Faking an iPhone Reboot

Researchers have figured how how to intercept and fake an iPhone reboot: Well dissect the iOS system and show how its possible to alter a shutdown event, tricking a user that got infected into thinking that the phone has been powered off, but in fact, its still running. The "NoReboot" approach...

Norton’s Antivirus Product Now Includes an Ethereum Miner

Norton 360 can now mine Ethereum. Its opt-in, and the company keeps 15%. Its hard to uninstall this option...

Stolen Bitcoins Returned

The US has returned $154 million in bitcoins stolen by a Sony employee. However, on December 1, following an investigation in collaboration with Japanese law enforcement authorities, the FBI seized the 3879.16242937 BTC in Ishiis wallet after obtaining the private key, which made it possible to...

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...

Tracking Stolen Cryptocurrencies

Good article about the current state of cryptocurrency forensics...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Communication

Interesting article on squid communication. 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...

New Windows Zero-Day

Googles Project Zero has discovered and published a buffer overflow vulnerability in the Windows Kernel Cryptography Driver. The exploit doesnt affect the cryptography, but allows attackers to escalate system privileges: Attackers were combining an exploit for it with a separate one targeting a...

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,...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Comic

It's not very good, but it has a squid in it. 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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Baby Sea Otters Prefer Shrimp to Squid

At least, this one does. 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...

New Internet Explorer Bug

There's a newly discovered bug in Internet Explorer that allows any currently visited website to learn the contents of the address bar when the user hits enter. This feels important; the site I am at now has no business knowing where I go next...

Friday Squid Blogging: Live Squid Washes up on North Carolina Beach

A "mysterious squid" -- big and red -- washed up on a beach in Carteret County, North Carolina. Someone found it, still alive, and set it back in the water after taking some photos of it. Squid scientists later decided it was a diamondback squid. So, you think that O'Shea might know the identity ...

Measuring LLMs’ Ability to Perform Cryptanalysis

There's new benchmark measuring AI's ability to perform mathematical cryptanalysis. Anthropic's frontier model actually found new attacks. The benchmark: "CryptanalysisBench: Can LLMs do Cryptanalysis?" The idea is to benchmark the ability of LLMs to discover new mathematical cryptanalytic attack...

Robot Police Officers

We've taken one small step towards robot police officers: a drone capable of disarming a suspect: In a June 22 video posted on the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office’s Instagram page, an officer wearing goggles can be seen operating a drone to retrieve a knife from an armed suspect hiding inside ...

Critical Zcash Vulnerability Found and Fixed

If you're a user--owner?--of this cryptocurrency, this is important: On May 29, the security researcher Taylor Hornby found a critical vulnerability in Zcash Orchard privacy pool using Claude Opus 4.8. The Zcash team hired Hornby specifically to look for this kind of issue. He found one fast enou...

A Ransomware Negotiator Was Working for a Ransomware Gang

Someone pleaded guilty to secretly working for a ransomware gang as he negotiated ransomware payments for clients...

Friday Squid Blogging: How Squid Survived Extinction Events

Science news: Scientists have finally cracked a long-standing mystery about squid and cuttlefish evolution by analyzing newly sequenced genomes alongside global datasets. The research reveals that these bizarre, intelligent creatures likely originated deep in the ocean over 100 million years ago,...

Friday Squid Blogging: New Giant Squid Video

Pretty fantastic video from Japan of a giant squid eating another 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...

Human Trust of AI Agents

Interesting research: "Humans expect rationality and cooperation from LLM opponents in strategic games." Abstract: As Large Language Models LLMs integrate into our social and economic interactions, we need to deepen our understanding of how humans respond to LLMs opponents in strategic settings. ...

AI Chatbots and Trust

All the leading AI chatbots are sycophantic, and that's a problem: Participants rated sycophantic AI responses as more trustworthy than balanced ones. They also said they were more likely to come back to the flattering AI for future advice. And critically ­ they couldn't tell the difference betwe...

Sen. Sanders Talks to Claude About AI and Privacy

Claude is actually pretty good on the issues...

Cybersecurity in the Age of Instant Software

AI is rapidly changing how software is written, deployed, and used. Trends point to a future where AIs can write custom software quickly and easily: "instant software." Taken to an extreme, it might become easier for a user to have an AI write an application on demand--a spreadsheet, for...

Microsoft Xbox One Hacked

It's an impressive feat, over a decade after the box was released: Since reset glitching wasn't possible, Gaasedelen thought some voltage glitching could do the trick. So, instead of tinkering with the system rest pins the hacker targeted the momentary collapse of the CPU voltage rail. This was...

Academia and the “AI Brain Drain”

In 2025, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta collectively spent US$380 billion on building artificial-intelligence tools. That number is expected to surge still higher this year, to $650 billion, to fund the building of physical infrastructure, such as data centers see go.nature.com/3lzf79q...

Anthropic and the Pentagon

OpenAI is in and Anthropic is out as a supplier of AI technology for the US defense department. This news caps a week of bluster by the highest officials in the US government towards some of the wealthiest titans of the big tech industry, and the overhanging specter of the existential risks posed...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Fishing in Peru

Peru has increased its squid catch limit. The article says "giant squid," but they can't possibly mean that. 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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Cartoon

I like this one. 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...

