Expeditionary Cyberspace Operations

Cyberspace operations now officially has a physical dimension, meaning that the United States has official military doctrine about cyberattacks that also involve an actual human gaining physical access to a piece of computing infrastructure. A revised version of Joint Publication 3-12 Cyberspace...

On the Poisoning of LLMs

Interesting essay on the poisoning of LLMs--ChatGPT in particular: Given that weve known about model poisoning for years, and given the strong incentives the black-hat SEO crowd has to manipulate results, its entirely possible that bad actors have been poisoning ChatGPT for months. We dont know...

Credible Handwriting Machine

In case you dont have enough to worry about, someone has built a credible handwriting machine: This is still a work in progress, but the project seeks to solve one of the biggest problems with other homework machines, such as this one that I covered a few months ago after it blew up on social...

Friday Squid Blogging: Peruvian Squid-Fishing Regulation Drives Chinese Fleets Away

A Peruvian oversight law has the opposite effect: Peru in 2020 began requiring any foreign fishing boat entering its ports to use a vessel monitoring system allowing its activities to be tracked in real time 24 hours a day. The equipment, which tracks a vessels geographic position and fishing...

FBI Disables Russian Malware

Reuters is reporting that the FBI "had identified and disabled malware wielded by Russias FSB security service against an undisclosed number of American computers, a move they hoped would deal a death blow to one of Russias leading cyber spying programs." The headline says that the FBI "sabotaged...

Large Language Models and Elections

Earlier this week, the Republican National Committee released a video that it claims was "built entirely with AI imagery." The content of the ad isnt especially novel--a dystopian vision of America under a second term with President Joe Biden--but the deliberate emphasis on the technology used to...

Friday Squid Blogging: More on Squid Fishing

The squid you eat most likely comes from unregulated waters. 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...

Hacking Pickleball

My latest book, A Hackers Mind, has a lot of sports stories. Sports are filled with hacks, as players look for every possible advantage that doesnt explicitly break the rules. Heres an example from pickleball, which nicely explains the dilemma between hacking as a subversion and hacking as...

NetWire Remote Access Trojan Maker Arrested

From Brian Krebs: A Croatian national has been arrested for allegedly operating NetWire, a Remote Access Trojan RAT marketed on cybercrime forums since 2012 as a stealthy way to spy on infected systems and siphon passwords. The arrest coincided with a seizure of the NetWire sales website by the...

Fines as a Security System

Tile has an interesting security solution to make its tracking tags harder to use for stalking: The Anti-Theft Mode feature will make the devices invisible to Scan and Secure, the companys in-app feature that lets you know if any nearby Tiles are following you. But to activate the new Anti-Theft...

No-Fly List Exposed

I cant remember the last time I thought about the US no-fly list: the list of people so dangerous they should never be allowed to fly on an airplane, yet so innocent that we cant arrest them. Back when I thought about it a lot, I realized that the TSAs practice of giving it to every airline meant...

Decarbonizing Cryptocurrencies through Taxation

Maintaining bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies causes about 0.3 percent of global CO2 emissions. That may not sound like a lot, but its more than the emissions of Switzerland, Croatia, and Norway combined. As many cryptocurrencies crash and the FTX bankruptcy moves into the litigation stage,...

Arresting IT Administrators

This is one way of ensuring that IT keeps up with patches: Albanian prosecutors on Wednesday asked for the house arrest of five public employees they blame for not protecting the country from a cyberattack by alleged Iranian hackers. Prosecutors said the five IT officials of the public...

As Long as We’re on the Subject of CAPTCHAs

There are these...

Hacking Boston’s CharlieCard

Interesting discussion of vulnerabilities and exploits against Bostons CharlieCard...

CryWiper Data Wiper Targeting Russian Sites

Kaspersky is reporting on a data wiper masquerading as ransomware that is targeting local Russian government networks. The Trojan corrupts any data thats not vital for the functioning of the operating system. It doesnt affect files with extensions .exe, .dll, .lnk, .sys or .msi, and ignores sever...

LastPass Security Breach

The company was hacked, and customer information accessed. No passwords were compromised...

