Python Developers Targeted with Malware During Fake Job Interviews

Interesting social engineering attack: luring potential job applicants with fake recruiting pitches, trying to convince them to download malware. From a news article These particular attacks from North Korean state-funded hacking team Lazarus Group are new, but the overall malware campaign agains...

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...

Taxonomy of Generative AI Misuse

Interesting paper: "Generative AI Misuse: A Taxonomy of Tactics and Insights from Real-World Data”: Generative, multimodal artificial intelligence GenAI offers transformative potential across industries, but its misuse poses significant risks. Prior research has shed light on the potential of...

Data Wallets Using the Solid Protocol

I am the Chief of Security Architecture at Inrupt, Inc., the company that is commercializing Tim Berners-Lees Solid open W3C standard for distributed data ownership. This week, we announced a digital wallet based on the Solid architecture. Details are here, but basically a digital wallet is a...

2017 ODNI Memo on Kaspersky Labs

Its heavily redacted, but still interesting. Many more ODNI documents here...

Paul Nakasone Joins OpenAI’s Board of Directors

Former NSA Director Paul Nakasone has joined the board of OpenAI...

Ross Anderson’s Memorial Service

The memorial service for Ross Anderson will be held on Saturday, at 2:00 PM BST. People can attend remotely on Zoom. The passcode is "L3954FrrEF"...

Friday Squid Blogging: Dana Squid Attacking Camera

Fantastic footage of a Dana squid attacking a camera at a depth of about a kilometer. 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 Purses

Squid-shaped purses for sale. 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: Searching for the Colossal Squid

A cruise ship is searching for the colossal 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...

Using AI-Generated Legislative Amendments as a Delaying Technique

Canadian legislators proposed 19,600 amendments--almost certainly AI-generated--to a bill in an attempt to delay its adoption. I wrote about many different legislative delaying tactics in A Hackers Mind, but this is a new one...

Friday Squid Blogging: New Plant Looks Like a Squid

Newly discovered plant looks like a squid. And its super weird: The plant, which grows to 3 centimetres tall and 2 centimetres wide, emerges to the surface for as little as a week each year. It belongs to a group of plants known as fairy lanterns and has been given the scientific name...

NSA Buying Bulk Surveillance Data on Americans without a Warrant

It finally admitted to buying bulk data on Americans from data brokers, in response to a query by Senator Weyden. This is almost certainly illegal, although the NSA maintains that it is legal until its told otherwise. Some news articles...

Friday Squid Blogging: Footage of Black-Eyed Squid Brooding Her Eggs

Amazing footage of a black-eyed squid Gonatus onyx carrying thousands of eggs. They tend to hang out about 6,200 feet below sea level. 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...

Code Written with AI Assistants Is Less Secure

Interesting research: "Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants?": Abstract: We conduct the first large-scale user study examining how users interact with an AI Code assistant to solve a variety of security related tasks across different programming languages. Overall, we find that...

OpenAI Is Not Training on Your Dropbox Documents—Today

Theres a rumor flying around the Internet that OpenAI is training foundation models on your Dropbox documents. Heres CNBC. Heres Boing Boing. Some articles are more nuanced, but theres still a lot of confusion. It seems not to be true. Dropbox isnt sharing all of your documents with OpenAI. But...

Police Get Medical Records without a Warrant

More unconstrained surveillance: Lawmakers noted the pharmacies policies for releasing medical records in a letter dated Tuesday to the Department of Health and Human Services HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra. The letter--signed by Sen. Ron Wyden D-Ore., Rep. Pramila Jayapal D-Wash., and Rep. Sara...

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...

Signal Will Leave the UK Rather Than Add a Backdoor

Totally expected, but still good to hear: Onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, Meredith Whittaker, the president of the Signal Foundation, which maintains the nonprofit Signal messaging app, reaffirmed that Signal would leave the U.K. if the countrys recently passed Online Safety Bill forced Signa...

Friday Squid Blogging: China’s Squid Fishing Ban Ineffective

China imposed a "pilot program banning fishing in parts of the south-west Atlantic Ocean from July to October, and parts of the eastern Pacific Ocean from September to December." However, the conservation group Oceana analyzed the data and figured out that the Chinese werent fishing in those area...

