New Report on IoT Security

The Atlantic Council has published a report on securing the Internet of Things: "Security in the Billions: Toward a Multinational Strategy to Better Secure the IoT Ecosystem." The report examines the regulatory approaches taken by four countries--the US, the UK, Australia, and Singapore--to secur...

Massive Data Breach at Uber

Its big: The breach appeared to have compromised many of Ubers internal systems, and a person claiming responsibility for the hack sent images of email, cloud storage and code repositories to cybersecurity researchers and The New York Times. "They pretty much have full access to Uber," said Sam...

FBI Seizes Stolen Cryptocurrencies

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the FBI has recovered over $30 million in cryptocurrency stolen by North Korean hackers earlier this year. Its only a fraction of the $540 million stolen, but its something. The Axie Infinity recovery represents a shift in law enforcements ability to trac...

Zoom Exploit on MacOS

This vulnerability was reported to Zoom last December: The exploit works by targeting the installer for the Zoom application, which needs to run with special user permissions in order to install or remove the main Zoom application from a computer. Though the installer requires a user to enter the...

Twitter Exposes Personal Information for 5.4 Million Accounts

Twitter accidentally exposed the personal information--including phone numbers and email addresses--for 5.4 million accounts. And someone was trying to sell this information. In January 2022, we received a report through our bug bounty program of a vulnerability in Twitters systems. As a result o...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Fishing for Squid

Foreign Policy has a three-part so far podcast series on squid and global fishing. 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. EDITED TO ADD: I accidentally posted this on Wednesday. I...

ZuoRAT Malware Is Targeting Routers

Wired is reporting on a new remote-access Trojan that is able to infect at least eighty different targets: So far, researchers from Lumen Technologies Black Lotus Labs say theyve identified at least 80 targets infected by the stealthy malware, including routers made by Cisco, Netgear, Asus, and...

Hertzbleed: A New Side-Channel Attack

Hertzbleed is a new side-channel attack that works against a variety of microprocressors. Deducing cryptographic keys by analyzing power consumption has long been an attack, but its not generally viable because measuring power consumption is often hard. This new attack measures power consumption ...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Bites Diver

I agree; the diver deserved 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...

Clever Cryptocurrency Theft

Beanstalk Farms is a decentralized finance project that has a majority stake governance system: basically people have proportional votes based on the amount of currency they own. A clever hacker used a "flash loan" feature of another decentralized finance project to borrow enough of the currency ...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at Future Summits in Antwerp, Belgium, on May 18, 2022. I’m speaking at IT-S Now 2022 in Vienna, Austria, on June 2, 2022. I’m speaking at the 14th International Conference on Cyber Conflict, CyCon 2022, in Tallinn,...

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...

Leak of Russian Censorship Data

The transparency organization Distributed Denial of Secrets has released 800GB of data from Roskomnadzor, the Russian government censorship organization. Specifically, Distributed Denial of Secrets says the data comes from the Roskomnadzor of the Republic of Bashkortostan. The Republic of...

Decrypting Hive Ransomware Data

Nice piece of research: Abstract: Among the many types of malicious codes, ransomware poses a major threat. Ransomware encrypts data and demands a ransom in exchange for decryption. As data recovery is impossible if the encryption key is not obtained, some companies suffer from considerable damag...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Chinese Squid Fishing Near the Galapagos

The Chinese have been illegally squid fishing near the Galapagos Islands. 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...

More on NIST’s Post-Quantum Cryptography

Back in July, NIST selected third-round algorithms for its post-quantum cryptography standard. Recently, Daniel Apon of NIST gave a talk detailing the selection criteria. Interesting stuff. NOTE: Were in the process of moving this blog to WordPress. Comments will be disabled until the move is...

Friday Squid Blogging: Morning Squid

Asa ika means "morning squid" in Japanese. 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...

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...

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...

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: Fishing for Jumbo Squid

Interesting article on the rise of the jumbo squid industry as a result of climate change. 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...

Reforming CDA 230

There's a serious debate on reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. I am in the process of figuring out what I believe, and this is more a place to put resources and listen to people's comments. The EFF has written extensively on why it is so important and dismantling it will be...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Deception

This is a fantastic video of a squid attracting prey with a tentacle that looks like a smaller 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...

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...

Tracking People Without GPS

Interesting research: The trick in accurately tracking a person with this method is finding out what kind of activity they're performing. Whether they're walking, driving a car, or riding in a train or airplane, it's pretty easy to figure out when you know what you're looking for. The sensors can...

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...

The Future of Ransomware

Ransomware isn't new, but it's increasingly popular and profitable. The concept is simple: Your computer gets infected with a virus that encrypts your files until you pay a ransom. It's extortion taken to its networked extreme. The criminals provide step-by-step instructions on how to pay,...

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 ...

Faking Domain Names with Unicode Characters

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

AI Coding Agents Are Installing Unknown/Untrusted Code on Corporate Networks

We cannot forget that AI coding agents are not yet trustworthy: Researchers at a stealth startup in Israel scanned 6,214 live domains belonging to defense contractors, Fortune 500, and Big Tech companies. Of the 8,265 llms.txt and llms-full.txt files they found many sites hosted both an llms.txt...

Researching Employment Scams

Researchers built a fake company to study fake employee scams...

Prompt Injections for Defense

This seems to work: Researchers from Tracebit on Monday said they found that placing prompt injections alongside passwords, cryptographic keys, and other secrets stored on Amazon Web Services was often all that was needed to shut down attacks from AI hacking agents. The prompts direct the attacki...

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...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking virtually at the Policy-Relevant Privacy Research Workshop in Calgary, Canada, on Monday, July 20, 2026. I’m speaking at Boston Leadership Exchange in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, on Wednesday, July 22, 2026. I’m speaki...

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...

Fast16 Malware

Researchers have reverse-engineered a piece of malware named Fast16. It's almost certainly state-sponsored, probably US in origin, and was deployed against Iran years before Stuxnet: "…the Fast16 malware was designed to carry out the most subtle form of sabotage ever seen in an in-the-wild malwar...

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...

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...

Inventors of Quantum Cryptography Win Turing Award

Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard have won the 2026 Turing Award for inventing quantum cryptography. I am incredibly pleased to see them get this recognition. I have always thought the technology to be fantastic, even though I think it's largely unnecessary. I wrote up my thoughts back in 2008,...

Team Mirai and Democracy

Japan’s election last month and the rise of the country’s newest and most innovative political party, Team Mirai, illustrates the viability of a different way to do politics. In this model, technology is used to make democratic processes stronger, instead of undermining them. It is harnessed to...

Proton Mail Shared User Information with the Police

404 Media has a story about Proton Mail giving subscriber data to the Swiss government, who passed the information to the FBI. It's metadata--payment information related to a particular account--but still important knowledge. This sort of thing happens, even to privacy-centric companies like Prot...

Canada Needs Nationalized, Public AI

Canada has a choice to make about its artificial intelligence future. The Carney administration is investing $2-billion over five years in its Sovereign AI Compute Strategy. Will any value generated by "sovereign AI" be captured in Canada, making a difference in the lives of Canadians, or is this...

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...