Facebook Fined $276M under GDPR

Facebook--Meta--was just fined $276 million USD for a data leak that included full names, birth dates, phone numbers, and location. Metas total fine by the Data Protection Commission is over $700 million. Total GDPR fines are over €2 billion EUR since 2018...

Breaking the Zeppelin Ransomware Encryption Scheme

Brian Krebs writes about how the Zeppelin ransomware encryption scheme was broken: The researchers said their break came when they understood that while Zeppelin used three different types of encryption keys to encrypt files, they could undo the whole scheme by factoring or computing just one of...

Failures in Twitter’s Two-Factor Authentication System

Twitter is having intermittent problems with its two-factor authentication system: Not all users are having problems receiving SMS authentication codes, and those who rely on an authenticator app or physical authentication token to secure their Twitter account may not have reason to test the...

Friday Squid Blogging: Newfoundland Giant Squid Sculpture

In 1878, a 55-foot-long giant squid washed up on the shores of Glovers Harbour, Newfoundland. Its the largest giant squid ever recorded--although scientists now think that the size was an exaggeration or the result of postmortem stretching--and theres a full-sized statue of it near the beach wher...

Friday Squid Blogging: The Reproductive Habits of Giant Squid

Interesting: A recent study on giant squid that have washed ashore along the Sea of Japan coast has raised the possibility that the animal has a different reproductive method than many other types of squid. Almost all squid and octopus species are polygamous, with multiple males passing sperm to ...

Detecting Deepfake Audio by Modeling the Human Acoustic Tract

This is interesting research: In this paper, we develop a new mechanism for detecting audio deepfakes using techniques from the field of articulatory phonetics. Specifically, we apply fluid dynamics to estimate the arrangement of the human vocal tract during speech generation and show that...

Friday Squid Blogging: Breeding the Oval Squid

Japanese scientists are trying to breed the oval squid in captivity. 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...

Security Vulnerabilities in Covert CIA Websites

Back in 2018, we learned that covert system of websites that the CIA used for communications was compromised by--at least--China and Iran, and that the blunder caused a bunch of arrests, imprisonments, and executions. Were now learning that the CIA is still "using an irresponsibly secured system...

Automatic Cheating Detection in Human Racing

This is a fascinating glimpse of the future of automatic cheating detection in sports: Maybe you heard about the truly insane false-start controversy in track and field? Devon Allen--a wide receiver for the Philadelphia Eagles--was disqualified from the 110-meter hurdles at the World Athletics...

Responsible Disclosure for Cryptocurrency Security

Stewart Baker discusses why the industry-norm responsible disclosure for software vulnerabilities fails for cryptocurrency software. Why can’t the cryptocurrency industry solve the problem the way the software and hardware industries do, by patching and updating security as flaws are found? Two...

Clever Phishing Scam Uses Legitimate PayPal Messages

Brian Krebs is reporting on a clever PayPal phishing scam that uses legitimate PayPal messaging. Basically, the scammers use the PayPal invoicing system to send the email. The email lists a phone number to dispute the charge, which is not PayPal and quickly turns into a request to download and...

Mudge Files Whistleblower Complaint against Twitter

Peiter Zatko, aka Mudge, has filed a whistleblower complaint with the SEC against Twitter, claiming that they violated an eleven-year-old FTC settlement by having lousy security. And he should know; he was Twitters chief security officer until he was fired in January. The Washington Post has the...

Signal Phone Numbers Exposed in Twilio Hack

Twilio was hacked earlier this month, and the phone numbers of 1,900 Signal users were exposed: Heres what our users need to know: All users can rest assured that their message history, contact lists, profile information, whom theyd blocked, and other personal data remain private and secure and...

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...

A Taxonomy of Access Control

My personal definition of a brilliant idea is one that is immediately obvious once its explained, but no one has thought of it before. I cant believe that no one has described this taxonomy of access control before Ittay Eyal laid it out in this paper. The paper is about cryptocurrency wallet...

Analyzing the Swiss E-Voting System

Andrew Appel has a long analysis of the Swiss online voting system. Its a really good analysis of both the system and the official analyses...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Cubes

Researchers thaw squid frozen into a cube and often make interesting discoveries. Okay, this is a weird story. 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...

