AI Coding Agents Are Installing Unknown/Untrusted Code on Corporate Networks

We cannot forget that AI coding agents are not yet trustworthy: Researchers at a stealth startup in Israel scanned 6,214 live domains belonging to defense contractors, Fortune 500, and Big Tech companies. Of the 8,265 llms.txt and llms-full.txt files they found many sites hosted both an llms.txt...

Researching Employment Scams

Researchers built a fake company to study fake employee scams...

Spyware for Babies

The New York Times has a long article alt link on surveillance systems aimed at babies. They are increasingly using AI. Nanit and its rivals want to own 24/7 health tracking for the sub-four-foot set. And their already astonishing levels of baby data collection are just the beginning. Nanit...

AI Surveillance and Social Progress

In the near future, AI-powered surveillance systems will be able to track everything we do in public, and much of what we do in private. And if we do something wrong--shoplift, litter, jaywalk, you name it--the system will notice, retain it, tie it to your official government record, communicate...

AI Use by the US Government

On 14 April, the Trump administration quietly acknowledged the widespread use of AI to automate government processes. The office of management and budget OMB disclosed a staggering 3,611 active or planned use cases for AI across the federal government. The list has ballooned by 70% from the one...

Laurie Anderson Is Quoting Me

Not by name, but Laurie Anderson quotes me in one of the tracks of her new album: My favorite quote is from a cryptologist who said "If you think technology will solve your problems, you don't understand technology and you don't understand your problems." Also in interviews: "Of course, it's...

Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid Live in the Waters of Western Australia

Evidence of them has been found by analyzing DNA in the seawater. 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...

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...

Mexican Surveillance Company

Grupo Seguritech is a Mexican surveillance company that is expanding into the US...

Canada Needs Nationalized, Public AI

Canada has a choice to make about its artificial intelligence future. The Carney administration is investing $2-billion over five years in its Sovereign AI Compute Strategy. Will any value generated by "sovereign AI" be captured in Canada, making a difference in the lives of Canadians, or is this...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid in Byzantine Monk Cooking

This is a very weird story about how squid stayed on the menu of Byzantine monks by falling between the cracks of dietary rules. At Constantinople's Monastery of Stoudios, the kitchen didn't answer to appetite. It answered to the "typikon": a manual for ensuring that nothing unexpected happened a...

Why Tehran’s Two-Tiered Internet Is So Dangerous

Iran is slowly emerging from the most severe communications blackout in its history and one of the longest in the world. Triggered as part of January's government crackdown against citizen protests nationwide, the regime implemented an internet shutdown that transcends the standard definition of...

LLMs Generate Predictable Passwords

LLMs are bad at generating passwords: There are strong noticeable patterns among these 50 passwords that can be seen easily: All of the passwords start with a letter, usually uppercase G, almost always followed by the digit 7. Character choices are highly uneven ­ for example, L , 9, m, 2, $ and...

On the Security of Password Managers

Good article on password managers that secretly have a backdoor. New research shows that these claims aren’t true in all cases, particularly when account recovery is in place or password managers are set to share vaults or organize users into groups. The researchers reverse-engineered or closely...

Friday Squid Blogging: Do Squid Dream?

An exploration of the interesting question...

I Am in the Epstein Files

Once. Someone named "Vincenzo lozzo" wrote to Epstein in email, in 2016: "I wouldn't pay too much attention to this, Schneier has a long tradition of dramatizing and misunderstanding things." The topic of the email is DDoS attacks, and it is unclear what I am dramatizing and misunderstanding. Rab...

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...

Against the Federal Moratorium on State-Level Regulation of AI

Cast your mind back to May of this year: Congress was in the throes of debate over the massive budget bill. Amidst the many seismic provisions, Senator Ted Cruz dropped a ticking time bomb of tech policy: a ten-year moratorium on the ability of states to regulate artificial intelligence. To many,...

AI as Cyberattacker

From Anthropic: In mid-September 2025, we detected suspicious activity that later investigation determined to be a highly sophisticated espionage campaign. The attackers used AI’s “agentic” capabilities to an unprecedented degree­--using AI not just as an advisor, but to execute the cyberattacks...

