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...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at the 24th International Information Security Conference in Madrid, Spain, on November 17, 2022. The list is maintained on this page...

NSA Over-surveillance

Here in 2022, we have a newly declassified 2016 Inspector General report--"Misuse of Sigint Systems"--about a 2013 NSA program that resulted in the unauthorized that is, illegal targeting of Americans. Given all we learned from Edward Snowden, this feels like a minor coda. Theres nothing really...

The Conviction of Uber’s Chief Security Officer

I have been meaning to write about Joe Sullivan, Ubers former Chief Security Officer. He was convicted of crimes related to covering up a cyberattack against Uber. Its a complicated case, and Im not convinced that he deserved a guilty ruling or that its a good thing for the industry. I may still...

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...

Australia Increases Fines for Massive Data Breaches

After suffering two large, and embarrassing, data breaches in recent weeks, the Australian government increased the fine for serious data breaches from $2.2 million to a minimum of $50 million. Thats $50 million AUD, or $32 million USD. This is a welcome change. The problem is one of incentives,...

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...

Credit Card Fraud That Bypasses 2FA

Someone in the UK is stealing smartphones and credit cards from people who have stored them in gym lockers, and is using the two items in combination to commit fraud: Phones, of course, can be made inaccessible with the use of passwords and face or fingerprint unlocking. And bank cards can be...

Facebook Has No Idea What Data It Has

This is from a court deposition: Facebooks stonewalling has been revealing on its own, providing variations on the same theme: It has amassed so much data on so many billions of people and organized it so confusingly that full transparency is impossible on a technical level. In the March 2022...

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...

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...

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...

San Francisco Police Want Real-Time Access to Private Surveillance Cameras

Surely no one could have predicted this: The new proposal--championed by Mayor London Breed after Novembers wild weekend of orchestrated burglaries and theft in the San Francisco Bay Area--would authorize the police department to use non-city-owned security cameras and camera networks to live...

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...

M1 Chip Vulnerability

This is a new vulnerability against Apples M1 chip. Researchers say that it is unpatchable. Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, however, have created a novel hardware attack, which combines memory corruption and speculative execution attacks to sidestep...

Long Story on the Accused CIA Vault 7 Leaker

Long article about Joshua Schulte, the accused leaker of the WikiLeaks Vault 7 and Vault 8 CIA data. Well worth reading...

Friday Squid Blogging: More on the “Mind Boggling” Squid Genome

Octopus and squid genes are weird. 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...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Far Side Cartoon

Squid, of course. 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...

Insurance Coverage for NotPetya Losses

Tarah Wheeler and Josephine Wolff analyze a recent court decision that the NotPetya attacks are not considered an act of war under the wording of Mercks insurance policy, and that the insurers must pay the $1B+ claim. Wheeler and Wolff argue that the judge "did the right thing for the wrong...

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...

Amy Zegart on Spycraft in the Internet Age

Amy Zegart has a new book: Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence. Wired has an excerpt: In short, data volume and accessibility are revolutionizing sensemaking. The intelligence playing field is leveling­ -- and not in a good way. Intelligence collectors are...

Finding Vulnerabilities in Open Source Projects

The Open Source Security Foundation announced $10 million in funding from a pool of tech and financial companies, including $5 million from Microsoft and Google, to find vulnerabilities in open source projects: The "Alpha" side will emphasize vulnerability testing by hand in the most popular...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Prices Are Rising

The price of squid in Korea is rising due to limited supply. 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...

On the Log4j Vulnerability

Its serious: The range of impacts is so broad because of the nature of the vulnerability itself. Developers use logging frameworks to keep track of what happens in a given application. To exploit Log4Shell, an attacker only needs to get the system to log a strategically crafted string of code. Fr...

NSO Group’s Pegasus Spyware Used Against US State Department Officials

NSO Groups descent into Internet pariah status continues. Its Pegasus spyware was used against nine US State Department employees. We dont know which NSO Group customer trained the spyware on the US. But the company does: NSO Group said in a statement on Thursday that it did not have any indicati...

Law Enforcement Access to Chat Data and Metadata

A January 2021 FBI document outlines what types of data and metadata can be lawfully obtained by the FBI from messaging apps. Rolling Stone broke the story and its been written about elsewhere. I dont see a lot of surprises in the document. Lots of apps leak all sorts of metadata: iMessage and...

Is Microsoft Stealing People’s Bookmarks?

I received email from two people who told me that Microsoft Edge enabled synching without warning or consent, which means that Microsoft sucked up all of their bookmarks. Of course they can turn synching off, but its too late. Has this happened to anyone else, or was this user error of some sort?...

Securing Your Smartphone

This is part 3 of Sean Gallaghers advice for "securing your digital life."...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Game Has a Cryptocurrency

In what maybe peak hype, Squid Game has its own cryptocurrency. Not in the fictional show, but in real life. 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...

More Russian SVR Supply-Chain Attacks

Microsoft is reporting that the same attacker that was behind the SolarWinds breach -- the Russian SVR, which Microsoft is calling Nobelium -- is continuing with similar supply-chain attacks: Nobelium has been attempting to replicate the approach it has used in past attacks by targeting...

Problems with Multifactor Authentication

Roger Grimes on why multifactor authentication isnt a panacea: The first time I heard of this issue was from a Midwest CEO. His organization had been hit by ransomware to the tune of $10M. Operationally, they were still recovering nearly a year later. And, embarrassingly, it was his most trusted ...

Schneier.com is Moving

Im switching my website software from Movable Type to WordPress, and moving to a new host. The migration is expected to last from approximately 3 AM EST Monday until 4 PM EST Tuesday. The site will still be visible during that time, but comments will be disabled. This is to prevent any new commen...

Friday Squid Blogging: Morning Squid

Asa ika means "morning squid" in Japanese. 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...

2017 Tesla Hack

Interesting story of a class break against the entire Tesla fleet...

Identifying People by Their Browsing Histories

Interesting paper: "Replication: Why We Still Can't Browse in Peace: On the Uniqueness and Reidentifiability of Web Browsing Histories": We examine the threat to individuals' privacy based on the feasibility of reidentifying users through distinctive profiles of their browsing history visible to...

Fawkes: Digital Image Cloaking

Fawkes is a system for manipulating digital images so that they aren't recognized by facial recognition systems. At a high level, Fawkes takes your personal images, and makes tiny, pixel-level changes to them that are invisible to the human eye, in a process we call image cloaking. You can then u...

I'm Leaving IBM

Today is my last day at IBM. If you've been following along, IBM bought my startup Resilient Systems in Spring 2016. Since then, I have been with IBM, holding the nicely ambiguous title of "Special Advisor." As of the end of the month, I will be back on my own. I will continue to write and speak,...

Measuring the Rationality of Security Decisions

Interesting research: "Dancing Pigs or Externalities? Measuring the Rationality of Security Decisions": Abstract: Accurately modeling human decision-making in security is critical to thinking about when, why, and how to recommend that users adopt certain secure behaviors. In this work, we conduct...