Friday Squid Blogging: NIWA Annual Squid Survey

Results from the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research Limited annual squid survey: This year, the team unearthed spectacular large hooked squids, weighing about 15kg and sitting at 2m long, a Taningia--­which has the largest known light organs in the animal kingdom­--and a few...

Friday Squid Blogging: Zaqistan Flag

The fictional nation of Zaqistan in Utah has a squid on its flag. 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: Chromatophores

Neat: Chromatophores are tiny color-changing cells in cephalopods. Watch them blink back and forth from purple to white on this squids skin in an Instagram video taken by Drew Chicone… Its completely hypnotic to watch these tiny cells flash with color. Its as if the squid has a little sky full of...

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...

AI to Aid Democracy

Theres good reason to fear that AI systems like ChatGPT and GPT4 will harm democracy. Public debate may be overwhelmed by industrial quantities of autogenerated argument. People might fall down political rabbit holes, taken in by superficially convincing bullshit, or obsessed by folies à deux...

Friday Squid Blogging: More on Squid Fishing

The squid you eat most likely comes from unregulated waters. 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...

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...

No-Fly List Exposed

I cant remember the last time I thought about the US no-fly list: the list of people so dangerous they should never be allowed to fly on an airplane, yet so innocent that we cant arrest them. Back when I thought about it a lot, I realized that the TSAs practice of giving it to every airline meant...

Real-World Steganography

From an article about Zheng Xiaoqing, an American convicted of spying for China: According to a Department of Justice DOJ indictment, the US citizen hid confidential files stolen from his employers in the binary code of a digital photograph of a sunset, which Mr Zheng then mailed to himself...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: How to Buy Fresh or Frozen Squid

Good advice on buying squid. I like to buy whole fresh squid and clean it myself. 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...

Experian Privacy Vulnerability

Brian Krebs is reporting on a vulnerability in Experians website: Identity thieves have been exploiting a glaring security weakness in the website of Experian, one of the big three consumer credit reporting bureaus. Normally, Experian requires that those seeking a copy of their credit report...

Hacking the JFK Airport Taxi Dispatch System

Two men have been convicted of hacking the taxi dispatch system at the JFK airport. This enabled them to reorder the taxis on the list; they charged taxi drivers $10 to cut the line...

Facebook Fined $276M under GDPR

Facebook--Meta--was just fined $276 million USD for a data leak that included full names, birth dates, phone numbers, and location. Metas total fine by the Data Protection Commission is over $700 million. Total GDPR fines are over €2 billion EUR since 2018...

First Review of A Hacker’s Mind

Kirkus reviews A Hackers Mind: A cybersecurity expert examines how the powerful game whatever system is put before them, leaving it to others to cover the cost. Schneier, a professor at Harvard Kennedy School and author of such books as Data and Goliath and Click Here To Kill Everybody, regularly...

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...

Iran’s Digital Surveillance Tools Leaked

Its Irans turn to have its digital surveillance tools leaked: According to these internal documents, SIAM is a computer system that works behind the scenes of Iranian cellular networks, providing its operators a broad menu of remote commands to alter, disrupt, and monitor how customers use their...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Mayfly Squid

This is surprisingly funny. 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...

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...

New Linux Cryptomining Malware

Its pretty nasty: The malware was dubbed "Shikitega" for its extensive use of the popular Shikata Ga Nai polymorphic encoder, which allows the malware to "mutate" its code to avoid detection. Shikitega alters its code each time it runs through one of several decoding loops that AT&T said each...

Mudge Files Whistleblower Complaint against Twitter

Peiter Zatko, aka Mudge, has filed a whistleblower complaint with the SEC against Twitter, claiming that they violated an eleven-year-old FTC settlement by having lousy security. And he should know; he was Twitters chief security officer until he was fired in January. The Washington Post has 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: Squid Inks Fisherman

Short 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...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Unexpectedly Low Squid Population in the Arctic

Research: Abstract: The retreating ice cover of the Central Arctic Ocean CAO fuels speculations on future fisheries. However, very little is known about the existence of harvestable fish stocks in this 3.3 million­–square kilometer ecosystem around the North Pole. Crossing the Eurasian Basin, we...

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...

Me on App Store Monopolies and Security

There are two bills working their way through Congress that would force companies like Apple to allow competitive app stores. Apple hates this, since it would break its monopoly, and its making a variety of security arguments to bolster its argument. I have written a rebuttal: I would like to...