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...

More on Rewiring Democracy

It's been a month since Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship was published. From what we know, sales are good. Some of the book's forty-three chapters are available online: chapters 2, 12, 28, 34, 38, and 41. We need more reviews--six on Amazon is no...

The Role of Humans in an AI-Powered World

As AI capabilities grow, we must delineate the roles that should remain exclusively human. The line seems to be between fact-based decisions and judgment-based decisions. For example, in a medical context, if an AI was demonstrably better at reading a test result and diagnosing cancer than a huma...

New Attacks Against Secure Enclaves

Encryption can protect data at rest and data in transit, but does nothing for data in use. What we have are secure enclaves. I've written about this before: Almost all cloud services have to perform some computation on our data. Even the simplest storage provider has code to copy bytes from an...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Game: The Challenge, Season Two

The second season of the Netflix reality competition show Squid Game: The Challenge has dropped. Too many links to pick a few--search for it. 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...

Cybercriminals Targeting Payroll Sites

Microsoft is warning of a scam involving online payroll systems. Criminals use social engineering to steal people's credentials, and then divert direct deposits into accounts that they control. Sometimes they do other things to make it harder for the victim to realize what is happening. I feel li...

The Trump Administration’s Increased Use of Social Media Surveillance

This chilling paragraph is in a comprehensive Brookings report about the use of tech to deport people from the US: The administration has also adapted its methods of social media surveillance. Though agencies like the State Department have gathered millions of handles and monitored political...

Details About Chinese Surveillance and Propaganda Companies

Details from leaked documents: While people often look at China’s Great Firewall as a single, all-powerful government system unique to China, the actual process of developing and maintaining it works the same way as surveillance technology in the West. Geedge collaborates with academic institutio...

A Cyberattack Victim Notification Framework

Interesting analysis: When cyber incidents occur, victims should be notified in a timely manner so they have the opportunity to assess and remediate any harm. However, providing notifications has proven a challenge across industry. When making notifications, companies often do not know the true...

Friday Squid Blogging: The Origin and Propagation of Squid

New research paywalled: Editor 's summary: Cephalopods are one of the most successful marine invertebrates in modern oceans, and they have a 500-million-year-old history. However, we know very little about their evolution because soft-bodied animals rarely fossilize. Ikegami et al. developed an...

Poor Password Choices

Look at this: McDonald's chose the password "123456" for a major corporate system...

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: What to Do When You Find a Squid “Egg Mop”

Tips on what to do if you find a mop of squid eggs. 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...

Court Rules Against NSO Group

The case is over: A jury has awarded WhatsApp $167 million in punitive damages in a case the company brought against Israel-based NSO Group for exploiting a software vulnerability that hijacked the phones of thousands of users. I'm sure it'll be appealed. Everything always is...

New Linux Rootkit

Interesting: The company has released a working rootkit called "Curing" that uses iouring, a feature built into the Linux kernel, to stealthily perform malicious activities without being caught by many of the detection solutions currently on the market. At the heart of the issue is the heavy...

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...

AI Data Poisoning

Cloudflare has a new feature--available to free users as well--that uses AI to generate random pages to feed to AI web crawlers: Instead of simply blocking bots, Cloudflare's new system lures them into a "maze" of realistic-looking but irrelevant pages, wasting the crawler's computing resources...

Friday Squid Blogging: A New Explanation of Squid Camouflage

New research: An associate professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Northeastern University, Deravi’s recently published paper in the Journal of Materials Chemistry C sheds new light on how squid use organs that essentially function as organic solar cells to help power their camouflage...

Implementing Cryptography in AI Systems

Interesting research: "How to Securely Implement Cryptography in Deep Neural Networks." Abstract: The wide adoption of deep neural networks DNNs raises the question of how can we equip them with a desired cryptographic functionality e.g, to decrypt an encrypted input, to verify that this input is...

Screenshot-Reading Malware

Kaspersky is reporting on a new type of smartphone malware. The malware in question uses optical character recognition OCR to review a device's photo library, seeking screenshots of recovery phrases for crypto wallets. Based on their assessment, infected Google Play apps have been downloaded more...

Zero-Day Vulnerability in Ivanti VPN

It's being actively exploited...

NSO Group Spies on People on Behalf of Governments

The Israeli company NSO Group sells Pegasus spyware to countries around the world including countries like Saudi Arabia, UAE, India, Mexico, Morocco and Rwanda. We assumed that those countries use the spyware themselves. Now we've learned that that's not true: that NSO Group employees operate the...

Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid Found on Spanish Beach

A giant squid has washed up on a beach in Northern Spain. Blog moderation policy...

Cheating at Conkers

The men's world conkers champion is accused of cheating with a steel chestnut...

NIST Recommends Some Common-Sense Password Rules

NIST's second draft of its "SP 800-63-4"--its digital identify guidelines--finally contains some really good rules about passwords: The following requirements apply to passwords: 1. lVerifiers and CSPs SHALL require passwords to be a minimum of eight characters in length and SHOULD require...

