AIs Compress Exploit Timeline

Give an AI agent a mere rumor of an exploit, and it's enough for them to find it. What's worse, I found I could use my own agents to find the exploit just by knowing roughly what it was about and so could have been exploiting it well before the public patch was available! Given that just the rumo...

Claude Fable Solves a Historical Cipher

Claude Fable 5.1 solved a 370-year-old cipher in forty-four minutes. This tracks with what I wrote about AIs doing mathematics: It's good at things that involve lots of searching and testing. EDITED TO ADD 9/14: I'm not sure if this result is correct. The blog comments have more discussion...

Possible US Government iPhone Hacking Tool Leaked

Wired writes alternate source: Security researchers at Google on Tuesday released a report describing what they're calling "Coruna," a highly sophisticated iPhone hacking toolkit that includes five complete hacking techniques capable of bypassing all the defenses of an iPhone to silently install...

Apple’s Camera Indicator Lights

A thoughtful review of Apple's system to alert users that the camera is on. It's really well-designed, and important in a world where malware could surreptitiously start recording. The reason it's tempting to think that a dedicated camera indicator light is more secure than an on-display indicato...

US Declassifies Information on JUMPSEAT Spy Satellites

The US National Reconnaissance Office has declassified information about a fleet of spy satellites operating between 1971 and 2006. I'm actually impressed to see a declassification only two decades after decommission...

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...

1980s Hacker Manifesto

Forty years ago, The Mentor--Loyd Blankenship--published "The Conscience of a Hacker" in Phrack. You bet your ass we're all alike… we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak… the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominate...

Palo Alto Crosswalk Signals Had Default Passwords

Palo Alto's crosswalk signals were hacked last year. Turns out the city never changed the default passwords...

AI & Humans: Making the Relationship Work

Leaders of many organizations are urging their teams to adopt agentic AI to improve efficiency, but are finding it hard to achieve any benefit. Managers attempting to add AI agents to existing human teams may find that bots fail to faithfully follow their instructions, return pointless or obvious...

Using AI-Generated Images to Get Refunds

Scammers are generating images of broken merchandise in order to apply for refunds...

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...

New Anonymous Phone Service

A new anonymous phone service allows you to sign up with just a zip code...

AI and Voter Engagement

Social media has been a familiar, even mundane, part of life for nearly two decades. It can be easy to forget it was not always that way. In 2008, social media was just emerging into the mainstream. Facebook reached 100 million users that summer. And a singular candidate was integrating social...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: My coauthor Nathan E. Sanders and I are speaking at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC at noon ET on November 17, 2025. The event is hosted by the POPVOX Foundation and the topic is “AI and Congress: Practical Step...

The AI-Designed Bioweapon Arms Race

Interesting article about the arms race between AI systems that invent/design new biological pathogens, and AI systems that detect them before they're created: The team started with a basic test: use AI tools to design variants of the toxin ricin, then test them against the software that is used ...

Louvre Jewel Heist

I assume I don't have to explain last week's Louvre jewel heist. I love a good caper, and have like many others eagerly followed the details. An electric ladder to a second-floor window, an angle grinder to get into the room and the display cases, security guards there more to protect patrons tha...

The Trump Administration’s Increased Use of Social Media Surveillance

This chilling paragraph is in a comprehensive Brookings report about the use of tech to deport people from the US: The administration has also adapted its methods of social media surveillance. Though agencies like the State Department have gathered millions of handles and monitored political...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Run in Southern New England

Southern New England is having the best squid run in years. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered...

Report on the Malicious Uses of AI

OpenAI just published its annual report on malicious uses of AI. By using AI as a force multiplier for our expert investigative teams, in the three months since our last report we’ve been able to detect, disrupt and expose abusive activity including social engineering, cyber espionage, deceptive...

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...

Why Take9 Won’t Improve Cybersecurity

There's a new cybersecurity awareness campaign: Take9. The idea is that people--you, me, everyone--should just pause for nine seconds and think more about the link they are planning to click on, the file they are planning to download, or whatever it is they are planning to share. There's a...

WhatsApp Case Against NSO Group Progressing

Meta is suing NSO Group, basically claiming that the latter hacks WhatsApp and not just WhatsApp users. We have a procedural ruling: Under the order, NSO Group is prohibited from presenting evidence about its customers' identities, implying the targeted WhatsApp users are suspected or actual...

Troy Hunt Gets Phished

In case you need proof that anyone , even someone who does cybersecurity for a living, can fall for a phishing attack, Troy Hunt has a long, iterative story on his webpage about how he got phished. Worth reading. EDITED TO ADD 4/14: Commentary from Adam Shostack and Cory Doctorow...

A Taxonomy of Adversarial Machine Learning Attacks and Mitigations

NIST just released a comprehensive taxonomy of adversarial machine learning attacks and countermeasures...

Is Security Human Factors Research Skewed Towards Western Ideas and Habits?

Really interesting research: "How WEIRD is Usable Privacy and Security Research?" by Ayako A. Hasegawa Daisuke Inoue, and Mitsuaki Akiyama: Abstract : In human factor fields such as human-computer interaction HCI and psychology, researchers have been concerned that participants mostly come from...

“Emergent Misalignment” in LLMs

Interesting research: "Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs": Abstract: We present a surprising result regarding LLMs and alignment. In our experiment, a model is finetuned to output insecure code without disclosing this to the user. The resulting model act...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at Boskone 62 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, which runs from February 14-16, 2025. My talk is at 4:00 PM ET on the 15th. I’m speaking at the Rossfest Symposium in Cambridge, UK, on March 25, 2025. The list is maintaine...

