3093 matches found
Friday Squid Blogging: Why There Are No Giant Squid in Aquariums
Theyre too big and we cant recreate their habitat. 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...
Analysis of Intellexa’s Predator Spyware
Amnesty International has published a comprehensive analysis of the Predator government spyware products. These technologies used to be the exclusive purview of organizations like the NSA. Now theyre available to every country on the planet--democratic, nondemocratic, authoritarian, whatever--for...
On Technologies for Automatic Facial Recognition
Interesting article on technologies that will automatically identify people: With technology like that on Mr. Leyvands head, Facebook could prevent users from ever forgetting a colleagues name, give a reminder at a cocktail party that an acquaintance had kids to ask about or help find someone at ...
Friday Squid Blogging: We’re Genetically Engineering Squid Now
Is this a good idea? The transparent squid is a genetically altered version of the hummingbird bobtail squid, a species usually found in the tropical waters from Indonesia to China and Japan. Its typically smaller than a thumb and shaped like a dumpling. And like other cephalopods, it has a...
Indirect Instruction Injection in Multi-Modal LLMs
Interesting research: "Abusing Images and Sounds for Indirect Instruction Injection in Multi-Modal LLMs": Abstract: We demonstrate how images and sounds can be used for indirect prompt and instruction injection in multi-modal LLMs. An attacker generates an adversarial perturbation corresponding t...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Bypassing a Theft Threat Model
Thieves cut through the wall of a coffee shop to get to an Apple store, bypassing the alarms in the process. I wrote about this kind of thing in 2000, in Secrets and Lies page 318: My favorite example is a band of California art thieves that would break into peoples houses by cutting a hole in...
Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid vs. Blue Marlin
Epic matchup. 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...
ChatGPT Is Ingesting Corporate Secrets
Interesting: According to internal Slack messages that were leaked to Insider, an Amazon lawyer told workers that they had "already seen instances" of text generated by ChatGPT that "closely" resembled internal company data. This issue seems to have come to a head recently because Amazon staffers...
SolarWinds and Market Incentives
In early 2021, IEEE Security and Privacy asked a number of board members for brief perspectives on the SolarWinds incident while it was still breaking news. This was my response. The penetration of government and corporate networks worldwide is the result of inadequate cyberdefenses across the...
Manipulating Weights in Face-Recognition AI Systems
Interesting research: "Facial Misrecognition Systems: Simple Weight Manipulations Force DNNs to Err Only on Specific Persons": Abstract: In this paper we describe how to plant novel types of backdoors in any facial recognition model based on the popular architecture of deep Siamese neural network...
Bulk Surveillance of Money Transfers
Just another obscure warrantless surveillance program. US law enforcement can access details of money transfers without a warrant through an obscure surveillance program the Arizona attorney generals office created in 2014. A database stored at a nonprofit, the Transaction Record Analysis Center...
Friday Squid Blogging: China Bans Taiwanese Squid Imports
Today I have some squid geopolitical news. 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...
Apple’s Device Analytics Can Identify iCloud Users
Researchers claim that supposedly anonymous device analytics information can identify users: On Twitter, security researchers Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry have found that Apples device analytics data includes an iCloud account and can be linked directly to a specific user, including their name,...
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...
Weird Fallout from Peiter Zatko’s Twitter Whistleblowing
People are trying to dig up dirt on Peiter Zatko, better known as Mudge. For the record, I have not been contacted. Im not sure if I should feel slighted...
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: Im speaking as part of a Geneva Centre for Security Policy course on Cyber Security in the Context of International Security, online, on September 22, 2022. Im speaking at IT-Security INSIDE 2022 in Zurich, Switzerland, on Septembe...
Friday Squid Blogging: SQUID Acronym for Making Conscious Choices
I think the U is forced: SQUID consists of five steps: Stop, Question, Understand, Imagine, and Decide. 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...
Hacking Starlink
This is the first--of many, I assume--hack of Starlink. Leveraging a string of vulnerabilities, attackers can access the Starlink system and run custom code on the devices...
Surveillance of Your Car
TheMarkup has an extensive analysis of connected vehicle data and the companies that are collecting it. The Markup has identified 37 companies that are part of the rapidly growing connected vehicle data industry that seeks to monetize such data in an environment with few regulations governing its...
