FTC’s Voice Cloning Challenge

The Federal Trade Commission is running a competition "to foster breakthrough ideas on preventing, monitoring, and evaluating malicious voice cloning."...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: Im speaking at the AI Summit New York on December 6, 2023. The list is maintained on this page...

Coin Flips Are Biased

Experimental result: Many people have flipped coins but few have stopped to ponder the statistical and physical intricacies of the process. In a preregistered study we collected 350,757 coin flips to test the counterintuitive prediction from a physics model of human coin tossing developed by Pers...

Tracking Down a Suspect through Cell Phone Records

Interesting forensics in connection with a serial killer arrest: Investigators went through phone records collected from both midtown Manhattan and the Massapequa Park area of Long Island--two areas connected to a "burner phone" they had tied to the killings. In court, prosecutors later said the...

Typing Incriminating Evidence in the Memo Field

Dont do it: Recently, the manager of the Harvard Med School morgue was accused of stealing and selling human body parts. Cedric Lodge and his wife Denise were among a half-dozen people arrested for some pretty grotesque crimes. This part is also at least a little bit funny though: Over a three-ye...

Friday Squid Blogging: Giggling Squid

Giggling Squid is a Thai chain in the UK. 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 Can Edit Their RNA

This is just crazy: Scientists dont yet know for sure why octopuses, and other shell-less cephalopods including squid and cuttlefish, are such prolific editors. Researchers are debating whether this form of genetic editing gave cephalopods an evolutionary leg or tentacle up or whether the editing...

Friday Squid Blogging: Online Cephalopod Course

Atlas Obscura has a five-part online course on cephalopods, taught by squid biologist Dr. Sarah McAnulty. 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...

On the Poisoning of LLMs

Interesting essay on the poisoning of LLMs--ChatGPT in particular: Given that weve known about model poisoning for years, and given the strong incentives the black-hat SEO crowd has to manipulate results, its entirely possible that bad actors have been poisoning ChatGPT for months. We dont know...

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...

Russian Cyberwarfare Documents Leaked

Now this is interesting: Thousands of pages of secret documents reveal how Vulkans engineers have worked for Russian military and intelligence agencies to support hacking operations, train operatives before attacks on national infrastructure, spread disinformation and control sections of the...

A Hacker’s Mind News

My latest book continues to sell well. Its ranking hovers between 1,500 and 2,000 on Amazon. Its been spied in airports. Reviews are consistently good. I have been enjoying giving podcast interviews. It all feels pretty good right now. You can order a signed book from me here. For those of you in...

NetWire Remote Access Trojan Maker Arrested

From Brian Krebs: A Croatian national has been arrested for allegedly operating NetWire, a Remote Access Trojan RAT marketed on cybercrime forums since 2012 as a stealthy way to spy on infected systems and siphon passwords. The arrest coincided with a seizure of the NetWire sales website by the...

Friday Squid Blogging: We’re Almost at Flying Squid Drones

Researchers are prototyping multi-segment shapeshifter drones, which are "the precursors to flying squid-bots." 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...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at Mobile World Congress 2023 in Barcelona, Spain, on March 1, 2023 at 1:00 PM CET. I’m speaking on “How to Reclaim Power in the Digital World” at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, on Thursday, March 16, 2023, at 5:30 PM...

Passwords Are Terrible (Surprising No One)

This is the result of a security audit: More than a fifth of the passwords protecting network accounts at the US Department of the Interior--including Password1234, Password1234!, and ChangeItN0w!--were weak enough to be cracked using standard methods, a recently published security audit of the...

Publisher’s Weekly Review of A Hacker’s Mind

Publishers Weekly reviewed A Hackers Mind--and its a starred review! "Hacking is something that the rich and powerful do, something that reinforces existing power structures," contends security technologist Schneier Click Here to Kill Everybody in this excellent survey of exploitation. Taking a...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: Im speaking at Capricon, a four-day science fiction convention in Chicago. My talk is on "The Coming AI Hackers" and will be held Friday, February 3 at 1:00 PM. The list is maintained on this page...

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...

Decarbonizing Cryptocurrencies through Taxation

Maintaining bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies causes about 0.3 percent of global CO2 emissions. That may not sound like a lot, but its more than the emissions of Switzerland, Croatia, and Norway combined. As many cryptocurrencies crash and the FTX bankruptcy moves into the litigation stage,...

Arresting IT Administrators

This is one way of ensuring that IT keeps up with patches: Albanian prosecutors on Wednesday asked for the house arrest of five public employees they blame for not protecting the country from a cyberattack by alleged Iranian hackers. Prosecutors said the five IT officials of the public...

