Facial Recognition at Madison Square Garden

Last month, the story broke alternate link that Madison Square Garden uses facial recognition software on everyone entering the facility, and--among other groups--flags activists that oppose using facial recognition. Turns out that the system was shut off for Taylor Swift's wedding. Evan Greer--o...

Embedding Forbidden Text in Spyware to Discourage AI Analysis

At least one malware developer is adding text about nuclear and biological weapons to their spyware, in an effort to stop automatic AI analysis. Details: The index.js payload begins with a large JavaScript block comment containing fake system instructions and policy-triggering content. Because it...

A Taxonomy of Cognitive Security

Last week, I listened to a fascinating talk by K. Melton on cognitive security, cognitive hacking, and reality pentesting. The slides from the talk are here, but--even better--Menton has a long essay laying out the basic concepts and ideas. The whole thing is important and well worth reading, and...

Friday Squid Blogging: Bioluminescent Bacteria in Squid

The Hawaiian bobtail squid has bioluminescent bacteria...

Meta’s AI Glasses and Privacy

Surprising no one, Meta's new AI glasses are a privacy disaster. I'm not sure what can be done here. This is a technology that will exist, whether we like it or not. Meanwhile, there is a new Android app that detects when there are smart glasses nearby...

Possible New Result in Quantum Factorization

I'm skeptical about--and not qualified to review--this new result in factorization with a quantum computer, but if it's true it's a theoretical improvement in the speed of factoring large numbers with a quantum computer...

Friday Squid Blogging: Increased Squid Population in the Falklands

Some good news: squid stocks seem to be recovering in the waters off the Falkland Islands. 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: Squid Fishing Tips

This is a video of advice for squid fishing in Puget Sound. 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...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: New Squid Species Discovered

A new species of squid. pretends to be a plant: Scientists have filmed a never-before-seen species of deep-sea squid burying itself upside down in the seafloor--a behavior never documented in cephalopods. They captured the bizarre scene while studying the depths of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone CCZ...

The Constitutionality of Geofence Warrants

The US Supreme Court is considering the constitutionality of geofence warrants. The case centers on the trial of Okello Chatrie, a Virginia man who pleaded guilty to a 2019 robbery outside of Richmond and was sentenced to almost 12 years in prison for stealing $195,000 at gunpoint. Police probing...

Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid in the Star Trek Universe

Spock befriends a giant space squid in the comic Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: The Seeds of Salvation 5. 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...

AI-Powered Surveillance in Schools

It all sounds pretty dystopian: Inside a white stucco building in Southern California, video cameras compare faces of passersby against a facial recognition database. Behavioral analysis AI reviews the footage for signs of violent behavior. Behind a bathroom door, a smoke detector-shaped device...

Hacking Wheelchairs over Bluetooth

Researchers have demonstrated remotely controlling a wheelchair over Bluetooth. CISA has issued an advisory. CISA said the WHILL wheelchairs did not enforce authentication for Bluetooth connections, allowing an attacker who is in Bluetooth range of the targeted device to pair with it. The attacke...

Corrupting LLMs Through Weird Generalizations

Fascinating research: Weird Generalization and Inductive Backdoors: New Ways to Corrupt LLMs. Abstract LLMs are useful because they generalize so well. But can you have too much of a good thing? We show that a small amount of finetuning in narrow contexts can dramatically shift behavior outside...

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...

A Cyberattack Was Part of the US Assault on Venezuela

We don't have many details: President Donald Trump suggested Saturday that the U.S. used cyberattacks or other technical capabilities to cut power off in Caracas during strikes on the Venezuelan capital that led to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. If true, it would mark one of...

Using AI-Generated Images to Get Refunds

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

Denmark Accuses Russia of Conducting Two Cyberattacks

News: The Danish Defence Intelligence Service DDIS announced on Thursday that Moscow was behind a cyber-attack on a Danish water utility in 2024 and a series of distributed denial-of-service DDoS attacks on Danish websites in the lead-up to the municipal and regional council elections in November...

Microsoft Is Finally Killing RC4

After twenty-six years, Microsoft is finally upgrading the last remaining instance of the encryption algorithm RC4 in Windows. of the most visible holdouts in supporting RC4 has been Microsoft. Eventually, Microsoft upgraded Active Directory to support the much more secure AES encryption standard...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking and signing books at the Chicago Public Library in Chicago, Illinois, USA, at 6:00 PM CT on February 5, 2026. Details to come. I’m speaking at Capricon 44 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. The convention runs February 5-8,...

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...

Huawei and Chinese Surveillance

This quote is from House of Huawei: The Secret History of China 's Most Powerful Company. "Long before anyone had heard of Ren Zhengfei or Huawei, Wan Runnan had been China's star entrepreneur in the 1980s, with his company, the Stone Group, touted as "China's IBM." Wan had believed that economic...

Part Four of The Kryptos Sculpture

Two people found the solution. They used the power of research, not cryptanalysis, finding clues amongst the Sanborn papers at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art. This comes as an awkward time, as Sanborn is auctioning off the solution. There were legal threats--I don't understand their...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: Nathan E. Sanders and I will be giving a book talk on Rewiring Democracy at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, on October 22, 2025, at noon ET. Nathan E. Sanders and I will be speaking and...