The Promptware Kill Chain

Attacks against modern generative artificial intelligence AI large language models LLMs pose a real threat. Yet discussions around these attacks and their potential defenses are dangerously myopic. The dominant narrative focuses on "prompt injection," a set of techniques to embed instructions int...

AIs Are Getting Better at Finding and Exploiting Security Vulnerabilities

From an Anthropic blog post: In a recent evaluation of AI models’ cyber capabilities, current Claude models can now succeed at multistage attacks on networks with dozens of hosts using only standard, open-source tools, instead of the custom tools needed by previous generations. This illustrates h...

AIs are Getting Better at Finding and Exploiting Internet Vulnerabilities

Really interesting blog post from Anthropic: In a recent evaluation of AI models’ cyber capabilities, current Claude models can now succeed at multistage attacks on networks with dozens of hosts using only standard, open-source tools, instead of the custom tools needed by previous generations. Th...

New Vulnerability in n8n

This isn't good: We discovered a critical vulnerability CVE-2026-21858, CVSS 10.0 in n8n that enables attackers to take over locally deployed instances, impacting an estimated 100,000 servers globally. No official workarounds are available for this vulnerability. Users should upgrade to version...

Prompt Injection Through Poetry

In a new paper, "Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models," researchers found that turning LLM prompts into poetry resulted in jailbreaking the models: Abstract : We present evidence that adversarial poetry functions as a universal single-turn...

AI as Cyberattacker

From Anthropic: In mid-September 2025, we detected suspicious activity that later investigation determined to be a highly sophisticated espionage campaign. The attackers used AI’s “agentic” capabilities to an unprecedented degree­--using AI not just as an advisor, but to execute the cyberattacks...

Signal’s Post-Quantum Cryptographic Implementation

Signal has just rolled out its quantum-safe cryptographic implementation. Ars Technica has a really good article with details: Ultimately, the architects settled on a creative solution. Rather than bolt KEM onto the existing double ratchet, they allowed it to remain more or less the same as it ha...

Friday Squid Blogging: “El Pulpo The Squid”

There is a new cigar named "El Pulpo The Squid." Yes, that means "The Octopus The 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...

Serious F5 Breach

This is bad: F5, a Seattle-based maker of networking software, disclosed the breach on Wednesday. F5 said a "sophisticated" threat group working for an undisclosed nation-state government had surreptitiously and persistently dwelled in its network over a "long-term." Security researchers who have...

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...

Autonomous AI Hacking and the Future of Cybersecurity

AI agents are now hacking computers. They're getting better at all phases of cyberattacks, faster than most of us expected. They can chain together different aspects of a cyber operation, and hack autonomously, at computer speeds and scale. This is going to change everything. Over the summer,...

1965 Cryptanalysis Training Workbook Released by the NSA

In the early 1960s, National Security Agency cryptanalyst and cryptanalysis instructor Lambros D. Callimahos coined the term "Stethoscope" to describe a diagnostic computer program used to unravel the internal structure of pre-computer ciphertexts. The term appears in the newly declassified...

Jim Sanborn Is Auctioning Off the Solution to Part Four of the Kryptos Sculpture

Well, this is interesting: The auction, which will include other items related to cryptology, will be held Nov. 20. RR Auction, the company arranging the sale, estimates a winning bid between $300,000 and $500,000. Along with the original handwritten plain text of K4 and other papers related to t...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid-Shaped UFO Spotted Over Texas

Here's the story. The commenters on X formerly Twitter are unimpressed. 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...

Tradecraft in the Information Age

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

White House Bans WhatsApp

Reuters is reporting that the White House has banned WhatsApp on all employee devices: The notice said the "Office of Cybersecurity has deemed WhatsApp a high risk to users due to the lack of transparency in how it protects user data, absence of stored data encryption, and potential security risk...

Airlines Secretly Selling Passenger Data to the Government

This is news: A data broker owned by the country's major airlines, including Delta, American Airlines, and United, collected U.S. travellers' domestic flight records, sold access to them to Customs and Border Protection CBP, and then as part of the contract told CBP to not reveal where the data...

Friday Squid Blogging: US Naval Ship Attacked by Squid in 1978

Interesting story: USS Stein was underway when her anti-submarine sonar gear suddenly stopped working. On returning to port and putting the ship in a drydock, engineers observed many deep scratches in the sonar dome's rubber "NOFOUL" coating. In some areas, the coating was described as being...

Florida Backdoor Bill Fails

A Florida bill requiring encryption backdoors failed to pass...

AI Vulnerability Finding

Microsoft is reporting that its AI systems are able to find new vulnerabilities in source code: Microsoft discovered eleven vulnerabilities in GRUB2, including integer and buffer overflows in filesystem parsers, command flaws, and a side-channel in cryptographic comparison. Additionally, 9 buffer...

DIRNSA Fired

In "Secrets and Lies" 2000, I wrote: It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state. It's something a bunch of us were saying at the time, in reference to the vast NSA's surveillance capabilities. I have been thinking of that quote a lot as I read ne...

NCSC Releases Post-Quantum Cryptography Timeline

The UK's National Computer Security Center part of GCHQ released a timeline--also see their blog post--for migration to quantum-computer-resistant cryptography. It even made The Guardian...