Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Changes Color from Black to Transparent

Neat video. 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...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Strawberry Squid Video

Beautiful video shot off the California coast. 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...

US Disrupts Russian Botnet

The Justice Department announced the disruption of a Russian GRU-controlled botnet: The Justice Department today announced a court-authorized operation, conducted in March 2022, to disrupt a two-tiered global botnet of thousands of infected network hardware devices under the control of a threat...

“Change Password”

Oops: Instead of telling you when its safe to cross the street, the walk signs in Crystal City, VA are just repeating CHANGE PASSWORD. Somethings gone terribly wrong here...

Using EM Waves to Detect Malware

I dont even know what I think about this. Researchers have developed a malware detection system that uses EM waves: "Obfuscation Revealed: Leveraging Electromagnetic Signals for Obfuscated Malware Classification." Abstract: The Internet of Things IoT is constituted of devices that are exponential...

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...

People Are Increasingly Choosing Private Web Search

DuckDuckGo has had a banner year: And yet, DuckDuckGo. The privacy-oriented search engine netted more than 35 billion search queries in 2021, a 46.4% jump over 2020 23.6 billion. Thats big. Even so, the company, which bills itself as the "Internet privacy company," offering a search engine and...

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...

US Blacklists NSO Group

The Israeli cyberweapons arms manufacturer -- and human rights violator, and probably war criminal -- NSO Group has been added to the US Department of Commerces trade blacklist. US companies and individuals cannot sell to them. Aside from the obvious difficulties this causes, itll make it harder...

Using Fake Student Accounts to Shill Brands

It turns out that its surprisingly easy to create a fake Harvard student and get a harvard.edu email account. Scammers are using that prestigious domain name to shill brands: Basically, it appears that anyone with $300 to spare can ­- or could, depending on whether Harvard successfully shuts down...

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...

Double-Encrypting Ransomware

This seems to be a new tactic: Emsisoft has identified two distinct tactics. In the first, hackers encrypt data with ransomware A and then re-encrypt that data with ransomware B. The other path involves what Emsisoft calls a "side-by-side encryption" attack, in which attacks encrypt some of an...

ICT Supply-Chain Security

The Carnegie Endowment for Peace published a comprehensive report on ICT information and communication technologies supply-chain security and integrity. It's a good read, but nothing that those who are following this issue don't already know...

GCHQ Found -- and Disclosed -- a Windows 10 Vulnerability

Now this is good news. The UK's National Cyber Security Centre NCSC -- part of GCHQ -- found a serious vulnerability in Windows Defender their anti-virus component. Instead of keeping it secret and all of us vulnerable, it alerted Microsoft. I'd like believe the US does this, too...

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...

Hiding Prompt Injection in Legal Filing

Someone hid AI instructions into a legal filing. Alternate link...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking, signing books, and participating in panel discussions at LAcon V in Anaheim, California, USA. My full schedule is here. I'm speaking online via Zoom at a League of Women Voters event on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, at...

AI for Military Support

Interesting empirical research: "Black Box Warfare: Human Judgment and Military Decision-Making in the Age of AI." Abstract: How is AI transforming decision-making in modern conflict? This study provides a unique empirical window into that question by deploying a high-fidelity replica of an AI...

Python Now Has a Post-Quantum Encryption Library

This is good: Post-quantum cryptography is now one pip-install away for the entire Python ecosystem. With funding from the Sovereign Tech Agency, we implemented support for ML-KEM, the NIST-standard key-establishment primitive, and ML-DSA, the NIST-standard digital-signature primitive, in...

A Video Screen That Is Also a Camera

Amazing: Researchers from ETH Zurich in Switzerland, however, managed to create a new type of pixel that can simultaneously do both. This hypercharged pixel, called a Fourier pixel, can generate and sense arbitrary light fields and tap into a pixel's full potential for carrying information by...

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,...

Sen. Sanders Talks to Claude About AI and Privacy

Claude is actually pretty good on the issues...

Google Wants to Transition to Post-Quantum Cryptography by 2029

Google says that it will fully transition to post-quantum cryptography by 2029. I think this is a good move, not because I think we will have a useful quantum computer anywhere near that year, but because crypto-agility is always a good thing. Slashdot thread...

Sen. Wyden Warns of Another Section 702 Abuse

Sen. Ron Wyden is warning us of an abuse of Section 702: Wyden took to the Senate floor to deliver a lengthy speech, ostensibly about the since approved with support of many Democrats nomination of Joshua Rudd to lead the NSA. Wyden was protesting that nomination, but in the context of Rudd being...

