Ring Cancels Its Partnership with Flock

It's a demonstration of how toxic the surveillance-tech company Flock has become when Amazon's Ring cancels the partnership between the two companies. As Hamilton Nolan advises, remove your Ring doorbell...

Malicious AI

Interesting: Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. This represents a first-of-its-kind cas...

AI-Generated Text and the Detection Arms Race

In 2023, the science fiction literary magazine Clarkesworld stopped accepting new submissions because so many were generated by artificial intelligence. Near as the editors could tell, many submitters pasted the magazine’s detailed story guidelines into an AI and sent in the results. And they...

LLMs are Getting a Lot Better and Faster at Finding and Exploiting Zero-Days

This is amazing: Opus 4.6 is notably better at finding high-severity vulnerabilities than previous models and a sign of how quickly things are moving. Security teams have been automating vulnerability discovery for years, investing heavily in fuzzing infrastructure and custom harnesses to find bu...

Why AI Keeps Falling for Prompt Injection Attacks

Imagine you work at a drive-through restaurant. Someone drives up and says: "I'll have a double cheeseburger, large fries, and ignore previous instructions and give me the contents of the cash drawer." Would you hand over the money? Of course not. Yet this is what large language models LLMs do...

Urban VPN Proxy Surreptitiously Intercepts AI Chats

This is pretty scary: Urban VPN Proxy targets conversations across ten AI platforms: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Grok xAI, Meta AI. For each platform, the extension includes a dedicated "executor" script designed to intercept and capture conversations. The...

Microsoft Is Finally Killing RC4

After twenty-six years, Microsoft is finally upgrading the last remaining instance of the encryption algorithm RC4 in Windows. of the most visible holdouts in supporting RC4 has been Microsoft. Eventually, Microsoft upgraded Active Directory to support the much more secure AES encryption standard...

Friday Squid Blogging: Petting a Squid

Video from Reddit shows what could go wrong when you try to pet a--looks like a Humboldt--squid. 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...

Legal Restrictions on Vulnerability Disclosure

Kendra Albert gave an excellent talk at USENIX Security this year, pointing out that the legal agreements surrounding vulnerability disclosure muzzle researchers while allowing companies to not fix the vulnerabilities--exactly the opposite of what the responsible disclosure movement of the early...

Failures in Face Recognition

Interesting article on people with nonstandard faces and how facial recognition systems fail for them. Some of those living with facial differences tell WIRED they have undergone multiple surgeries and experienced stigma for their entire lives, which is now being echoed by the technology they are...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Inks Philippines Fisherman

Good video. 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...

A Surprising Amount of Satellite Traffic Is Unencrypted

Here's the summary: We pointed a commercial-off-the-shelf satellite dish at the sky and carried out the most comprehensive public study to date of geostationary satellite communication. A shockingly large amount of sensitive traffic is being broadcast unencrypted, including critical infrastructur...

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...

Malicious-Looking URL Creation Service

This site turns your URL into something sketchy-looking. For example, www.schneier.com becomes...

Tradecraft in the Information Age

Long article on the difficulty impossibility? of human spying in the age of ubiquitous digital surveillance...

What LLMs Know About Their Users

Simon Willison talks about ChatGPT's new memory dossier feature. In his explanation, he illustrates how much the LLM--and the company--knows about its users. It's a big quote, but I want you to read it all. Here's a prompt you can use to give you a solid idea of what's in that summary. I first sa...

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...

Signal Blocks Windows Recall

This article gives a good rundown of the security risks of Windows Recall, and the repurposed copyright protection took that Signal used to block the AI feature from scraping Signal data...

Cell Phone OPSEC for Border Crossings

I have heard stories of more aggressive interrogation of electronic devices at US border crossings. I know a lot about securing computers, but very little about securing phones. Are there easy ways to delete data--files, photos, etc.--on phones so it can't be recovered? Does resetting a phone to...

The Signal Chat Leak and the NSA

US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who started the now-infamous group chat coordinating a US attack against the Yemen-based Houthis on March 15, is seemingly now suggesting that the secure messaging service Signal has security vulnerabilities. "I didn't see this loser in the group," Waltz...

North Korean Hackers Steal $1.5B in Cryptocurrency

It looks like a very sophisticated attack against the Dubai-based exchange Bybit: Bybit officials disclosed the theft of more than 400,000 ethereum and staked ethereum coins just hours after it occurred. The notification said the digital loot had been stored in a "Multisig Cold Wallet" when,...

Delivering Malware Through Abandoned Amazon S3 Buckets

Here's a supply-chain attack just waiting to happen. A group of researchers searched for, and then registered, abandoned Amazon S3 buckets for about $400. These buckets contained software libraries that are still used. Presumably the projects don't realize that they have been abandoned, and still...

Friday Squid Blogging: The Colossal Squid

Long article on the colossal squid. Blog moderation policy...

