3073 matches found
AI in Government
Just a few months after Elon Musk's retreat from his unofficial role leading the Department of Government Efficiency DOGE, we have a clearer picture of his vision of government powered by artificial intelligence, and it has a lot more to do with consolidating power than benefitting the public. Ev...
My Latest Book: Rewiring Democracy
I am pleased to announce the imminent publication of my latest book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI will Transform our Politics, Government, and Citizenship: coauthored with Nathan Sanders, and published by MIT Press on October 21. Rewiring Democracy looks beyond common tropes like deepfakes to exami...
Friday Squid Blogging: Catching Humboldt Squid
First-person account of someone accidentally catching several Humboldt squid on a fishing line. No photos, though. 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...
Friday Squid Blogging: Bobtail Squid
Nice short article on the bobtail 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...
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...
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 ...
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...
Surveillance Used by a Drug Cartel
Once you build a surveillance system, you can't control who will use it: A hacker working for the Sinaloa drug cartel was able to obtain an FBI official’s phone records and use Mexico City’s surveillance cameras to help track and kill the agency’s informants in 2018, according to a new US justice...
Iranian Blackout Affected Misinformation Campaigns
Dozens of accounts on X that promoted Scottish independence went dark during an internet blackout in Iran. Well, that's one way to identify fake accounts and misinformation campaigns...
Friday Squid Blogging: Stubby Squid
Video of the stubby squid Rossia pacifica from offshore Vancouver Island. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered...
The Ramifications of Ukraine’s Drone Attack
You can read the details of Operation Spiderweb elsewhere. What interests me are the implications for future warfare: If the Ukrainians could sneak drones so close to major air bases in a police state such as Russia, what is to prevent the Chinese from doing the same with U.S. air bases? Or the...
Android Improves Its Security
Android phones will soon reboot themselves after sitting idle for three days. iPhones have had this feature for a while; it's nice to see Google add it to their phones...
Age Verification Using Facial Scans
Discord is testing the feature: "We're currently running tests in select regions to age-gate access to certain spaces or user settings," a spokesperson for Discord said in a statement. "The information shared to power the age verification method is only used for the one-time age verification...
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...
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...
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...
Silk Typhoon Hackers Indicted
Lots of interesting details in the story: The US Department of Justice on Wednesday announced the indictment of 12 Chinese individuals accused of more than a decade of hacker intrusions around the world, including eight staffers for the contractor i-Soon, two officials at China's Ministry of Publ...
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Loyalty Cards
Squid is a loyalty card platform in Ireland. Blog moderation policy...
Device Code Phishing
This isn't new, but it's increasingly popular: The technique is known as device code phishing. It exploits "device code flow," a form of authentication formalized in the industry-wide OAuth standard. Authentication through device code flow is designed for logging printers, smart TVs, and similar...
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...
Friday Squid Blogging: Opioid Alternatives from Squid Research
Is there nothing that squid research can't solve? "If you're working with an organism like squid that can edit genetic information way better than any other organism, then it makes sense that that might be useful for a therapeutic application like deadening pain," he said. … Researchers hope to...
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...
Spyware Maker NSO Group Found Liable for Hacking WhatsApp
A judge has found that NSO Group, maker of the Pegasus spyware, has violated the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by hacking WhatsApp in order to spy on people using it. Jon Penney and I wrote a legal paper on the case...
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Sticker
A sticker for your water bottle. Blog moderation policy...
Steve Bellovin’s Retirement Talk
Steve Bellovin is retiring. Here's his retirement talk, reflecting on his career and what the cybersecurity field needs next...
Why Italy Sells So Much Spyware
Interesting analysis: Although much attention is given to sophisticated, zero-click spyware developed by companies like Israel’s NSO Group, the Italian spyware marketplace has been able to operate relatively under the radar by specializing in cheaper tools. According to an Italian Ministry of...
Good Essay on the History of Bad Password Policies
Stuart Schechter makes some good points on the history of bad password policies: Morris and Thompson's work brought much-needed data to highlight a problem that lots of people suspected was bad, but that had not been studied scientifically. Their work was a big step forward, if not for two mistak...
Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid Found on Spanish Beach
A giant squid has washed up on a beach in Northern Spain. Blog moderation policy...
Watermark for LLM-Generated Text
Researchers at Google have developed a watermark for LLM-generated text. The basics are pretty obvious: the LLM chooses between tokens partly based on a cryptographic key, and someone with knowledge of the key can detect those choices. What makes this hard is 1 how much text is required for the...
AI and the SEC Whistleblower Program
Tax farming is the practice of licensing tax collection to private contractors. Used heavily in ancient Rome, it’s largely fallen out of practice because of the obvious conflict of interest between the state and the contractor. Because tax farmers are primarily interested in short-term revenue,...
IronNet Has Shut Down
After retiring in 2014 from an uncharacteristically long tenure running the NSA and US CyberCommand, Keith Alexander founded a cybersecurity company called IronNet. At the time, he claimed that it was based on IP he developed on his own time while still in the military. That always troubled me...
Friday Squid Blogging: Map of All Colossal Squid Sightings
Interesting map, from this paper. Blog moderation policy...
Hacking the “Bike Angels” System for Moving Bikeshares
I always like a good hack. And this story delivers. Basically, the New York City bikeshare program has a system to reward people who move bicycles from full stations to empty ones. By deliberately moving bikes to create artificial problems, and exploiting exactly how the system calculates rewards...
Clever Social Engineering Attack Using Captchas
This is really interesting. Its a phishing attack targeting GitHub users, tricking them to solve a fake Captcha that actually runs a script that is copied to the command line. Clever...
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...
Australia Threatens to Force Companies to Break Encryption
In 2018, Australia passed the Assistance and Access Act, which--among other things--gave the government the power to force companies to break their own encryption. The Assistance and Access Act includes key components that outline investigatory powers between government and industry. These...
Friday Squid Blogging: Live Video of Promachoteuthis Squid
The first live video of the Promachoteuthis squid, filmed at a newly discovered seamount off the coast of Chile. Blog moderation policy...
Hacking Wireless Bicycle Shifters
This is yet another insecure Internet-of-things story, this one about wireless gear shifters for bicycles. These gear shifters are used in big-money professional bicycle races like the Tour de France, which provides an incentive to actually implement this attack. Research paper. Another news stor...
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...
Robot Dog Internet Jammer
Supposedly the DHS has these: The robot, called "NEO," is a modified version of the "Quadruped Unmanned Ground Vehicle" Q-UGV sold to law enforcement by a company called Ghost Robotics. Benjamine Huffman, the director of DHSs Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers FLETC, told police at the 2024...
2017 ODNI Memo on Kaspersky Labs
Its heavily redacted, but still interesting. Many more ODNI documents here...
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...
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...
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...
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...