Deepfakes and the 2024 US Election

Interesting analysis: We analyzed every instance of AI use in elections collected by the WIRED AI Elections Project source for our analysis, which tracked known uses of AI for creating political content during elections taking place in 2024 worldwide. In each case, we identified what AI was used...

Privacy of Photos.app’s Enhanced Visual Search

Initial speculation about a new Apple feature...

Hacking Digital License Plates

Not everything needs to be digital and "smart." License plates, for example: Josep Rodriguez, a researcher at security firm IOActive, has revealed a technique to “jailbreak” digital license plates sold by Reviver, the leading vendor of those plates in the US with 65,000 plates already sold. By...

IronNet Has Shut Down

After retiring in 2014 from an uncharacteristically long tenure running the NSA and US CyberCommand, Keith Alexander founded a cybersecurity company called IronNet. At the time, he claimed that it was based on IP he developed on his own time while still in the military. That always troubled me...

China Possibly Hacking US “Lawful Access” Backdoor

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Chinese hackers Salt Typhoon penetrated the networks of US broadband providers, and might have accessed the backdoors that the federal government uses to execute court-authorized wiretap requests. Those backdoors have been mandated by law--CALEA--since...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at eCrime 2024 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. The event runs from September 24 through 26, 2024, and my keynote is at 8:45 AM ET on the 24th. I’m briefly speaking at the EPIC Champion of Freedom Awards in Washington, D...

Friday Squid Blog: The Market for Squid Oil Is Growing

How did I not know before now that there was a market for squid oil? The squid oil market has experienced robust growth in recent years, expanding from $4.56 billion in 2023 to $4.94 billion in 2024 at a compound annual growth rate CAGR of 8.5%. The growth in the historic period can be attributed...

Cloudflare Reports that Almost 7% of All Internet Traffic Is Malicious

6.8%, to be precise. From ZDNet: However, Distributed Denial of Service DDoS attacks continue to be cybercriminals weapon of choice, making up over 37% of all mitigated traffic. The scale of these attacks is staggering. In the first quarter of 2024 alone, Cloudflare blocked 4.5 million unique DDo...

Friday Squid Blogging: 1994 Lair of Squid Game

I didnt know: In 1994, Hewlett-Packard released a miracle machine: the HP 200LX pocket-size PC. In the depths of the device, among the MS-DOS productivity apps built into its fixed memory, there lurked a first-person maze game called Lair of Squid. … In Lair of Squid, youre trapped in an underwat...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Baby Colossal Squid

This video might be a juvenile 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...

How Criminals Are Using Generative AI

Theres a new report on how criminals are using generative AI tools: Key Takeaways: Adoption rates of AI technologies among criminals lag behind the rates of their industry counterparts because of the evolving nature of cybercrime. Compared to last year, criminals seem to have abandoned any attemp...

Microsoft and Security Incentives

Former senior White House cyber policy director A. J. Grotto talks about the economic incentives for companies to improve their security--in particular, Microsoft: Grotto told us Microsoft had to be "dragged kicking and screaming" to provide logging capabilities to the government by default, and...

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...

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...

Apple Announces Post-Quantum Encryption Algorithms for iMessage

Apple announced PQ3, its post-quantum encryption standard based on the Kyber secure key-encapsulation protocol, one of the post-quantum algorithms selected by NIST in 2022. Theres a lot of detail in the Apple blog post, and more in Douglas Stabilas security analysis. I am of two minds about this...

No, Toothbrushes Were Not Used in a Massive DDoS Attack

The widely reported story last week that 1.5 million smart toothbrushes were hacked and used in a DDoS attack is false. Near as I can tell, a German reporter talking to someone at Fortinet got it wrong, and then everyone else ran with it without reading the German text. It was a hypothetical, whi...

Microsoft Executives Hacked

Microsoft is reporting that a Russian intelligence agency--the same one responsible for SolarWinds--accessed the email system of the companys executives. Beginning in late November 2023, the threat actor used a password spray attack to compromise a legacy non-production test tenant account and ga...

Voice Cloning with Very Short Samples

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

Data Exfiltration Using Indirect Prompt Injection

Interesting attack on a LLM: In Writer, users can enter a ChatGPT-like session to edit or create their documents. In this chat session, the LLM can retrieve information from sources on the web to assist users in creation of their documents. We show that attackers can prepare websites that, when a...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Nebula

Pretty photograph. The Squid Nebula is shown in blue, indicating doubly ionized oxygen--­which is when you ionize your oxygen once and then ionize it again just to make sure. In all seriousness, it likely indicates a low-mass star nearing the end of its life. As usual, you can also use this squid...

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...

The Inability to Simultaneously Verify Sentience, Location, and Identity

Really interesting "systematization of knowledge" paper: "SoK: The Ghost Trilemma" Abstract: Trolls, bots, and sybils distort online discourse and compromise the security of networked platforms. User identity is central to the vectors of attack and manipulation employed in these contexts. However...