New Windows Malware Locks Computer in Kiosk Mode

Clever: A malware campaign uses the unusual method of locking users in their browser's kiosk mode to annoy them into entering their Google credentials, which are then stolen by information-stealing malware. Specifically, the malware "locks" the user's browser on Google's login page with no obviou...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Game Season Two Teaser

The teaser for Squid Game Season Two dropped. Blog moderation policy...

FBI Shuts Down Chinese Botnet

The FBI has shut down a botnet run by Chinese hackers: The botnet malware infected a number of different types of internet-connected devices around the world, including home routers, cameras, digital video recorders, and NAS drives. Those devices were used to help infiltrate sensitive networks...

My TedXBillings Talk

Over the summer, I gave a talk about AI and democracy at TedXBillings. The recording is live. Please share. Im hoping for more than 200 views…...

Australia Threatens to Force Companies to Break Encryption

In 2018, Australia passed the Assistance and Access Act, which--among other things--gave the government the power to force companies to break their own encryption. The Assistance and Access Act includes key components that outline investigatory powers between government and industry. These...

YubiKey Side-Channel Attack

There is a side-channel attack against YubiKey access tokens that allows someone to clone a device. Its a complicated attack, requiring the victims username and password, and physical access to their YubiKey--as well as some technical expertise and equipment. Still, nice piece of security analysi...

Security Researcher Sued for Disproving Government Statements

This story seems straightforward. A city is the victim of a ransomware attack. They repeatedly lie to the media about the severity of the breach. A security researcher repeatedly proves their statements to be lies. The city gets mad and sues the researcher. Lets hope the judge throws the case out...

SQL Injection Attack on Airport Security

Interesting vulnerability: …a special lane at airport security called Known Crewmember KCM. KCM is a TSA program that allows pilots and flight attendants to bypass security screening, even when flying on domestic personal trips. The KCM process is fairly simple: the employee uses the dedicated la...

NIST Releases First Post-Quantum Encryption Algorithms

From the Federal Register: After three rounds of evaluation and analysis, NIST selected four algorithms it will standardize as a result of the PQC Standardization Process. The public-key encapsulation mechanism selected was CRYSTALS-KYBER, along with three digital signature schemes:...

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...

Education in Secure Software Development

The Linux Foundation and OpenSSF released a report on the state of education in secure software development. …many developers lack the essential knowledge and skills to effectively implement secure software development. Survey findings outlined in the report show nearly one-third of all...

Robot Dog Internet Jammer

Supposedly the DHS has these: The robot, called "NEO," is a modified version of the "Quadruped Unmanned Ground Vehicle" Q-UGV sold to law enforcement by a company called Ghost Robotics. Benjamine Huffman, the director of DHSs Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers FLETC, told police at the 2024...

Snake Mimics a Spider

This is a fantastic video. Its an Iranian spider-tailed horned viper Pseudocerastes urarachnoides. Its tail looks like a spider, which the snake uses to fool passing birds looking for a meal...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: Im speaking--along with John Bruce, the CEO and Co-founder of Inrupt--at the 18th Annual CDOIQ Symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. The symposium runs from July 16 through 18, 2024, and my session is on Tuesday, July 16 at...

Upcoming Book on AI and Democracy

If youve been reading my blog, youve noticed that I have written a lot about AI and democracy, mostly with my co-author Nathan Sanders. I am pleased to announce that were writing a book on the topic. This isnt a book about deep fakes, or misinformation. This is a book about what happens when AI...

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...

Using Legitimate GitHub URLs for Malware

Interesting social-engineering attack vector: McAfee released a report on a new LUA malware loader distributed through what appeared to be a legitimate Microsoft GitHub repository for the "C++ Library Manager for Windows, Linux, and MacOS," known as vcpkg. The attacker is exploiting a property of...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Trackers

A new bioadhesive makes it easier to attach trackers to squid. Note: the article does not discuss squid privacy rights. 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...

X.com Automatically Changing Link Text but Not URLs

Brian Krebs reported that X formerly known as Twitter started automatically changing twitter.com links to x.com links. The problem is: 1 it changed any domain name that ended with "twitter.com," and 2 it only changed the links appearance anchortext, not the underlying URL. So if you were a clever...

Smuggling Gold by Disguising it as Machine Parts

Someone got caught trying to smuggle 322 pounds of gold thats about a quarter of a cubic foot out of Hong Kong. It was disguised as machine parts: On March 27, customs officials x-rayed two air compressors and discovered that they contained gold that had been "concealed in the integral parts" of...

In Memoriam: Ross Anderson, 1956–2024

Last week, I posted a short memorial of Ross Anderson. The Communications of the ACM asked me to expand it. Heres the longer version. EDITED TO ADD 4/11: Two weeks before he passed away, Ross gave an 80-minute interview where he told his life story...

On Secure Voting Systems

Andrew Appel shepherded a public comment--signed by twenty election cybersecurity experts, including myself--on best practices for ballot marking devices and vote tabulation. It was written for the Pennsylvania legislature, but its general in nature. From the executive summary: We believe that no...

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...

On Software Liabilities

Over on Lawfare, Jim Dempsey published a really interesting proposal for software liability: "Standard for Software Liability: Focus on the Product for Liability, Focus on the Process for Safe Harbor." Section 1 of this paper sets the stage by briefly describing the problem to be solved. Section ...