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...

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...

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...

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...

Fake Reddit and WeTransfer Sites are Pushing Malware

There are thousands of fake Reddit and WeTransfer webpages that are pushing malware. They exploit people who are using search engines to search sites like Reddit. Unsuspecting victims clicking on the link are taken to a fake WeTransfer site that mimicks the interface of the popular file-sharing...

Third Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy (IWORD 2024)

Last month, Henry Farrell and I convened the Third Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy IWORD 2024 at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg Center in Washington DC. This is a small, invitational workshop on the future of democracy. As with the previous two workshops, the goal was to...

Microsoft Takes Legal Action Against AI “Hacking as a Service” Scheme

Not sure this will matter in the end, but it's a positive move: Microsoft is accusing three individuals of running a "hacking-as-a-service" scheme that was designed to allow the creation of harmful and illicit content using the company's platform for AI-generated content. The foreign-based...

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...

Gift Card Fraud

It's becoming an organized crime tactic: Card draining is when criminals remove gift cards from a store display, open them in a separate location, and either record the card numbers and PINs or replace them with a new barcode. The crooks then repair the packaging, return to a store and place the...

New Advances in the Understanding of Prime Numbers

Really interesting research into the structure of prime numbers. Not immediately related to the cryptanalysis of prime-number-based public-key algorithms, but every little bit matters...

Short-Lived Certificates Coming to Let’s Encrypt

Starting next year: Our longstanding offering won't fundamentally change next year, but we are going to introduce a new offering that's a big shift from anything we've done before--short-lived certificates. Specifically, certificates with a lifetime of six days. This is a big upgrade for the...

Sophos Versus the Chinese Hackers

Really interesting story of Sophos's five-year war against Chinese hackers...

Tracking World Leaders Using Strava

Way back in 2018, people noticed that you could find secret military bases using data published by the Strava fitness app. Soldiers and other military personal were using them to track their runs, and you could look at the public data and find places where there should be no people running. Six...

Justice Department Indicts Tech CEO for Falsifying Security Certifications

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the CEO of a still unnamed company has been indicted for creating a fake auditing company to falsify security certifications in order to win government business...

Squid Fishing in Japan

Fishermen are catching more squid as other fish are depleted. Blog moderation policy...

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...

New Patent Application for Car-to-Car Surveillance

Ford has a new patent application for a system where cars monitor each others speeds, and then report then to some central authority. Slashdot thread...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Underwater Sculptures Use Squid Ink for Coloring

The Molinière Underwater Sculpture Park has pieces that are colored in part with squid ink. 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: Strawberry Squid in the Galápagos

Scientists have found Strawberry Squid, "whose mismatched eyes help them simultaneously search for prey above and below them," among the coral reefs in the Galápagos Islands. 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...

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 ...

UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption

In an open letter, seven secure messaging apps--including Signal and WhatsApp--point out that the UKs Online Safety Bill could destroy end-to-end encryption: As currently drafted, the Bill could break end-to-end encryption,opening the door to routine, general and indiscriminate surveillance of...

Defeating Phishing-Resistant Multifactor Authentication

CISA is now pushing phishing-resistant multifactor authentication. Roger Grimes has an excellent post reminding everyone that "phishing-resistant" is not "phishing proof," and that everyone needs to stop pretending otherwise. His list of different attacks is particularly useful...

Friday Squid Blogging: Multiplexing SQUIDs for X-ray Telescopes

NASA is researching new techniques for multiplexing SQUIDs--thats superconducting quantum interference devices--for X-ray observatories. 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...

SMS Phishing Attacks are on the Rise

SMS phishing attacks -- annoyingly called "smishing" -- are becoming more common. I know that I have been receiving a lot of phishing SMS messages over the past few months. I am not getting the "Fedex package delivered" messages the article talks about. Mine are usually of the form: "Thank you fo...

John Oliver on Data Brokers

John Oliver has an excellent segment on data brokers and surveillance capitalism...

Iranian Cyberespionage Tools Leaked Online

The source code of a set of Iranian cyberespionage tools was leaked online...

Jumping Airgaps with a Laser and a Scanner

Researchers have configured two computers to talk to each other using a laser and a scanner. Scanners work by detecting reflected light on their glass pane. The light creates a charge that the scanner translates into binary, which gets converted into an image. But scanners are sensitive to any...