Symbiote Backdoor in Linux

Interesting: What makes Symbiote different from other Linux malware that we usually come across, is that it needs to infect other running processes to inflict damage on infected machines. Instead of being a standalone executable file that is run to infect a machine, it is a shared object SO libra...

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...

The NSA Says that There are No Known Flaws in NIST’s Quantum-Resistant Algorithms

Rob Joyce, the director of cybersecurity at the NSA, said so in an interview: The NSA already has classified quantum-resistant algorithms of its own that it developed over many years, said Joyce. But it didnt enter any of its own in the contest. The agencys mathematicians, however, worked with NI...

Surveillance by Driverless Car

San Francisco police are using autonomous vehicles as mobile surveillance cameras. Privacy advocates say the revelation that police are actively using AV footage is cause for alarm. “This is very concerning,” Electronic Frontier Foundation EFF senior staff attorney Adam Schwartz told Motherboard...

New Sophisticated Malware

Mandiant is reporting on a new botnet. The group, which security firm Mandiant is calling UNC3524, has spent the past 18 months burrowing into victims networks with unusual stealth. In cases where the group is ejected, it wastes no time reinfecting the victim environment and picking up where thin...

Long Article on NSO Group

Ronan Farrow has a long article in the New Yorker on NSO Group, which includes the news that someone -- probably Spain -- used the software to spy on domestic Catalonian separatists...

Cyberweapons Arms Manufacturer FinFisher Shuts Down

FinFisher has shut down operations. This is the spyware company whose products were used, among other things, to spy on Turkish and Bahraini political opposition...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Migration and Climate Change

New research on the changing migration of the Doryteuthis opalescens as a result of climate change. News article: Stanford researchers have solved a mystery about why a species of squid native to California has been found thriving in the Gulf of Alaska about 1,800 miles north of its expected rang...

A Detailed Look at the Conti Ransomware Gang

Based on two years of leaked messages, 60,000 in all: The Conti ransomware gang runs like any number of businesses around the world. It has multiple departments, from HR and administrators to coders and researchers. It has policies on how its hackers should process their code, and shares best...

Friday Squid Blogging: Unexpectedly Low Squid Population in the Arctic

Research: Abstract: The retreating ice cover of the Central Arctic Ocean CAO fuels speculations on future fisheries. However, very little is known about the existence of harvestable fish stocks in this 3.3 million­–square kilometer ecosystem around the North Pole. Crossing the Eurasian Basin, we...

NASA’s Insider Threat Program

The Office of Inspector General has audited NASAs insider threat program: While NASA has a fully operational insider threat program for its classified systems, the vast majority of the Agencys information technology IT systems -- including many containing high-value assets or critical...

An Elaborate Employment Con in the Internet Age

The story is an old one, but the tech gives it a bunch of new twists: Gemma Brett, a 27-year-old designer from west London, had only been working at Madbird for two weeks when she spotted something strange. Curious about what her commute would be like when the pandemic was over, she searched for...

Merck Wins Insurance Lawsuit re NotPetya Attack

The insurance company Ace American has to pay for the losses: On 6th December 2021, the New Jersey Superior Court granted partial summary judgment attached in favour of Merck and International Indemnity, declaring that the War or Hostile Acts exclusion was inapplicable to the dispute. Merck...

UK Government to Launch PR Campaign Undermining End-to-End Encryption

Rolling Stone is reporting that the UK government has hired the M&C Saatchi advertising agency to launch an anti-encryption advertising campaign. Presumably theyll lean heavily on the "think of the children!" rhetoric were seeing in this current wave of the crypto wars. The technical eavesdroppin...

An Examination of the Bug Bounty Marketplace

Heres a fascinating report: "Bounty Everything: Hackers and the Making of the Global Bug Marketplace." From a summary: …researchers Ryan Ellis and Yuan Stevens provide a window into the working lives of hackers who participate in “bug bounty” programs­ -- programs that hire hackers to discover an...

Using Foreign Nationals to Bypass US Surveillance Restrictions

Remember when the US and Australian police surreptitiously owned and operated the encrypted cell phone app ANOM? They arrested 800 people in 2021 based on that operation. New documents received by Motherboard show that over 100 of those phones were shipped to users in the US, far more than...