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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...
Phishing Attacks Against People Seeking Programming Jobs
This is new. North Korean hackers are posing as company recruiters, enticing job candidates to participate in coding challenges. When they run the code they are supposed to work on, it installs malware on their system. News article...
Poisoning AI Training Data
All it takes to poison AI training data is to create a website: I spent 20 minutes writing an article on my personal website titled "The best tech journalists at eating hot dogs." Every word is a lie. I claimed without evidence that competitive hot-dog-eating is a popular hobby among tech reporte...
On the Security of Password Managers
Good article on password managers that secretly have a backdoor. New research shows that these claims aren’t true in all cases, particularly when account recovery is in place or password managers are set to share vaults or organize users into groups. The researchers reverse-engineered or closely...
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...
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I'm speaking at Ontario Tech University in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, at 2 PM ET on Thursday, February 26, 2026. I’m speaking at the Personal AI Summit in Los Angeles, California, USA, on Thursday, March 5, 2026. I’m speaking at Tech...
3D Printer Surveillance
New York is contemplating a bill that adds surveillance to 3D printers: New York’s 20262027 executive budget bill S.9005 / A.10005 includes language that should alarm every maker, educator, and small manufacturer in the state. Buried in Part C is a provision requiring all 3D printers sold or...
AI-Generated Text and the Detection Arms Race
In 2023, the science fiction literary magazine Clarkesworld stopped accepting new submissions because so many were generated by artificial intelligence. Near as the editors could tell, many submitters pasted the magazine’s detailed story guidelines into an AI and sent in the results. And they...
Urban VPN Proxy Surreptitiously Intercepts AI Chats
This is pretty scary: Urban VPN Proxy targets conversations across ten AI platforms: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Grok xAI, Meta AI. For each platform, the extension includes a dedicated "executor" script designed to intercept and capture conversations. The...
Chinese Surveillance and AI
New report: "The Party's AI: How China's New AI Systems are Reshaping Human Rights." From a summary article: China is already the world's largest exporter of AI powered surveillance technology; new surveillance technologies and platforms developed in China are also not likely to simply stay there...
Against the Federal Moratorium on State-Level Regulation of AI
Cast your mind back to May of this year: Congress was in the throes of debate over the massive budget bill. Amidst the many seismic provisions, Senator Ted Cruz dropped a ticking time bomb of tech policy: a ten-year moratorium on the ability of states to regulate artificial intelligence. To many,...
Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid Eating a Diamondback Squid
I have no context for this video--it's from Reddit--but one of the commenters adds some context: Hey everyone, squid biologist here! Wanted to add some stuff you might find interesting. With so many people carrying around cameras, we're getting more videos of giant squid at the surface than in...
AIs Exploiting Smart Contracts
I have long maintained that smart contracts are a dumb idea: that a human process is actually a security feature. Here's some interesting research on training AIs to automatically exploit smart contracts: AI models are increasingly good at cyber tasks, as we've written about before. But what is t...
AI vs. Human Drivers
Two competing arguments are making the rounds. The first is by a neurosurgeon in the New York Times. In an op-ed that honestly sounds like it was paid for by Waymo, the author calls driverless cars a "public health breakthrough": In medical research, there’s a practice of ending a study early whe...
Prompt Injection in AI Browsers
This is why AIs are not ready to be personal assistants: A new attack called 'CometJacking' exploits URL parameters to pass to Perplexity's Comet AI browser hidden instructions that allow access to sensitive data from connected services, like email and calendar. In a realistic scenario, no...
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...
Failures in Face Recognition
Interesting article on people with nonstandard faces and how facial recognition systems fail for them. Some of those living with facial differences tell WIRED they have undergone multiple surgeries and experienced stigma for their entire lives, which is now being echoed by the technology they are...
Agentic AI’s OODA Loop Problem
The OODA loop --for observe, orient, decide, act--is a framework to understand decision-making in adversarial situations. We apply the same framework to artificial intelligence agents, who have to make their decisions with untrustworthy observations and orientation. To solve this problem, we need...
Digital Threat Modeling Under Authoritarianism
Today's world requires us to make complex and nuanced decisions about our digital security. Evaluating when to use a secure messaging app like Signal or WhatsApp, which passwords to store on your smartphone, or what to share on social media requires us to assess risks and make judgments...
Malicious-Looking URL Creation Service
This site turns your URL into something sketchy-looking. For example, www.schneier.com becomes...
Hacking Electronic Safes
Vulnerabilities in electronic safes that use Securam Prologic locks: While both their techniques represent glaring security vulnerabilities, Omo says it's the one that exploits a feature intended as a legitimate unlock method for locksmiths that's the more widespread and dangerous. "This attack i...
Lawsuit About WhatsApp Security
Attaullah Baig, WhatsApp's former head of security, has filed a whistleblower lawsuit alleging that Facebook deliberately failed to fix a bunch of security flaws, in violation of its 2019 settlement agreement with the Federal Trade Commission. The lawsuit, alleging violations of the whistleblower...