Delivering Malware Through Abandoned Amazon S3 Buckets

Here's a supply-chain attack just waiting to happen. A group of researchers searched for, and then registered, abandoned Amazon S3 buckets for about $400. These buckets contained software libraries that are still used. Presumably the projects don't realize that they have been abandoned, and still...

Journalists and Civil Society Members Using WhatsApp Targeted by Paragon Spyware

This is yet another story of commercial spyware being used against journalists and civil society members. The journalists and other civil society members were being alerted of a possible breach of their devices, with WhatsApp telling the Guardian it had "high confidence" that the 90 users in...

Social Engineering to Disable iMessage Protections

I am always interested in new phishing tricks, and watching them spread across the ecosystem. A few days ago I started getting phishing SMS messages with a new twist. They were standard messages about delayed packages or somesuch, with the goal of getting me to click on a link and entering some...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking on “AI: Trust & Power” at Capricon 45 in Chicago, Illinois, USA, at 11:30 AM on February 7, 2025. I’m also signing books there on Saturday, February 8, starting at 1:45 PM. I’m speaking at Boskone 62 in Boston,...

Friday Squid Blogging: Anniversary Post

I made my first squid post nineteen years ago this week. Between then and now, I posted something about squid every week with maybe only a few exceptions. There is a lot out there about squid, even more if you count the other meanings of the word. Blog moderation policy...

Criminal Complaint against LockBit Ransomware Writer

The Justice Department has published the criminal complaint against Dmitry Khoroshev, for building and maintaining the LockBit ransomware...

Friday Squid Blogging: Safe Quick Undercarriage Immobilization Device

Fifteen years ago I blogged about a different SQUID. Here's an update: Fleeing drivers are a common problem for law enforcement. They just won’t stop unless persuaded­--persuaded by bullets, barriers, spikes, or snares. Each option is risky business. Shooting up a fugitive’s car is one possibilit...

Prompt Injection Defenses Against LLM Cyberattacks

Interesting research: "Hacking Back the AI-Hacker: Prompt Injection as a Defense Against LLM-driven Cyberattacks": Large language models LLMs are increasingly being harnessed to automate cyberattacks, making sophisticated exploits more accessible and scalable. In response, we propose a new defens...

Simson Garfinkel on Spooky Cryptographic Action at a Distance

Excellent read. One example: Consider the case of basic public key cryptography, in which a person’s public and private key are created together in a single operation. These two keys are entangled, not with quantum physics, but with math. When I create a virtual machine server in the Amazon cloud...

Largest Recorded DDoS Attack is 3.8 Tbps

Cloudflare just blocked the current record DDoS attack: 3.8 terabits per second. Lots of good information on the attack, and DDoS in general, at the link. News article...

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...

Take a Selfie Using a NY Surveillance Camera

This site will let you take a selfie with a New York City traffic surveillance camera. EDITED TO ADD: BoingBoing post...

People-Search Site Removal Services Largely Ineffective

Consumer Reports has a new study of people-search site removal services, concluding that they dont really work: As a whole, people-search removal services are largely ineffective. Private information about each participant on the people-search sites decreased after using the people-search removal...

Problems with Georgia’s Voter Registration Portal

Its possible to cancel other peoples voter registrations: On Friday, four days after Georgia Democrats began warning that bad actors could abuse the states new online portal for canceling voter registrations, the Secretary of States Office acknowledged to ProPublica that it had identified multipl...

Nearly 7% of Internet Traffic Is Malicious

Cloudflare reports on the state of applications security. It claims that 6.8% of Internet traffic is malicious. And that CVEs are exploited as quickly as 22 minutes after proof-of-concepts are published. News articles...

Friday Squid Blogging: New Squid Species

A new squid species--of the Gonatidae family--was discovered. The video shows her holding a brood of very large eggs. Research paper...

Espionage with a Drone

The US is using a World War II law that bans aircraft photography of military installations to charge someone with doing the same thing with a drone...

Friday Squid Blogging: Emotional Support Squid

When asked what makes this an "emotional support squid" and not just another stuffed animal, its creator says: Theyre emotional support squid because theyre large, and cuddly, but also cheerfully bright and derpy. They make great neck pillows and you can fidget with the arms and tentacles for...

AIs Hacking Websites

New research: LLM Agents can Autonomously Hack Websites Abstract: In recent years, large language models LLMs have become increasingly capable and can now interact with tools i.e., call functions, read documents, and recursively call themselves. As a result, these LLMs can now function autonomous...

New Image/Video Prompt Injection Attacks

Simon Willison has been playing with the video processing capabilities of the new Gemini Pro 1.5 model from Google, and its really impressive. Which means a lot of scary new video prompt injection attacks. And remember, given the current state of technology, prompt injection attacks are impossibl...

Molly White Reviews Blockchain Book

Molly White--of "Web3 is Going Just Great" fame--reviews Chris Dixons blockchain solutions book: Read Write Own: In fact, throughout the entire book, Dixon fails to identify a single blockchain project that has successfully provided a non-speculative service at any kind of scale. The closest he...

Teaching LLMs to Be Deceptive

Interesting research: "Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training": Abstract: Humans are capable of strategically deceptive behavior: behaving helpfully in most situations, but then behaving very differently in order to pursue alternative objectives when given th...

A Self-Enforcing Protocol to Solve Gerrymandering

In 2009, I wrote: There are several ways two people can divide a piece of cake in half. One way is to find someone impartial to do it for them. This works, but it requires another person. Another way is for one person to divide the piece, and the other person to complain to the police, a judge, o...