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...

iPhones and iPads Approved for NATO Classified Data

Apple announcement: …iPhone and iPad are the first and only consumer devices in compliance with the information assurance requirements of NATO nations. This enables iPhone and iPad to be used with classified information up to the NATO restricted level without requiring special software or...

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...

Side-Channel Attacks Against LLMs

Here are three papers describing different side-channel attacks against LLMs. "Remote Timing Attacks on Efficient Language Model Inference": Abstract: Scaling up language models has significantly increased their capabilities. But larger models are slower models, and so there is now an extensive...

Prompt Injection Via Road Signs

Interesting research: "CHAI: Command Hijacking Against Embodied AI." Abstract: Embodied Artificial Intelligence AI promises to handle edge cases in robotic vehicle systems where data is scarce by using common-sense reasoning grounded in perception and action to generalize beyond training...

LLMs are Getting a Lot Better and Faster at Finding and Exploiting Zero-Days

This is amazing: Opus 4.6 is notably better at finding high-severity vulnerabilities than previous models and a sign of how quickly things are moving. Security teams have been automating vulnerability discovery for years, investing heavily in fuzzing infrastructure and custom harnesses to find bu...

AI Coding Assistants Secretly Copying All Code to China

There's a new report about two AI coding assistants, used by 1.5 million developers, that are surreptitiously sending a copy of everything they ingest to China. Maybe avoid using them...

Could ChatGPT Convince You to Buy Something?

Eighteen months ago, it was plausible that artificial intelligence might take a different path than social media. Back then, AI's development hadn't consolidated under a small number of big tech firms. Nor had it capitalized on consumer attention, surveilling users and delivering ads...

AI and the Corporate Capture of Knowledge

More than a decade after Aaron Swartz's death, the United States is still living inside the contradiction that destroyed him. Swartz believed that knowledge, especially publicly funded knowledge, should be freely accessible. Acting on that, he downloaded thousands of academic articles from the...

A Cyberattack Was Part of the US Assault on Venezuela

We don't have many details: President Donald Trump suggested Saturday that the U.S. used cyberattacks or other technical capabilities to cut power off in Caracas during strikes on the Venezuelan capital that led to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. If true, it would mark one of...

Friday Squid Blogging: Petting a Squid

Video from Reddit shows what could go wrong when you try to pet a--looks like a Humboldt--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...

Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

For two days in September, Afghanistan had no internet. No satellite failed; no cable was cut. This was a deliberate outage, mandated by the Taliban government. It followed a more localized shutdown two weeks prior, reportedly instituted "to prevent immoral activities." No additional explanation...

Building Trustworthy AI Agents

The promise of personal AI assistants rests on a dangerous assumption: that we can trust systems we haven’t made trustworthy. We can’t. And today’s versions are failing us in predictable ways: pushing us to do things against our own best interests, gaslighting us with doubt about things we are or...

Like Social Media, AI Requires Difficult Choices

In his 2020 book, "Future Politics , " British barrister Jamie Susskind wrote that the dominant question of the 20th century was "How much of our collective life should be determined by the state, and what should be left to the market and civil society?" But in the early decades of this century,...

Friday Squid Blogging: Flying Neon Squid Found on Israeli Beach

A meter-long flying neon squid Ommastrephes bartramii was found dead on an Israeli beach. The species is rare in the Mediterranean. 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...

IACR Nullifies Election Because of Lost Decryption Key

The International Association of Cryptologic Research--the academic cryptography association that's been putting conferences like Crypto back when "crypto" meant "cryptography" and Eurocrypt since the 1980s--had to nullify an online election when trustee Moti Yung lost his decryption key. For thi...

More Prompt||GTFO

The next three in this series on online events highlighting interesting uses of AI in cybersecurity are online: 4, 5, and 6. Well worth watching...

Book Review: The Business of Secrets

The Business of Secrets: Adventures in Selling Encryption Around the World by Fred Kinch May 24, 2024 From the vantage point of today, it's surreal reading about the commercial cryptography business in the 1970s. Nobody knew anything. The manufacturers didn't know whether the cryptography they so...

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: Squid Inks Philippines Fisherman

Good video. 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...

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,...

Abusing Notion’s AI Agent for Data Theft

Notion just released version 3.0, complete with AI agents. Because the system contains Simon Willson's lethal trifecta, it's vulnerable to data theft though prompt injection. First, the trifecta: The lethal trifecta of capabilities is: Access to your private data --one of the most common purposes...

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...

Assessing the Quality of Dried Squid

Research: Nondestructive detection of multiple dried squid qualities by hyperspectral imaging combined with 1D-KAN-CNN Abstract: Given that dried squid is a highly regarded marine product in Oriental countries, the global food industry requires a swift and noninvasive quality assessment of this...