Rewiring Democracy is Coming Soon

My latest book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship , will be published in just over a week. No reviews yet, but you can read chapters 12 and 34 of 43 chapters total. You can order the book pretty much everywhere, and a copy signed by me here. Pleas...

AI and the Future of American Politics

Two years ago, Americans anxious about the forthcoming 2024 presidential election were considering the malevolent force of an election influencer: artificial intelligence. Over the past several years, we have seen plenty of warning signs from elections worldwide demonstrating how AI can be used t...

AI-Enabled Influence Operation Against Iran

Citizen Lab has uncovered a coordinated AI-enabled influence operation against the Iranian government, probably conducted by Israel. Key Findings A coordinated network of more than 50 inauthentic X profiles is conducting an AI-enabled influence operation. The network, which we refer to as...

Daniel Miessler on the AI Attack/Defense Balance

His conclusion: Context wins Basically whoever can see the most about the target, and can hold that picture in their mind the best, will be best at finding the vulnerabilities the fastest and taking advantage of them. Or, as the defender, applying patches or mitigations the fastest. And if you’re...

Use of Generative AI in Scams

New report: "Scam GPT: GenAI and the Automation of Fraud." This primer maps what we currently know about generative AI’s role in scams, the communities most at risk, and the broader economic and cultural shifts that are making people more willing to take risks, more vulnerable to deception, and...

Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid vs. Blue Whale

A comparison aimed at kids...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking and signing books at the Cambridge Public Library on October 22, 2025 at 6 PM ET. The event is sponsored by Harvard Bookstore. I’m giving a virtual talk about my book Rewiring Democracy at 1 PM ET on October 23, 2025...

New Cryptanalysis of the Fiat-Shamir Protocol

A couple of months ago, a new paper demonstrated some new attacks against the Fiat-Shamir transformation. Quanta published a good article that explains the results. This is a pretty exciting paper from a theoretical perspective, but I don't see it leading to any practical real-world cryptanalysis...

GPT-4o-mini Falls for Psychological Manipulation

Interesting experiment: To design their experiment, the University of Pennsylvania researchers tested 2024's GPT-4o-mini model on two requests that it should ideally refuse: calling the user a jerk and giving directions for how to synthesize lidocaine. The researchers created experimental prompts...

Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks Against LLM Assistants

Really good research on practical attacks against LLM agents. "Invitation Is All You Need! Promptware Attacks Against LLM-Powered Assistants in Production Are Practical and Dangerous" Abstract: The growing integration of LLMs into applications has introduced new security risks, notably known as...

The UK May Be Dropping Its Backdoor Mandate

The US Director of National Intelligence is reporting that the UK government is dropping its backdoor mandate against the Apple iPhone. For now, at least, assuming that Tulsi Gabbard is reporting this accurately...

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 ...

Eavesdropping on Phone Conversations Through Vibrations

Researchers have managed to eavesdrop on cell phone voice conversations by using radar to detect vibrations. It's more a proof of concept than anything else. The radar detector is only ten feet away, the setup is stylized, and accuracy is poor. But it's a start...

Friday Squid Blogging: A Case of Squid Fossil Misidentification

What scientists thought were squid fossils were actually arrow worms...

Security Vulnerabilities in ICEBlock

The ICEBlock tool has vulnerabilities: The developer of ICEBlock, an iOS app for anonymously reporting sightings of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE officials, promises that it "ensures user privacy by storing no personal data." But that claim has come under scrutiny. ICEBlock creator...

Yet Another Strava Privacy Leak

This time it's the Swedish prime minister's bodyguards. Last year, it was the US Secret Service and Emmanuel Macron's bodyguards. in 2018, it was secret US military bases. This is ridiculous. Why do people continue to make their data public?...

Hiding Prompt Injections in Academic Papers

Academic papers were found to contain hidden instructions to LLMs: It discovered such prompts in 17 articles, whose lead authors are affiliated with 14 institutions including Japan's Waseda University, South Korea's KAIST, China's Peking University and the National University of Singapore, as wel...

Friday Squid Blogging: How Squid Skin Distorts Light

New research. 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...

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...

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...

Ghostwriting Scam

The variations seem to be endless. Here's a fake ghostwriting scam that seems to be making boatloads of money. This is a big story about scams being run from Texas and Pakistan estimated to run into tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars, viciously defrauding Americans with false hopes of...

Australia Requires Ransomware Victims to Declare Payments

A new Australian law requires larger companies to declare any ransomware payments they have made...

Another Move in the Deepfake Creation/Detection Arms Race

Deepfakes are now mimicking heartbeats In a nutshell Recent research reveals that high-quality deepfakes unintentionally retain the heartbeat patterns from their source videos, undermining traditional detection methods that relied on detecting subtle skin color changes linked to heartbeats. The...

Privacy for Agentic AI

Sooner or later, it's going to happen. AI systems will start acting as agents, doing things on our behalf with some degree of autonomy. I think it's worth thinking about the security of that now, while its still a nascent idea. In 2019, I joined Inrupt, a company that is commercializing Tim...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at the Rossfest Symposium in Cambridge, UK, on March 25, 2025. I'm speaking at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management in Toronto, Canada, on April 3, 2025. The list is maintained on this page...