First Wap: A Surveillance Computer You’ve Never Heard Of

Mother Jones has a long article on surveillance arms manufacturers, their wares, and how they avoid export control laws: Operating from their base in Jakarta, where permissive export laws have allowed their surveillance business to flourish, First Wap's European founders and executives have quiet...

Friday Squid Blogging: Jigging for Squid

A nice story...

Digital Threat Modeling Under Authoritarianism

Today's world requires us to make complex and nuanced decisions about our digital security. Evaluating when to use a secure messaging app like Signal or WhatsApp, which passwords to store on your smartphone, or what to share on social media requires us to assess risks and make judgments...

1965 Cryptanalysis Training Workbook Released by the NSA

In the early 1960s, National Security Agency cryptanalyst and cryptanalysis instructor Lambros D. Callimahos coined the term "Stethoscope" to describe a diagnostic computer program used to unravel the internal structure of pre-computer ciphertexts. The term appears in the newly declassified...

Encryption Backdoor in Military/Police Radios

I wrote about this in 2023. Here's the story: Three Dutch security analysts discovered the vulnerabilities­--five in total--­in a European radio standard called TETRA Terrestrial Trunked Radio, which is used in radios made by Motorola, Damm, Hytera, and others. The standard has been used in radio...

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...

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...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Live Colossal Squid Filmed

A live colossal squid was filmed for the first time in the ocean. It's only a juvenile: a foot long. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered...

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...

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...

Algorithms Are Coming for Democracy—but It’s Not All Bad

In 2025, AI is poised to change every aspect of democratic politics--but it won't necessarily be for the worse. India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, has used AI to translate his speeches for his multilingual electorate in real time, demonstrating how AI can help diverse democracies to be more...

Race Condition Attacks against LLMs

These are two attacks against the system components surrounding LLMs: We propose that LLM Flowbreaking, following jailbreaking and prompt injection, joins as the third on the growing list of LLM attack types. Flowbreaking is less about whether prompt or response guardrails can be bypassed, and mo...

Microsoft Is Adding New Cryptography Algorithms

Microsoft is updating SymCrypt, its core cryptographic library, with new quantum-secure algorithms. Microsofts details are here. From a news article: The first new algorithm Microsoft added to SymCrypt is called ML-KEM. Previously known as CRYSTALS-Kyber, ML-KEM is one of three post-quantum...

Texas Sues GM for Collecting Driving Data without Consent

Texas is suing General Motors for collecting driver data without consent and then selling it to insurance companies: From CNN: In car models from 2015 and later, the Detroit-based car manufacturer allegedly used technology to "collect, record, analyze, and transmit highly detailed driving data...

Compromising the Secure Boot Process

This isnt good: On Thursday, researchers from security firm Binarly revealed that Secure Boot is completely compromised on more than 200 device models sold by Acer, Dell, Gigabyte, Intel, and Supermicro. The cause: a cryptographic key underpinning Secure Boot on those models that was compromised ...

The Justice Department Took Down the 911 S5 Botnet

The US Justice Department has dismantled an enormous botnet: According to an indictment unsealed on May 24, from 2014 through July 2022, Wang and others are alleged to have created and disseminated malware to compromise and amass a network of millions of residential Windows computers worldwide...

AI Will Increase the Quantity—and Quality—of Phishing Scams

A piece I coauthored with Fredrik Heiding and Arun Vishwanath in the Harvard Business Review: Summary. Gen AI tools are rapidly making these emails more advanced, harder to spot, and significantly more dangerous. Recent research showed that 60% of participants fell victim to artificial intelligen...

AI Voice Scam

Scammers tricked a company into believing they were dealing with a BBC presenter. They faked her voice, and accepted money intended for her...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Trackers

A new bioadhesive makes it easier to attach trackers to squid. Note: the article does not discuss squid privacy rights. 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...

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...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at the Munich Security Conference MSC 2024 in Munich, Germany, on Friday, February 16, 2024. I’m giving a keynote on “AI and Trust” at Generative AI, Free Speech, & Public Discourse. The symposium will be held at...

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...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Eating Dancing Squid

Its not actually alive, but it twitches in response to soy sauce. 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...

New York Increases Cybersecurity Rules for Financial Companies

Another example of a large and influential state doing things the federal government wont: Boards of directors, or other senior committees, are charged with overseeing cybersecurity risk management, and must retain an appropriate level of expertise to understand cyber issues, the rules say...

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...