On the Subversion of NIST by the NSA

Nadiya Kostyuk and Susan Landau wrote an interesting paper: "Dueling Over DUALECDRBG: The Consequences of Corrupting a Cryptographic Standardization Process": Abstract: In recent decades, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST, which develops cryptographic standards for...

Twitter Used Two-Factor Login Details for Ad Targeting

Twitter was fined $150 million for using phone numbers and email addresses collected for two-factor authentication for ad targeting...

Leaking Military Secrets on Gaming Discussion Boards

People are leaking classified military information on discussion boards for the video game War Thunder to win arguments--repeatedly...

Remotely Controlling Touchscreens

Researchers have demonstrated controlling touchscreens at a distance, at least in a laboratory setting: The core idea is to take advantage of the electromagnetic signals to execute basic touch events such as taps and swipes into targeted locations of the touchscreen with the goal of taking over...

The Limits of Cyber Operations in Wartime

Interesting paper by Lennart Maschmeyer: "The Subversive Trilemma: Why Cyber Operations Fall Short of Expectations": Abstract: Although cyber conflict has existed for thirty years, the strategic utility of cyber operations remains unclear. Many expect cyber operations to provide independent utili...

The Justice Department Will No Longer Charge Security Researchers with Criminal Hacking

Following a recent Supreme Court ruling, the Justice Department will no longer prosecute "good faith" security researchers with cybercrimes: The policy for the first time directs that good-faith security research should not be charged. Good faith security research means accessing a computer solel...

The Onion on Google Map Surveillance

"Google Maps Adds Shortcuts through Houses of People Google Knows Arent Home Right Now." Excellent satire...

Attacks on Managed Service Providers Expected to Increase

CISA, NSA, FBI, and similar organizations in the other Five Eyes countries are warning that attacks on MSPs--as a vector to their customers--are likely to increase. No details about what this prediction is based on. Makes sense, though. The SolarWinds attack was incredibly successful for the...

Apple Mail Now Blocks Email Trackers

Apple Mail now blocks email trackers by default. Most email newsletters you get include an invisible "image," typically a single white pixel, with a unique file name. The server keeps track of every time this "image" is opened and by which IP address. This quirk of internet history means that...

Zero-Day Vulnerabilities Are on the Rise

Both Google and Mandiant are reporting a significant increase in the number of zero-day vulnerabilities reported in 2021. Google: 2021 included the detection and disclosure of 58 in-the-wild 0-days, the most ever recorded since Project Zero began tracking in mid-2014. That’s more than double the...

Industrial Control System Malware Discovered

The Department of Energy, CISA, the FBI, and the NSA jointly issued an advisory describing a sophisticated piece of malware called Pipedream thats designed to attack a wide range of industrial control systems. This is clearly from a government, but no attribution is given. Theres also no indicati...

Friday Squid Blogging: Do Squid Have Emotions?

Scientists are now debating whether octopuses, squid, and crabs have emotions. Short answer: we dont know, but cant rule it out. There may be a point when humans can no longer assume that crayfish, shrimp, and other invertebrates dont feel pain and other emotions. "If they can no longer be...

US Disrupts Russian Botnet

The Justice Department announced the disruption of a Russian GRU-controlled botnet: The Justice Department today announced a court-authorized operation, conducted in March 2022, to disrupt a two-tiered global botnet of thousands of infected network hardware devices under the control of a threat...

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...

White House Warns of Possible Russian Cyberattacks

News: The White House has issued its starkest warning that Russia may be planning cyberattacks against critical-sector U.S. companies amid the Ukraine invasion. … Context: The alert comes after Russia has lobbed a series of digital attacks at the Ukrainian government and critical industry sectors...

US Critical Infrastructure Companies Will Have to Report When They Are Hacked

This will be law soon: Companies critical to U.S. national interests will now have to report when theyre hacked or they pay ransomware, according to new rules approved by Congress. … The reporting requirement legislation was approved by the House and the Senate on Thursday and is expected to be...

Vulnerability in Stalkerware Apps

TechCrunch is reporting -- but not describing in detail -- a vulnerability in a series of stalkerware apps that exposes personal information of the victims. The vulnerability isnt in the apps installed on the victims phones, but in the website the stalker goes to view the information the app...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Piglet Squid

Nice article on the piglet 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...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at the RSA Conference 2022 in San Francisco on February 8, 2022. I’m speaking at IT-S Now 2022 in Vienna on June 2, 2022. I’m speaking at the 14th International Conference on Cyber Conflict, CyCon 2022, in Tallinn,...

New German Government is Pro-Encryption and Anti-Backdoors

I hope this is true: According to Jens Zimmermann, the German coalition negotiations had made it "quite clear" that the incoming government of the Social Democrats SPD, the Greens and the business-friendly liberal FDP would reject "the weakening of encryption, which is being attempted under the...

More Detail on the Juniper Hack and the NSA PRNG Backdoor

We knew the basics of this story, but its good to have more detail. Heres me in 2015 about this Juniper hack. Heres me in 2007 on the NSA backdoor...

Double-Encrypting Ransomware

This seems to be a new tactic: Emsisoft has identified two distinct tactics. In the first, hackers encrypt data with ransomware A and then re-encrypt that data with ransomware B. The other path involves what Emsisoft calls a "side-by-side encryption" attack, in which attacks encrypt some of an...

Hacking AI-Graded Tests

The company Edgenuity sells AI systems for grading tests. Turns out that they just search for keywords without doing any actual semantic analysis...

