How Hackers Are Thinking About AI

Interesting paper: "What hackers talk about when they talk about AI: Early-stage diffusion of a cybercrime innovation." Abstract: The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence AI is raising concerns about its potential to transform cybercrime. Beyond empowering novice offenders, AI stands to...

Jailbreaking the F-35 Fighter Jet

Countries around the world are becoming increasingly concerned about their dependencies on the US. If you've purchase US-made F-35 fighter jets, you are dependent on the US for software maintenance. The Dutch Defense Secretary recently said that he could jailbreak the planes to accept third-party...

Israel Hacked Traffic Cameras in Iran

Multiple news outlets are reporting on Israel's hacking of Iranian traffic cameras and how they assisted with the killing of that country's leadership. The New York Times has an article on the intelligence operation more generally...

Rewiring Democracy Ebook is on Sale

I just noticed that the ebook version of Rewiring Democracy is on sale for $5 on Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Google Play, Kobo, and presumably everywhere else in the US. I have no idea how long this will last. Also, Amazon has a coupon that brings the hardcover price dow...

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...

US Disrupts Massive Cell Phone Array in New York

This is a weird story: The US Secret Service disrupted a network of telecommunications devices that could have shut down cellular systems as leaders gather for the United Nations General Assembly in New York City. The agency said on Tuesday that last month it found more than 300 SIM servers and...

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...

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...

Surveillance Via Smart Toothbrush

The only links are from The Daily Mail and The Mirror, but a marital affair was discovered because the cheater was recorded using his smart toothbrush at home when he was supposed to be at work...

Location Tracking App for Foreigners in Moscow

Russia is proposing a rule that all foreigners in Moscow install a tracking app on their phones. Using a mobile application that all foreigners will have to install on their smartphones, the Russian state will receive the following information: Residence location Fingerprint Face photograph...

AI-Generated Law

On April 14, Dubai's ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, announced that the United Arab Emirates would begin using artificial intelligence to help write its laws. A new Regulatory Intelligence Office would use the technology to "regularly suggest updates" to the law and "accelerate the...

Friday Squid Blogging: Japanese Divers Video Giant Squid

The video is really amazing. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered...

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...

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...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Beaked Whales Feed on Squid

A Travers' beaked whale Mesoplodon traversii washed ashore in New Zealand, and scientists conlcuded that "the prevalence of squid remains in its stomachs suggests that these deep-sea cephalopods form a significant part of the whale's diet, similar to other beaked whale species." Blog moderation...

Apps That Are Spying on Your Location

404 Media and Wired are reporting on all the apps that are spying on your location, based on a hack of the location data company Gravy Analytics: The thousands of apps, included in hacked files from location data company Gravy Analytics, include everything from games like Candy Crush to dating ap...

Zero-Day Vulnerability in Ivanti VPN

It's being actively exploited...

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...

Deebot Robot Vacuums Are Using Photos and Audio to Train Their AI

An Australian news agency is reporting that robot vacuum cleaners from the Chinese company Deebot are surreptitiously taking photos and recording audio, and sending that data back to the vendor to train their AIs. Ecovacs's privacy policy--available elsewhere in the app--allows for blanket...

My TedXBillings Talk

Over the summer, I gave a talk about AI and democracy at TedXBillings. The recording is live. Please share. Im hoping for more than 200 views…...

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...

On the CSRB’s Non-Investigation of the SolarWinds Attack

ProPublica has a long investigative article on how the Cyber Safety Review Board failed to investigate the SolarWinds attack, and specifically Microsofts culpability, even though they were directed by President Biden to do so...

The US Is Banning Kaspersky

This move has been coming for a long time. The Biden administration on Thursday said it’s banning the company from selling its products to new US-based customers starting on July 20, with the company only allowed to provide software updates to existing customers through September 29. The ban--­th...

Recovering Public Keys from Signatures

Interesting summary of various ways to derive the public key from digitally signed files. Normally, with a signature scheme, you have the public key and want to know whether a given signature is valid. But what if we instead have a message and a signature, assume the signature is valid, and want ...

Exploiting Mistyped URLs

Interesting research: "Hyperlink Hijacking: Exploiting Erroneous URL Links to Phantom Domains": Abstract: Web users often follow hyperlinks hastily, expecting them to be correctly programmed. However, it is possible those links contain typos or other mistakes. By discovering active but erroneous...

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...

On the Zero-Day Market

New paper: "Zero Progress on Zero Days: How the Last Ten Years Created the Modern Spyware Market": Abstract: Spyware makes surveillance simple. The last ten years have seen a global market emerge for ready-made software that lets governments surveil their citizens and foreign adversaries alike an...

