New Blog Moderation Policy

There has been a lot of toxicity in the comments section of this blog. Recently, were having to delete more and more comments. Not just spam and off-topic comments, but also sniping and personal attacks. Its gotten so bad that I need to do something. My options are limited because Im just one...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Catch Quotas in Peru

Peru has set a lower squid quota for 2024. The article says "giant squid," but that seems wrong. We dont eat those. 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: Baby Colossal Squid

This video might be a juvenile 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...

How Criminals Are Using Generative AI

Theres a new report on how criminals are using generative AI tools: Key Takeaways: Adoption rates of AI technologies among criminals lag behind the rates of their industry counterparts because of the evolving nature of cybercrime. Compared to last year, criminals seem to have abandoned any attemp...

WhatsApp in India

Meta has threatened to pull WhatsApp out of India if the courts try to force it to break its end-to-end encryption...

Microsoft and Security Incentives

Former senior White House cyber policy director A. J. Grotto talks about the economic incentives for companies to improve their security--in particular, Microsoft: Grotto told us Microsoft had to be "dragged kicking and screaming" to provide logging capabilities to the government by default, and...

Maybe the Phone System Surveillance Vulnerabilities Will Be Fixed

It seems that the FCC might be fixing the vulnerabilities in SS7 and the Diameter protocol: On March 27 the commission asked telecommunications providers to weigh in and detail what they are doing to prevent SS7 and Diameter vulnerabilities from being misused to track consumers locations. The FCC...

David Kahn

David Kahn has died. His groundbreaking book, The Codebreakers was the first serious book I read about codebreaking, and one of the primary reasons I entered this field. He will be missed. EDITED TO ADD 2/4: Funeral website. EDITED TO ADD 2/10: New York Times obituary...

GCHQ Christmas Codebreaking Challenge

Looks like fun. Details here...

Surveillance Cameras Disguised as Clothes Hooks

This seems like a bad idea. And there are ongoing lawsuits against Amazon for selling them...

Facebook Enables Messenger End-to-End Encryption by Default

Its happened. Details here, and tech details here for messages in transit and here for messages in storage Rollout to everyone will take months, but its a good day for both privacy and security. Slashdot thread...

AI and Trust

I trusted a lot today. I trusted my phone to wake me on time. I trusted Uber to arrange a taxi for me, and the driver to get me to the airport safely. I trusted thousands of other drivers on the road not to ram my car on the way. At the airport, I trusted ticket agents and maintenance engineers a...

Own Your Own Government Surveillance Van

A used government surveillance van is for sale in Chicago: So how was this van turned into a mobile spying center? Well, lets start with how it has more LCD monitors than a Counterstrike LAN party. They can be used to monitor any of six different video inputs including a videoscope camera. A...

When Apps Go Rogue

Interesting story of an Apple Macintosh app that went rogue. Basically, it was a good app until one particular update…when it went bad. With more official macOS features added in 2021 that enabled the "Night Shift" dark mode, the NightOwl app was left forlorn and forgotten on many older Macs. Few...

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...

Buying Campaign Contributions as a Hack

The first Republican primary debate has a popularity threshold to determine who gets to appear: 40,000 individual contributors. Now there are a lot of conventional ways a candidate can get that many contributors. Doug Burgum came up with a novel idea: buy them: A long-shot contender at the bottom...

Wisconsin Governor Hacks the Veto Process

In my latest book, A Hackers Mind, I wrote about hacks as loophole exploiting. This is a great example: The Wisconsin governor used his line-item veto powers--supposedly unique in their specificity--to change a one-year funding increase into a 400-year funding increase. He took this wording:...

Class-Action Lawsuit for Scraping Data without Permission

I have mixed feelings about this class-action lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming that it "scraped 300 billion words from the internet" without either registering as a data broker or obtaining consent. On the one hand, I want this to be a protected fair use of public data. On the other...

Self-Driving Cars Are Surveillance Cameras on Wheels

Police are already using self-driving car footage as video evidence: While security cameras are commonplace in American cities, self-driving cars represent a new level of access for law enforcement ­ and a new method for encroachment on privacy, advocates say. Crisscrossing the city on their...

Friday Squid Blogging: See-Through Squid

Doryteuthis opalescens is known as the market squid, and was critical in the recent squid RNA research. 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...

Power LED Side-Channel Attack

This is a clever new side-channel attack: The first attack uses an Internet-connected surveillance camera to take a high-speed video of the power LED on a smart card reader­--or of an attached peripheral device--­during cryptographic operations. This technique allowed the researchers to pull a...

AI-Generated Steganography

New research suggests that AIs can produce perfectly secure steganographic images: Abstract: Steganography is the practice of encoding secret information into innocuous content in such a manner that an adversarial third party would not realize that there is hidden meaning. While this problem has...

Friday Squid Blogging: Light-Emitting Squid

Its a Taningia danae: Their arms are lined with two rows of sharp retractable hooks. And, like most deep-sea squid, they are adorned with light organs called photophores. They have some on the underside of their mantle. There are more facing upward, near one of their eyes. But it’s the photophore...