As Long as We’re on the Subject of CAPTCHAs

There are these...

A Security Vulnerability in the KmsdBot Botnet

Security researchers found a software bug in the KmsdBot cryptomining botnet: With no error-checking built in, sending KmsdBot a malformed command­--like its controllers did one day while Akamai was watching­--created a panic crash with an "index out of range" error. Because theres no persistence...

Hacking Boston’s CharlieCard

Interesting discussion of vulnerabilities and exploits against Bostons CharlieCard...

The Decoupling Principle

This is a really interesting paper that discusses what the authors call the Decoupling Principle: The idea is simple, yet previously not clearly articulated: to ensure privacy, information should be divided architecturally and institutionally such that each entity has only the information they ne...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Brains

Researchers have new evidence of how squid brains develop: Researchers from the FAS Center for Systems Biology describe how they used a new live-imaging technique to watch neurons being created in the embryo in almost real-time. They were then able to track those cells through the development of...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Purse

Perfect for an evening out. 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...

An Untrustworthy TLS Certificate in Browsers

The major browsers natively trust a whole bunch of certificate authorities, and some of them are really sketchy: Googles Chrome, Apples Safari, nonprofit Firefox and others allow the company, TrustCor Systems, to act as whats known as a root certificate authority, a powerful spot in the internets...

The Conviction of Uber’s Chief Security Officer

I have been meaning to write about Joe Sullivan, Ubers former Chief Security Officer. He was convicted of crimes related to covering up a cyberattack against Uber. Its a complicated case, and Im not convinced that he deserved a guilty ruling or that its a good thing for the industry. I may still...

Friday Squid Blogging: Chinese Squid Fishing

China claims that it is "engaging in responsible squid fishing": Chen Xinjun, dean of the College of Marine Sciences at Shanghai Ocean University, made the remarks in response to recent accusations by foreign reporters and actor Leonardo DiCaprio that China is depleting its own fish stock and tha...

Australia Increases Fines for Massive Data Breaches

After suffering two large, and embarrassing, data breaches in recent weeks, the Australian government increased the fine for serious data breaches from $2.2 million to a minimum of $50 million. Thats $50 million AUD, or $32 million USD. This is a welcome change. The problem is one of incentives,...

Adversarial ML Attack that Secretly Gives a Language Model a Point of View

Machine learning security is extraordinarily difficult because the attacks are so varied--and it seems that each new one is weirder than the next. Heres the latest: a training-time attack that forces the model to exhibit a point of view: Spinning Language Models: Risks of Propaganda-As-A-Service...

Friday Squid Blogging: Breeding the Oval Squid

Japanese scientists are trying to breed the oval squid in captivity. 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...

Credit Card Fraud That Bypasses 2FA

Someone in the UK is stealing smartphones and credit cards from people who have stored them in gym lockers, and is using the two items in combination to commit fraud: Phones, of course, can be made inaccessible with the use of passwords and face or fingerprint unlocking. And bank cards can be...

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...

San Francisco Police Want Real-Time Access to Private Surveillance Cameras

Surely no one could have predicted this: The new proposal--championed by Mayor London Breed after Novembers wild weekend of orchestrated burglaries and theft in the San Francisco Bay Area--would authorize the police department to use non-city-owned security cameras and camera networks to live...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: Im speaking as part of a Geneva Centre for Security Policy course on Cyber Security in the Context of International Security, online, on September 22, 2022. Im speaking at IT-Security INSIDE 2022 in Zurich, Switzerland, on Septembe...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Cubes

Researchers thaw squid frozen into a cube and often make interesting discoveries. Okay, this is a weird story. 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...

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 ...

Long Story on the Accused CIA Vault 7 Leaker

Long article about Joshua Schulte, the accused leaker of the WikiLeaks Vault 7 and Vault 8 CIA data. Well worth reading...

Friday Squid Blogging: More on the “Mind Boggling” Squid Genome

Octopus and squid genes are weird. 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 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...

Websites that Collect Your Data as You Type

A surprising number of websites include JavaScript keyloggers that collect everything you type as you type it, not just when you submit a form. Researchers from KU Leuven, Radboud University, and University of Lausanne crawled and analyzed the top 100,000 websites, looking at scenarios in which a...

ICE Is a Domestic Surveillance Agency

Georgetown has a new report on the highly secretive bulk surveillance activities of ICE in the US: When you think about government surveillance in the United States, you likely think of the National Security Agency or the FBI. You might even think of a powerful police agency, such as the New York...

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,...