only talk on “Securing a World of Physically Capable Computers” as part of Teleport’s Security Visionaries 2022 series, on January 18, 2022. I’m speaking at IT-S Now 2022 in Vienna on June 2, 2022. I’m speaking...

Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid Art

Images of giant squid and octopi attacking. 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...

MacOS Zero-Day Used against Hong Kong Activists

Google researchers discovered a MacOS zero-day exploit being used against Hong Kong activists. It was a "watering hole" attack, which means the malware was hidden in a legitimate website. Users visiting that website would get infected. From an article: Googles researchers were able to trigger the...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Person in Squid Suit Takes Dog for a Walk

No, I dont understand it, either. 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 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...

Hacker-Themed Board Game

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

Cellebrite Can Break Signal

Cellebrite announced that it can break Signal. Note that the company has heavily edited its blog post, but the original -- with lots of technical details -- was saved by the Wayback Machine. News article. Slashdot post. The whole story is puzzling. Cellebrites details will make it easier for the...

Data and Goliath Book Placement

Notice the copy of Data and Goliath just behind the head of Maine Senator Angus King. This demonstrates the importance of a vibrant color and a large font...

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...

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...

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...

Details on the Mirai Botnet Authors

Brian Krebs has a long article on the Mirai botnet authors, who pled guilty...

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...

Wondermark on Security

Another comic...

Firing a Locked Smart Gun

The Armatix IP1 "smart gun" can only be fired by someone who is wearing a special watch. Unfortunately, this security measure is easily hackable...

NSA Insider Security Post-Snowden

According to a recently declassified report obtained under FOIA, the NSA's attempts to protect itself against insider attacks aren't going very well: The N.S.A. failed to consistently lock racks of servers storing highly classified data and to secure data center machine rooms, according to the...

Analyzing Cyber Insurance Policies

There's a really interesting new paper analyzing over 100 different cyber insurance policies. From the abstract: In this research paper, we seek to answer fundamental questions concerning the current state of the cyber insurance market. Specifically, by collecting over 100 full insurance policies...

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...

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...

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...

Bypassing On-Camera Age-Verification Checks

Some AI-based video age-verification checks can be fooled with a fake mustache...

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...

Claude Mythos Has Found 271 Zero-Days in Firefox

That's a lot. No, it's an extraordinary number: Since February, the Firefox team has been working around the clock using frontier AI models to find and fix latent security vulnerabilities in the browser. We wrote previously about our collaboration with Anthropic to scan Firefox with Opus 4.6, whi...

Defense in Depth, Medieval Style

This article on the walls of Constantinople is fascinating. The system comprised four defensive lines arranged in formidable layers: The brick-lined ditch, divided by bulkheads and often flooded, 15­-20 meters wide and up to 7 meters deep. A low breastwork, about 2 meters high, enabling defenders...

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...

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...

Microsoft SharePoint Zero-Day

Chinese hackers are exploiting a high-severity vulnerability in Microsoft SharePoint to steal data worldwide: The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-53770, carries a severity rating of 9.8 out of a possible 10. It gives unauthenticated remote access to SharePoint Servers exposed to the Internet...

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...

New Linux Vulnerabilities

They're interesting: Tracked as CVE-2025-5054 and CVE-2025-4598, both vulnerabilities are race condition bugs that could enable a local attacker to obtain access to access sensitive information. Tools like Apport and systemd-coredump are designed to handle crash reporting and core dumps in Linux...

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...

AIs as Trusted Third Parties

This is a truly fascinating paper: "Trusted Machine Learning Models Unlock Private Inference for Problems Currently Infeasible with Cryptography." The basic idea is that AIs can act as trusted third parties: Abstract: We often interact with untrusted parties. Prioritization of privacy can limit t...

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...

Pairwise Authentication of Humans

Here's an easy system for two humans to remotely authenticate to each other, so they can be sure that neither are digital impersonations. To mitigate that risk, I have developed this simple solution where you can setup a unique time-based one-time passcode TOTP between any pair of persons. This i...