The Software-Defined Car

Developers are starting to talk about the software-defined car. For decades, features have accumulated like cruft in new vehicles: a box here to control the antilock brakes, a module there to run the cruise control radar, and so on. Now engineers and designers are rationalizing the way they go...

AI Hacking Village at DEF CON This Year

At DEF CON this year, Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI and Stability AI will all open up their models for attack. The DEF CON event will rely on an evaluation platform developed by Scale AI, a California company that produces training for AI applications. Participants wi...

Friday Squid Blogging: More Squid Camouflage Research

Heres a research group trying to replicate squid cell transparency in mammalian cells. 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...

Swatting as a Service

Motherboard is reporting on AI-generated voices being used for "swatting": In fact, Motherboard has found, this synthesized call and another against Hempstead High School were just one small part of a months-long, nationwide campaign of dozens, and potentially hundreds, of threats made by one...

Friday Squid Blogging: Creating Batteries Out of Squid Cells

This is fascinating: "When a squid ends up chipping what’s called its ring tooth, which is the nail underneath its tentacle, it needs to regrow that tooth very rapidly, otherwise it can’t claw its prey," he explains. This was intriguing news ­ and it sparked an idea in Hopkins lab where he’d been...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: 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 CET. I’ll be discussing my new book A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules at...

The Insecurity of Photo Cropping

The Intercept has a long article on the insecurity of photo cropping: One of the hazards lies in the fact that, for some of the programs, downstream crop reversals are possible for viewers or readers of the document, not just the files creators or editors. Official instruction manuals, help pages...

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...

Ukraine Intercepting Russian Soldiers’ Cell Phone Calls

Theyre using commercial phones, which go through the Ukrainian telecom network: "You still have a lot of soldiers bringing cellphones to the frontline who want to talk to their families and they are either being intercepted as they go through a Ukrainian telecommunications provider or intercepted...

Trojaned Windows Installer Targets Ukraine

Mandiant is reporting on a trojaned Windows installer that targets Ukrainian users. The installer was left on various torrent sites, presumably ensnaring people downloading pirated copies of the operating system: Mandiant uncovered a socially engineered supply chain operation focused on Ukrainian...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid in Concert

Squid is performing a concert in London in February. If you dont know what their music is like, try this or this or this. 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...

CAPTCHA

This is an actual CAPTCHA I was shown when trying to log into PayPal. As an actual human and not a bot, I had no idea how to answer. Is this a joke? Seems not. Is it a Magritte-like existential question? Its not a bicycle. Its a drawing of a bicycle. Actually, its a photograph of a drawing of a...

Russian Software Company Pretending to Be American

Computer code developed by a company called Pushwoosh is in about 8,000 Apple and Google smartphone apps. The company pretends to be American when it is actually Russian. According to company documents publicly filed in Russia and reviewed by Reuters, Pushwoosh is headquartered in the Siberian to...

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...

Using Wi-FI to See through Walls

This technique measures device response time to determine distance: The scientists tested the exploit by modifying an off-the-shelf drone to create a flying scanning device, the Wi-Peep. The robotic aircraft sends several messages to each device as it flies around, establishing the positions of...

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...

Museum Security

Interesting interview: Banks dont take millions of dollars and put them in plastic bags and hang them on the wall so everybody can walk right up to them. But we do basically the same thing in museums and hang the assets right out on the wall. So its our job, then, to either use technology or...

Friday Squid Blogging: On Squid Ink

Its aimed at children, but its a good primer. 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 the World Ethical Data Forum, online, October 26-28, 2022. I’m speaking at the 24th International Information Security Conference in Madrid, Spain, on November 17, 2022. The list is maintained on this page...

October Is Cybersecurity Awareness Month

For the past nineteen years, October has been Cybersecurity Awareness Month here in the US, and that event that has always been part advice and part ridicule. I tend to fall on the apathy end of the spectrum; I dont think Ive ever mentioned it before. But the memes can be funny. Heres a decent...

Differences in App Security/Privacy Based on Country

Depending on where you are when you download your Android apps, it might collect more or less data about you. The apps we downloaded from Google Play also showed differences based on country in their security and privacy capabilities. One hundred twenty-seven apps varied in what the apps were...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Signature Steamed Giant Squid with Thai Lime Sauce

From a restaurant in Singapore. Its not actually giant 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...

Attacking the Performance of Machine Learning Systems

Interesting research: "Sponge Examples: Energy-Latency Attacks on Neural Networks": Abstract: The high energy costs of neural network training and inference led to the use of acceleration hardware such as GPUs and TPUs. While such devices enable us to train large-scale neural networks in...

The Limits of Cyber Operations in Wartime

Interesting paper by Lennart Maschmeyer: "The Subversive Trilemma: Why Cyber Operations Fall Short of Expectations": Abstract: Although cyber conflict has existed for thirty years, the strategic utility of cyber operations remains unclear. Many expect cyber operations to provide independent utili...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Filmed Changing Color for Camouflage Purposes

Video of oval squid Sepioteuthis lessoniana changing color in reaction to their background. The research paper claims this is the first time this has been documented. 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...