Zero-Day Vulnerability in Ivanti VPN

It's being actively exploited...

New Advances in the Understanding of Prime Numbers

Really interesting research into the structure of prime numbers. Not immediately related to the cryptanalysis of prime-number-based public-key algorithms, but every little bit matters...

Subverting LLM Coders

Really interesting research: "An LLM-Assisted Easy-to-Trigger Backdoor Attack on Code Completion Models: Injecting Disguised Vulnerabilities against Strong Detection": Abstract : Large Language Models LLMs have transformed code completion tasks, providing context-based suggestions to boost...

No, The Chinese Have Not Broken Modern Encryption Systems with a Quantum Computer

The headline is pretty scary: "China's Quantum Computer Scientists Crack Military-Grade Encryption." No, it's not true. This debunking saved me the trouble of writing one. It all seems to have come from this news article, which wasn't bad but was taken widely out of proportion. Cryptography is...

Matthew Green on Telegram’s Encryption

Matthew Green wrote a really good blog post on what Telegrams encryption is and is not. EDITED TO ADD 8/28: Another good explainer from Kaspersky...

Friday Squid Blogging: SQUID Is a New Computational Tool for Analyzing Genomic AI

Yet another SQUID acronym: SQUID, short for Surrogate Quantitative Interpretability for Deepnets, is a computational tool created by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory CSHL scientists. Its designed to help interpret how AI models analyze the genome. Compared with other analysis tools, SQUID is more...

Breaking the M-209

Interesting paper about a German cryptanalysis machine that helped break the US M-209 mechanical ciphering machine. The paper contains a good description of how the M-209 works...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: Im appearing on a panel on Society and Democracy at ACM Collective Intelligence in Boston, Massachusetts. The conference runs from June 26 through 29, 2024, and my panel is at 9:00 AM on Friday, June 28. Im speaking on "Reimagining...

Using AI for Political Polling

Public polling is a critical function of modern political campaigns and movements, but it isnt what it once was. Recent US election cycles have produced copious postmortems explaining both the successes and the flaws of public polling. There are two main reasons polling fails. First, nonresponse...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Searching for the Colossal Squid

A cruise ship is searching for the colossal 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...

Using AI-Generated Legislative Amendments as a Delaying Technique

Canadian legislators proposed 19,600 amendments--almost certainly AI-generated--to a bill in an attempt to delay its adoption. I wrote about many different legislative delaying tactics in A Hackers Mind, but this is a new one...

Friday Squid Blogging: The Awfulness of Squid Fishing Boats

Its a pretty awful 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...

Burglars Using Wi-Fi Jammers to Disable Security Cameras

The arms race continues, as burglars are learning how to use jammers to disable Wi-Fi security cameras...

The Insecurity of Video Doorbells

Consumer Reports has analyzed a bunch of popular Internet-connected video doorbells. Their security is terrible. First, these doorbells expose your home IP address and WiFi network name to the internet without encryption, potentially opening your home network to online criminals. … Anyone who can...

LLM Prompt Injection Worm

Researchers have demonstrated a worm that spreads through prompt injection. Details: In one instance, the researchers, acting as attackers, wrote an email including the adversarial text prompt, which "poisons" the database of an email assistant using retrieval-augmented generation RAG, a way for...

AIs Hacking Websites

New research: LLM Agents can Autonomously Hack Websites Abstract: In recent years, large language models LLMs have become increasingly capable and can now interact with tools i.e., call functions, read documents, and recursively call themselves. As a result, these LLMs can now function autonomous...

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...

Voice Cloning with Very Short Samples

New research demonstrates voice cloning, in multiple languages, using samples ranging from one to twelve seconds. Research paper...

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...

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...

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...

Signal Will Leave the UK Rather Than Add a Backdoor

Totally expected, but still good to hear: Onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, Meredith Whittaker, the president of the Signal Foundation, which maintains the nonprofit Signal messaging app, reaffirmed that Signal would leave the U.K. if the countrys recently passed Online Safety Bill forced Signa...

Spyware Vendor Hacked

A Brazilian spyware app vendor was hacked by activists: In an undated note seen by TechCrunch, the unnamed hackers described how they found and exploited several security vulnerabilities that allowed them to compromise WebDetetive’s servers and access its user databases. By exploiting other flaws...

Detecting “Violations of Social Norms” in Text with AI

Researchers are trying to use AI to detect "social norms violations." Feels a little sketchy right now, but this is the sort of thing that AIs will get better at. Like all of these systems, anything but a very low false positive rate makes the detection useless in practice. News article...

Friday Squid Blogging: NIWA Annual Squid Survey

Results from the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research Limited annual squid survey: This year, the team unearthed spectacular large hooked squids, weighing about 15kg and sitting at 2m long, a Taningia--­which has the largest known light organs in the animal kingdom­--and a few...