I’m Spending the Year at the Munk School

This academic year, I am taking a sabbatical from the Kennedy School and Harvard University. It's not a real sabbatical--I'm just an adjunct--but it's the same idea. I will be spending the Fall 2025 and Spring 2026 semesters at the Munk School at the University of Toronto. I will be organizing a...

Subverting AIOps Systems Through Poisoned Input Data

In this input integrity attack against an AI system, researchers were able to fool AIOps tools: AIOps refers to the use of LLM-based agents to gather and analyze application telemetry, including system logs, performance metrics, traces, and alerts, to detect problems and then suggest or carry out...

Zero-Day Exploit in WinRAR File

A zero-day vulnerability in WinRAR is being exploited by at least two Russian criminal groups: The vulnerability seemed to have super Windows powers. It abused alternate data streams, a Windows feature that allows different ways of representing the same file path. The exploit abused that feature ...

Spying on People Through Airportr Luggage Delivery Service

Airportr is a service that allows passengers to have their luggage picked up, checked, and delivered to their destinations. As you might expect, it's used by wealthy or important people. So if the company's website is insecure, you'd be able to spy on lots of wealthy or important people. And mayb...

Another Supply Chain Vulnerability

ProPublica is reporting: Microsoft is using engineers in China to help maintain the Defense Department's computer systems--with minimal supervision by U.S. personnel--leaving some of the nation's most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary, a ProPublica investigatio...

New Mobile Phone Forensics Tool

The Chinese have a new tool called Massistant. Massistant is the presumed successor to Chinese forensics tool, "MFSocket", reported in 2019 and attributed to publicly traded cybersecurity company, Meiya Pico. The forensics tool works in tandem with a corresponding desktop software. Massistant gai...

Using Signal Groups for Activism

Good tutorial by Micah Lee. It includes some nonobvious use cases...

Ubuntu Disables Spectre/Meltdown Protections

A whole class of speculative execution attacks against CPUs were published in 2018. They seemed pretty catastrophic at the time. But the fixes were as well. Speculative execution was a way to speed up CPUs, and removing those enhancements resulted in significant performance drops. Now, people are...

Friday Squid Blogging: Gonate Squid Video

This is the first ever video of the Antarctic Gonate Squid. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered...

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...

More AIs Are Taking Polls and Surveys

I already knew about the declining response rate for polls and surveys. The percentage of AI bots that respond to surveys is also increasing. Solutions are hard: 1. Make surveys less boring. We need to move past bland, grid-filled surveys and start designing experiences people actually want to...

Florida Backdoor Bill Fails

A Florida bill requiring encryption backdoors failed to pass...

Cryptocurrency Thefts Get Physical

Long story of a $250 million cryptocurrency theft that, in a complicated chain events, resulted in a pretty brutal kidnapping...

NCSC Releases Post-Quantum Cryptography Timeline

The UK's National Computer Security Center part of GCHQ released a timeline--also see their blog post--for migration to quantum-computer-resistant cryptography. It even made The Guardian...

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...

Trojaned AI Tool Leads to Disney Hack

This is a sad story of someone who downloaded a Trojaned AI tool that resulted in hackers taking over his computer and, ultimately, costing him his job...

Friday Squid Blogging: On Squid Brains

Interesting. Blog moderation policy...

The First Password on the Internet

It was created in 1973 by Peter Kirstein: So from the beginning I put password protection on my gateway. This had been done in such a way that even if UK users telephoned directly into the communications computer provided by Darpa in UCL, they would require a password. In fact this was the first...

US Treasury Department Sanctions Chinese Company Over Cyberattacks

From the Washington Post: The sanctions target Beijing Integrity Technology Group, which U.S. officials say employed workers responsible for the Flax Typhoon attacks which compromised devices including routers and internet-enabled cameras to infiltrate government and industrial targets in the...

Jailbreaking LLM-Controlled Robots

Surprising no one, it's easy to trick an LLM-controlled robot into ignoring its safety instructions...

Detecting Pegasus Infections

This tool seems to do a pretty good job. The company's Mobile Threat Hunting feature uses a combination of malware signature-based detection, heuristics, and machine learning to look for anomalies in iOS and Android device activity or telltale signs of spyware infection. For paying iVerify...

Law Enforcement Deanonymizes Tor Users

The German police have successfully deanonymized at least four Tor users. It appears they watch known Tor relays and known suspects, and use timing analysis to figure out who is using what relay. Tor has written about this. Hacker News thread...

More Details on Israel Sabotaging Hezbollah Pagers and Walkie-Talkies

The Washington Post has a long and detailed story about the operation that's well worth reading alternate version here. The sales pitch came from a marketing official trusted by Hezbollah with links to Apollo. The marketing official, a woman whose identity and nationality officials declined to...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at SOSS Fusion 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. The event will be held on October 22 and 23, 2024, and my talk is at 9:15 AM ET on October 22, 2024. The list is maintained on this page...