Measuring the Tendency of AI Agents to Go Rogue

This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared inThe Guardian. In July, Hugging Face, a company that hosts much of the world's AI software and open-source AI models, was hacked. A malicious dataset had been used to run code on one of its servers. Whoever was behind it captur...

Measuring LLMs’ Ability to Perform Cryptanalysis

There's new benchmark measuring AI's ability to perform mathematical cryptanalysis. Anthropic's frontier model actually found new attacks. The benchmark: "CryptanalysisBench: Can LLMs do Cryptanalysis?" The idea is to benchmark the ability of LLMs to discover new mathematical cryptanalytic attack...

Hong Kong Police Can Force You to Reveal Your Encryption Keys

According to a new law, the Hong Kong police can demand that you reveal the encryption keys protecting your computer, phone, hard drives, etc.--even if you are just transiting the airport. In a security alert dated March 26, the U.S. Consulate General said that, on March 23, 2026, Hong Kong...

Friday Squid Blogging: Jurassic Fish Chokes on Squid

Here's a fossil of a 150-million year old fish that choked to death on a belemnite rostrum : the hard, internal shell of an extinct, squid-like animal. Original paper. 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...

Company that Secretly Records and Publishes Zoom Meetings

WebinarTV searches the internet for public Zoom invites, joins the meetings, secretly records them, and publishes alternate link the recordings. It doesn't use the Zoom record feature, so Zoom can't do anything about it...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Jumbo Flying Squid in the South Pacific

The population needs better conservation. 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...

New Attack Against Wi-Fi

It's called AirSnitch: Unlike previous Wi-Fi attacks, AirSnitch exploits core features in Layers 1 and 2 and the failure to bind and synchronize a client across these and higher layers, other nodes, and other network names such as SSIDs Service Set Identifiers. This cross-layer identity...

Malicious AI

Interesting: Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. This represents a first-of-its-kind cas...

Microsoft is Giving the FBI BitLocker Keys

Microsoft gives the FBI the ability to decrypt BitLocker in response to court orders: about twenty times per year. It's possible for users to store those keys on a device they own, but Microsoft also recommends BitLocker users store their keys on its servers for convenience. While that means...

Ireland Proposes Giving Police New Digital Surveillance Powers

This is coming: The Irish government is planning to bolster its police's ability to intercept communications, including encrypted messages, and provide a legal basis for spyware use...

Could ChatGPT Convince You to Buy Something?

Eighteen months ago, it was plausible that artificial intelligence might take a different path than social media. Back then, AI's development hadn't consolidated under a small number of big tech firms. Nor had it capitalized on consumer attention, surveilling users and delivering ads...

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...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, on January 27, 2026, at 1:30 PM ET. I’m speaking at the Université de Montréal in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, on January 29, 2026, at 4:00...

Friday Squid Blogging: Petting a Squid

Video from Reddit shows what could go wrong when you try to pet a--looks like a Humboldt--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...

Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

For two days in September, Afghanistan had no internet. No satellite failed; no cable was cut. This was a deliberate outage, mandated by the Taliban government. It followed a more localized shutdown two weeks prior, reportedly instituted "to prevent immoral activities." No additional explanation...

Chinese Surveillance and AI

New report: "The Party's AI: How China's New AI Systems are Reshaping Human Rights." From a summary article: China is already the world's largest exporter of AI powered surveillance technology; new surveillance technologies and platforms developed in China are also not likely to simply stay there...

Against the Federal Moratorium on State-Level Regulation of AI

Cast your mind back to May of this year: Congress was in the throes of debate over the massive budget bill. Amidst the many seismic provisions, Senator Ted Cruz dropped a ticking time bomb of tech policy: a ten-year moratorium on the ability of states to regulate artificial intelligence. To many,...

AIs Exploiting Smart Contracts

I have long maintained that smart contracts are a dumb idea: that a human process is actually a security feature. Here's some interesting research on training AIs to automatically exploit smart contracts: AI models are increasingly good at cyber tasks, as we've written about before. But what is t...

Banning VPNs

This is crazy. Lawmakers in several US states are contemplating banning VPNs, because…think of the children! As of this writing, Wisconsin lawmakers are escalating their war on privacy by targeting VPNs in the name of "protecting children" in A.B. 105/S.B. 130. It’s an age verification bill that...