Microsoft Zero-Days Sold and then Used
Yet another article about cyber-weapons arms manufacturers and their particular supply chain. This one is about Windows and Adobe Reader zero-day exploits sold by an Austrian company named DSIRF. Theres an entire industry devoted to undermining all of our security. It needs to be stopped...
Securing Open-Source Software
Good essay arguing that open-source software is a critical national-security asset and needs to be treated as such: Open source is at least as important to the economy, public services, and national security as proprietary code, but it lacks the same standards and safeguards. It bears the qualiti...
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...
Ubiquitous Surveillance by ICE
Report by Georgetowns Center on Privacy and Technology published a comprehensive report on the surprising amount of mass surveillance conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE. Our two-year investigation, including hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests and a comprehensive...
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...
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Street Art
Pretty. 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...
iPhone Malware that Operates Even When the Phone Is Turned Off
Researchers have demonstrated iPhone malware that works even when the phone is fully shut down. t turns out that the iPhone’s Bluetooth chip--which is key to making features like Find My work--has no mechanism for digitally signing or even encrypting the firmware it runs. Academics at Germany’s...
Video Conferencing Apps Sometimes Ignore the Mute Button
New research: "Are You Really Muted?: A Privacy Analysis of Mute Buttons in Video Conferencing Apps": Abstract: In the post-pandemic era, video conferencing apps VCAs have converted previously private spaces -- bedrooms, living rooms, and kitchens -- into semi-public extensions of the office. And...
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...
Gus Simmons’s Memoir
Gus Simmons is an early pioneer in cryptography and computer security. I know him best for his work on authentication and covert channels, specifically as related to nuclear treaty verification. His work is cited extensively in Applied Cryptography. He has written a memoir of growing up dirt-poor...
Linux Improves Its Random Number Generator
In kernel version 5.17, both /dev/random and /dev/urandom have been replaced with a new -- identical -- algorithm based on the BLAKE2 hash function, which is an excellent security improvement...
Hacking Alexa through Alexa’s Speech
An Alexa can respond to voice commands it issues. This can be exploited: The attack works by using the devices speaker to issue voice commands. As long as the speech contains the device wake word usually "Alexa" or "Echo" followed by a permissible command, the Echo will carry it out, researchers...
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...
Possible Government Surveillance of the Otter.ai Transcription App
A reporter interviews a Uyghur human-rights advocate, and uses the Otter.ai transcription app. The next day, I received an odd note from Otter.ai, the automated transcription app that I had used to record the interview. It read: “Hey Phelim, to help us improve your Otter’s experience, what was th...
Secret CIA Data Collection Program
Two US senators claim that the CIA has been running an unregulated -- and almost certainly illegal -- mass surveillance program on Americans. The senators statement. Some declassified information from the CIA. No real details yet...
Friday Squid Blogging: Climate Change Causing “Squid Bloom” along Pacific Coast
The oceans are warmer, which means more 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...
Bunnie Huang’s Plausibly Deniable Database
Bunnie Huang has created a Plausibly Deniable Database. Most security schemes facilitate the coercive processes of an attacker because they disclose metadata about the secret data, such as the name and size of encrypted files. This allows specific and enforceable demands to be made: “Give us the...
Friday Squid Blogging: Deep-Dwelling Squid
We have discovered a squid -- Oegopsida, Magnapinnidae, Magnapinna sp. -- that lives at 6,000 meters deep. :They’re really weird," says Vecchione. "They drift along with their arms spread out and these really long, skinny, spaghetti-like extensions dangling down underneath them." Microscopic...
Thieves Using AirTags to “Follow” Cars
From Ontario and not surprising: Since September 2021, officers have investigated five incidents where suspects have placed small tracking devices on high-end vehicles so they can later locate and steal them. Brand name "air tags" are placed in out-of-sight areas of the target vehicles when they...
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,...
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...
Identifying Computer-Generated Faces
Its the eyes: The researchers note that in many cases, users can simply zoom in on the eyes of a person they suspect may not be real to spot the pupil irregularities. They also note that it would not be difficult to write software to spot such errors and for social media sites to use it to remove...
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...