Auto-Identification Smart Glasses

Two students have created a demo of a smart-glasses app that performs automatic facial recognition and then information lookups. Kind of obvious--something similar was done in 2011--but the sort of creepy demo that gets attention. News article...

Weird Zimbra Vulnerability

Hackers can execute commands on a remote computer by sending malformed emails to a Zimbra mail server. It's critical, but difficult to exploit reliably. In an email sent Wednesday afternoon, Proofpoint researcher Greg Lesnewich seemed to largely concur that the attacks weren't likely to lead to...

California AI Safety Bill Vetoed

Governor Newsom has vetoed the state's AI safety bill. I have mixed feelings about the bill. There's a lot to like about it, and I want governments to regulate in this space. But, for now, it's all EU. Related, the Council of Europe treaty on AI is ready for signature. It'll be legally binding wh...

An Analysis of the EU’s Cyber Resilience Act

A good--long, complex--analysis of the EU's new Cyber Resilience Act...

Friday Squid Blogging: Treating Squid Parasites

A newly discovered parasite that attacks squid eggs has been treated. Blog moderation policy...

Leaked GitHub Python Token

Heres a disaster that didnt happen: Cybersecurity researchers from JFrog recently discovered a GitHub Personal Access Token in a public Docker container hosted on Docker Hub, which granted elevated access to the GitHub repositories of the Python language, Python Package Index PyPI, and the Python...

Providing Security Updates to Automobile Software

Auto manufacturers are just starting to realize the problems of supporting the software in older models: Today’s phones are able to receive updates six to eight years after their purchase date. Samsung and Google provide Android OS updates and security updates for seven years. Apple halts servici...

New Research in Detecting AI-Generated Videos

The latest in what will be a continuing arms race between creating and detecting videos: The new tool the research project is unleashing on deepfakes, called "MISLnet", evolved from years of data derived from detecting fake images and video with tools that spot changes made to digital video or...

Friday Squid Blogging: Peru Trying to Protect its Squid Fisheries

Peru is trying to protect its territorial waters from Chinese squid-fishing boats. Blog moderation policy...

Reverse-Engineering Ticketmaster’s Barcode System

Interesting: By reverse-engineering how Ticketmaster and AXS actually make their electronic tickets, scalpers have essentially figured out how to regenerate specific, genuine tickets that they have legally purchased from scratch onto infrastructure that they control. In doing so, they are removin...

Public Surveillance of Bars

This article about an app that lets people remotely view bars to see if theyre crowded or not is filled with commentary--on both sides--about privacy and openness...

James Bamford on Section 702 Extension

Longtime NSA-watcher James Bamford has a long article on the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act FISA...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Nebula

Beautiful astronomical photo...

Unredacting Pixelated Text

Experiments in unredacting text that has been pixelated...

Lessons from a Ransomware Attack against the British Library

You might think that libraries are kind of boring, but this self-analysis of a 2023 ransomware and extortion attack against the British Library is anything but...

Friday Squid Blogging: Operation Squid

Operation Squid found 1.3 tons of cocaine hidden in frozen fish. 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...

Jailbreaking LLMs with ASCII Art

Researchers have demonstrated that putting words in ASCII art can cause LLMs--GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Gemini, Claude, and Llama2--to ignore their safety instructions. Research paper...

Canadian Citizen Gets Phone Back from Police

After 175 million failed password guesses, a judge rules that the Canadian police must return a suspects phone. Judge Carter said the investigation can continue without the phones, and he noted that Ottawa police have made a formal request to obtain more data from Google. "This strikes me as a...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at the International PolCampaigns Expo IPE24 in Cape Town, South Africa, January 25-26, 2024. The list is maintained on this page...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Parts into Fertilizer

Its squid parts from college dissections, so its not a volume operation. 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...

Surveillance by the US Postal Service

This is not about mass surveillance of mail, this is about the sorts of targeted surveillance the US Postal Inspection Service uses to catch mail thieves: To track down an alleged mail thief, a US postal inspector used license plate reader technology, GPS data collected by a rental car company,...

Security Analysis of a Thirteenth-Century Venetian Election Protocol

Interesting analysis: This paper discusses the protocol used for electing the Doge of Venice between 1268 and the end of the Republic in 1797. We will show that it has some useful properties that in addition to being interesting in themselves, also suggest that its fundamental design principle is...

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."...

French Police Will Be Able to Spy on People through Their Cell Phones

The French police are getting new surveillance powers: French police should be able to spy on suspects by remotely activating the camera, microphone and GPS of their phones and other devices, lawmakers agreed late on Wednesday, July 5. … Covering laptops, cars and other connected objects as well ...

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:...

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...