Disabling Self-Driving Cars with a Traffic Cone

You can disable a self-driving car by putting a traffic cone on its hood: The group got the idea for the conings by chance. The person claims a few of them walking together one night saw a cone on the hood of an AV, which appeared disabled. They werent sure at the time which came first; perhaps...

Friday Squid Blogging: Balloon Squid

Masayoshi Matsumoto is a "master balloon artist," and he made a squid and other animals. 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...

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...

UPS Data Harvested for SMS Phishing Attacks

I get UPS phishing spam on my phone all the time. I never click on it, because its so obviously spam. Turns out that hackers have been harvesting actual UPS delivery data from a Canadian tracking tool for its phishing SMSs...

On the Catastrophic Risk of AI

Earlier this week, I signed on to a short group statement, coordinated by the Center for AI Safety: Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war. The press coverage has been extensive, and surprising t...

Indiana, Iowa, and Tennessee Pass Comprehensive Privacy Laws

Its been a big month for US data privacy. Indiana, Iowa, and Tennessee all passed state privacy laws, bringing the total number of states with a privacy law up to eight. No private right of action in any of those, which means its up to the states to enforce the laws...

Ted Chiang on the Risks of AI

Ted Chiang has an excellent essay in the New Yorker: "Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?" The question we should be asking is: as A.I. becomes more powerful and flexible, is there any way to keep it from being another version of McKinsey? The question is worth considering across different meaning...

Friday Squid Blogging: More Squid Camouflage Research

Heres a research group trying to replicate squid cell transparency in mammalian cells. 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...

Research on AI in Adversarial Settings

New research: “Achilles Heels for AGI/ASI via Decision Theoretic Adversaries": As progress in AI continues to advance, it is important to know how advanced systems will make choices and in what ways they may fail. Machines can already outsmart humans in some domains, and understanding how to safe...

Security Vulnerabilities in Snipping Tools

Both Googles Pixels Markup Tool and the Windows Snipping Tool have vulnerabilities that allow people to partially recover content that was edited out of images...

Elephant Hackers

An elephant uses its right-of-way privileges to stop sugar-cane trucks and grab food...

New National Cybersecurity Strategy

Last week, the Biden administration released a new National Cybersecurity Strategy summary here. There is lots of good commentary out there. Its basically a smart strategy, but the hard parts are always the implementation details. Its one thing to say that we need to secure our cloud...

Friday Squid Blogging: Thermal Batteries from Squid Proteins

Researchers are making thermal batteries from "a synthetic material thats derived from squid ring teeth protein." 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...

Hacking the Tax Code

The tax code isn’t software. It doesn’t run on a computer. But it’s still code. It’s a series of algorithms that takes an input--financial information for the year--and produces an output: the amount of tax owed. It’s incredibly complex code; there are a bazillion details and exceptions and speci...

Ransomware Payments Are Down

Chainalysis reports that worldwide ransomware payments were down in 2022. Ransomware attackers extorted at least $456.8 million from victims in 2022, down from $765.6 million the year before. As always, we have to caveat these findings by noting that the true totals are much higher, as there are...

Threats of Machine-Generated Text

With the release of ChatGPT, Ive read many random articles about this or that threat from the technology. This paper is a good survey of the field: what the threats are, how we might detect machine-generated text, directions for future research. Its a solid grounding amongst all of the hype...

Remote Vulnerabilities in Automobiles

This group has found a ton of remote vulnerabilities in all sorts of automobiles. Its enough to make you want to buy a car that is not Internet-connected. Unfortunately, that seems to be impossible...

Apple Patches iPhone Zero-Day

The most recent iPhone update--to version 16.1.2--patches a zero-day vulnerability that "may have been actively exploited against versions of iOS released before iOS 15.1." News: Apple said security researchers at Googles Threat Analysis Group, which investigates nation state-backed spyware,...

Reimagining Democracy

Last week, I hosted a two-day workshop on reimagining democracy. The idea was to bring together people from a variety of disciplines who are all thinking about different aspects of democracy, less from a "what we need to do today" perspective and more from a blue-sky future perspective. My remit ...

Another Event-Related Spyware App

Last month, we were warned not to install Qatars World Cup app because it was spyware. This month, its Egypts COP27 Summit app: The app is being promoted as a tool to help attendees navigate the event. But it risks giving the Egyptian government permission to read users emails and messages. Even...

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...

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...

Prompt Injection/Extraction Attacks against AI Systems

This is an interesting attack I had not previously considered. The variants are interesting, and I think were just starting to understand their implications...

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...

Russia Creates Malware False-Flag App

The Russian hacking group Turla released an Android app that seems to aid Ukrainian hackers in their attacks against Russian networks. Its actually malware, and provides information back to the Russians: The hackers pretended to be a "community of free people around the world who are fighting...

Ecuador’s Attempt to Resettle Edward Snowden

Someone hacked the Ecuadorian embassy in Moscow and found a document related to Ecuadors 2013 efforts to bring Edward Snowden there. If you remember, Snowden was traveling from Hong Kong to somewhere when the US revoked his passport, stranding him in Russia. In the document, Ecuador asks Russia t...