North Korea ATM Hack

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA published a long and technical alert describing a North Korea hacking scheme against ATMs in a bunch of countries worldwide: This joint advisory is the result of analytic efforts among the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agenc...

US Postal Service Files Blockchain Voting Patent

The US Postal Service has filed a patent on a blockchain voting method: Abstract: A voting system can use the security of blockchain and the mail to provide a reliable voting system. A registered voter receives a computer readable code in the mail and confirms identity and confirms correct ballot...

Cryptanalysis of an Old Zip Encryption Algorithm

Mike Stay broke an old zipfile encryption algorithm to recover $300,000 in bitcoin. DefCon talk here...

Data and Goliath Book Placement

Notice the copy of Data and Goliath just behind the head of Maine Senator Angus King. This demonstrates the importance of a vibrant color and a large font...

Hacking a Power Supply

This hack targets the firmware on modern power supplies. Yes, power supplies are also computers. Normally, when a phone is connected to a power brick with support for fast charging, the phone and the power adapter communicate with each other to determine the proper amount of electricity that can ...

EFF's 30th Anniversary Livestream

It's the EFF's 30th birthday, and the organization is having a celebratory livestream today from 3:00 to 10:00 pm PDT. There are a lot of interesting discussions and things. I am having a fireside chat at 4:10 pm PDT to talk about the Crypto Wars and more. Stop by. And thank you for supporting EF...

Friday Squid Blogging: Gonatus Squid Eating a Dragonfish

There's a video: Last July, Choy was on a ship off the shore of Monterey Bay, looking at the video footage transmitted by an ROV many feet below. A Gonatus squid was spotted sucking off the face of a "really huge dragonfish," she says. "It took a little while to figure out what's going on here,...

Lessons Learned from the Estonian National ID Security Flaw

Estonia recently suffered a major flaw in the security of their national ID card. This article discusses the fix and the lessons learned from the incident: In the future, the infrastructure dependency on one digital identity platform must be decreased, the use of several alternatives must be...

NSA Insider Security Post-Snowden

According to a recently declassified report obtained under FOIA, the NSA's attempts to protect itself against insider attacks aren't going very well: The N.S.A. failed to consistently lock racks of servers storing highly classified data and to secure data center machine rooms, according to the...

NSA Links WannaCry to North Korea

There's evidence: Though the assessment is not conclusive, the preponderance of the evidence points to Pyongyang. It includes the range of computer Internet protocol addresses in China historically used by the RGB, and the assessment is consistent with intelligence gathered recently by other...

Data vs. Analysis in Counterterrorism

This article argues that Britain's counterterrorism problem isn't lack of data, it's lack of analysis...

Faking Domain Names with Unicode Characters

It's things like this that make phishing attacks easier. News article...

Hiding Prompt Injection in Legal Filing

Someone hid AI instructions into a legal filing. Alternate link...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking, signing books, and participating in panel discussions at LAcon V in Anaheim, California, USA. My full schedule is here. I'm speaking online via Zoom at a League of Women Voters event on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, at...

If the Markets Reject OpenAI and Anthropic, the US Should Nationalize Them

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared inThe Guardian. OpenAI, and then Anthropic, were each formed by AI developers who feared unrestrained corporate AI development--specifically, that companies like Google and Meta would steer the technology towards deleterious,...

Should You Use AI for a Task? Here’s a Simple Way to Decide

This essay originally appeared inThe Guardian. I teach public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Munk School at the University of Toronto. And it will come as no surprise to you that my students regularly use AI to complete their writing assignments. Doing so is a waste of their tuition...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Washing Up on Cape Cod Beach

Lots of articles about this. 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...

Embedding Forbidden Text in Spyware to Discourage AI Analysis

At least one malware developer is adding text about nuclear and biological weapons to their spyware, in an effort to stop automatic AI analysis. Details: The index.js payload begins with a large JavaScript block comment containing fake system instructions and policy-triggering content. Because it...

Google Wants to Transition to Post-Quantum Cryptography by 2029

Google says that it will fully transition to post-quantum cryptography by 2029. I think this is a good move, not because I think we will have a useful quantum computer anywhere near that year, but because crypto-agility is always a good thing. Slashdot thread...

Claude Used to Hack Mexican Government

An unknown hacker used Anthropic's LLM to hack the Mexican government: The unknown Claude user wrote Spanish-language prompts for the chatbot to act as an elite hacker, finding vulnerabilities in government networks, writing computer scripts to exploit them and determining ways to automate data...

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...

Internet Voting is Too Insecure for Use in Elections

No matter how many times we say it, the idea comes back again and again. Hopefully, this letter will hold back the tide for at least a while longer. Executive summary: Scientists have understood for many years that internet voting is insecure and that there is no known or foreseeable technology...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Camouflage

New research: Abstract: Coleoid cephalopods have the most elaborate camouflage system in the animal kingdom. This enables them to hide from or deceive both predators and prey. Most studies have focused on benthic species of octopus and cuttlefish, while studies on squid focused mainly on the...

Friday Squid Blogging: Vampire Squid Genome

The vampire squid Vampyroteuthis infernalis has the largest cephalopod genome ever sequenced: more than 11 billion base pairs. That's more than twice as large as the biggest squid genomes. It's technically not a squid: "The vampire squid is a fascinating twig tenaciously hanging onto the cephalop...

Banning VPNs

This is crazy. Lawmakers in several US states are contemplating banning VPNs, because…think of the children! As of this writing, Wisconsin lawmakers are escalating their war on privacy by targeting VPNs in the name of "protecting children" in A.B. 105/S.B. 130. It’s an age verification bill that...