Using Legitimate GitHub URLs for Malware

Interesting social-engineering attack vector: McAfee released a report on a new LUA malware loader distributed through what appeared to be a legitimate Microsoft GitHub repository for the "C++ Library Manager for Windows, Linux, and MacOS," known as vcpkg. The attacker is exploiting a property of...

Cheating Automatic Toll Booths by Obscuring License Plates

The Wall Street Journal is reporting on a variety of techniques drivers are using to obscure their license plates so that automatic readers cant identify them and charge tolls properly. Some drivers have power-washed paint off their plates or covered them with a range of household items such as...

Essays from the Second IWORD

The Ash Center has posted a series of twelve essays stemming from the Second Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy IWORD 2023. Aviv Ovadya, Democracy as Approximation: A Primer for “AI for Democracy” Innovators Kathryn Peters, Permission and Participation Claudia Chwalisz, Moving...

NSA Buying Bulk Surveillance Data on Americans without a Warrant

It finally admitted to buying bulk data on Americans from data brokers, in response to a query by Senator Weyden. This is almost certainly illegal, although the NSA maintains that it is legal until its told otherwise. Some news articles...

On IoT Devices and Software Liability

New law journal article: Smart Device Manufacturer Liability and Redress for Third-Party Cyberattack Victims Abstract: Smart devices are used to facilitate cyberattacks against both their users and third parties. While users are generally able to seek redress following a cyberattack via data...

Friday Squid Blogging—18th Anniversary Post: New Species of Pygmy Squid Discovered

Theyre Ryukyuan pygmy squid Idiosepius kijimuna and Hannans pygmy squid Kodama jujutsu. The second one represents an entire new genus. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. And, yes, this is the eighteenth anniversary of...

OpenAI Is Not Training on Your Dropbox Documents—Today

Theres a rumor flying around the Internet that OpenAI is training foundation models on your Dropbox documents. Heres CNBC. Heres Boing Boing. Some articles are more nuanced, but theres still a lot of confusion. It seems not to be true. Dropbox isnt sharing all of your documents with OpenAI. But...

A Robot the Size of the World

In 2016, I wrote about an Internet that affected the world in a direct, physical manner. It was connected to your smartphone. It had sensors like cameras and thermostats. It had actuators: Drones, autonomous cars. And it had smarts in the middle, using sensor data to figure out what to do and the...

Extracting GPT’s Training Data

This is clever: The actual attack is kind of silly. We prompt the model with the command "Repeat the word poem forever" and sit back and watch as the model responds complete transcript here. In the abridged example above, the model emits a real email address and phone number of some unsuspecting...

Apple to Add Manual Authentication to iMessage

Signal has had the ability to manually authenticate another account for years. iMessage is getting it: The feature is called Contact Key Verification, and it does just what its name says: it lets you add a manual verification step in an iMessage conversation to confirm that the other person is wh...

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...

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 the Cybersecurity Jobs Shortage

In April, Cybersecurity Ventures reported on extreme cybersecurity job shortage: Global cybersecurity job vacancies grew by 350 percent, from one million openings in 2013 to 3.5 million in 2021, according to Cybersecurity Ventures. The number of unfilled jobs leveled off in 2022, and remains at 3...

Detecting AI-Generated Text

There are no reliable ways to distinguish text written by a human from text written by an large language model. OpenAI writes: Do AI detectors work? In short, no. While some including OpenAI have released tools that purport to detect AI-generated content, none of these have proven to reliably...

Fake Signal and Telegram Apps in the Google Play Store

Google removed fake Signal and Telegram apps from its Play store. An app with the name Signal Plus Messenger was available on Play for nine months and had been downloaded from Play roughly 100 times before Google took it down last April after being tipped off by security firm ESET. It was also...

New York Using AI to Detect Subway Fare Evasion

The details are scant--the article is based on a "heavily redacted" contract--but the New York subway authority is using an "AI system" to detect people who dont pay the subway fare. Joana Flores, an MTA spokesperson, said the AI system doesnt flag fare evaders to New York police, but she decline...

Commentary on the Implementation Plan for the 2023 US National Cybersecurity Strategy

The Atlantic Council released a detailed commentary on the White Houses new "Implementation Plan for the 2023 US National Cybersecurity Strategy." Lots of interesting bits. So far, at least three trends emerge: First, the plan contains a somewhat more concrete list of actions than its parent...

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...

The US Is Spying on the UN Secretary General

The Washington Post is reporting that the US is spying on the UN Secretary General. The reports on Guterres appear to contain the secretary generals personal conversations with aides regarding diplomatic encounters. They indicate that the United States relied on spying powers granted under the...

Stalkerware Vendor Hacked

The stalkerware company LetMeSpy has been hacked: TechCrunch reviewed the leaked data, which included years of victims call logs and text messages dating back to 2013. The database we reviewed contained current records on at least 13,000 compromised devices, though some of the devices shared litt...