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...
Baggage Tag Scam
I just heard about this: There's a travel scam warning going around the internet right now: You should keep your baggage tags on your bags until you get home, then shred them, because scammers are using luggage tags to file fraudulent claims for missing baggage with the airline. First, the scam i...
AI Agents Need Data Integrity
Think of the Web as a digital territory with its own social contract. In 2014, Tim Berners-Lee called for a "Magna Carta for the Web" to restore the balance of power between individuals and institutions. This mirrors the original charter's purpose: ensuring that those who occupy a territory have ...
Friday Squid Blogging: New Vulnerability in Squid HTTP Proxy Server
In a rare squid/security combined post, a new vulnerability was discovered in the Squid HTTP proxy server...
Google Project Zero Changes Its Disclosure Policy
Google's vulnerability finding team is again pushing the envelope of responsible disclosure: Google's Project Zero team will retain its existing 90+30 policy regarding vulnerability disclosures, in which it provides vendors with 90 days before full disclosure takes place, with a 30-day period...
Subliminal Learning in AIs
Today's freaky LLM behavior: We study subliminal learning, a surprising phenomenon where language models learn traits from model-generated data that is semantically unrelated to those traits. For example, a "student" model learns to prefer owls when trained on sequences of numbers generated by a...
What LLMs Know About Their Users
Simon Willison talks about ChatGPT's new memory dossier feature. In his explanation, he illustrates how much the LLM--and the company--knows about its users. It's a big quote, but I want you to read it all. Here's a prompt you can use to give you a solid idea of what's in that summary. I first sa...
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...
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Facts on Your Phone
Text "SQUID" to 1-833-SCI-TEXT for daily squid facts. The website has merch. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered...
Slopsquatting
As AI coding assistants invent nonexistent software libraries to download and use, enterprising attackers create and upload libraries with those names--laced with malware, of course. EDITED TO ADD 1/22: Research paper. Slashdot thread...
China Sort of Admits to Being Behind Volt Typhoon
The Wall Street Journal has the story: Chinese officials acknowledged in a secret December meeting that Beijing was behind a widespread series of alarming cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure, according to people familiar with the matter, underscoring how hostilities between the two superpowers ar...
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...
Web 3.0 Requires Data Integrity
If you've ever taken a computer security class, you've probably learned about the three legs of computer security--confidentiality, integrity, and availability--known as the CIA triad. When we talk about a system being secure, that's what we're referring to. All are important, but to different...
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...
Improvements in Brute Force Attacks
New paper: "GPU Assisted Brute Force Cryptanalysis of GPRS, GSM, RFID, and TETRA: Brute Force Cryptanalysis of KASUMI, SPECK, and TEA3." Abstract: Key lengths in symmetric cryptography are determined with respect to the brute force attacks with current technology. While nowadays at least 128-bit...
Friday Squid Blogging: SQUID Band
A bagpipe and drum band: SQUID transforms traditional Bagpipe and Drum Band entertainment into a multi-sensory rush of excitement, featuring high energy bagpipes, pop music influences and visually stunning percussion! As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories i...
China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea Intelligence Sharing
Former CISA Director Jen Easterly writes about a new international intelligence sharing co-op: Historically, China, Russia, Iran & North Korea have cooperated to some extent on military and intelligence matters, but differences in language, culture, politics & technological sophistication have...
North Korean Hackers Steal $1.5B in Cryptocurrency
It looks like a very sophisticated attack against the Dubai-based exchange Bybit: Bybit officials disclosed the theft of more than 400,000 ethereum and staked ethereum coins just hours after it occurred. The notification said the digital loot had been stored in a "Multisig Cold Wallet" when,...
Friday Squid Blogging: The Colossal Squid
Long article on the colossal squid. Blog moderation policy...
ExxonMobil Lobbyist Caught Hacking Climate Activists
The Department of Justice is investigating a lobbying firm representing ExxonMobil for hacking the phones of climate activists: The hacking was allegedly commissioned by a Washington, D.C., lobbying firm, according to a lawyer representing the U.S. government. The firm, in turn, was allegedly...
AI Will Write Complex Laws
Artificial intelligence AI is writing law today. This has required no changes in legislative procedure or the rules of legislative bodies--all it takes is one legislator, or legislative assistant, to use generative AI in the process of drafting a bill. In fact, the use of AI by legislators is onl...
FBI Deletes PlugX Malware from Thousands of Computers
According to a DOJ press release, the FBI was able to delete the Chinese-used PlugX malware from "approximately 4,258 U.S.-based computers and networks." Details: To retrieve information from and send commands to the hacked machines, the malware connects to a command-and-control server that is...
Scams Based on Fake Google Emails
Scammers are hacking Google Forms to send email to victims that come from google.com. Brian Krebs reports on the effects. Boing Boing post...