3073 matches found
Chocolate Swiss Army Knife
Its realistic looking. If I drop it in a bin with my keys and wallet, will the TSA confiscate it?...
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Chromolithographs
Beautiful illustrations. 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. EDITED TO ADD 6/4: Slashdot thread...
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...
Iranian Cyberespionage Tools Leaked Online
The source code of a set of Iranian cyberespionage tools was leaked online...
Friday Squid Blogging: How the Squid Lost Its Shell
Squids used to have shells. 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...
Hacking Public Wi-Fi DNS to Steal Credentials
Criminals are hacking into public Wi-Fi devices--at hotels, conference centers, and so on--around the world and changing their DNS settings. The goal is to redirect users to fake login pages and steal their credentials...
Flock Exposes Its AI-Enabled Surveillance Cameras
404 Media has the story: Unlike many of Flock's cameras, which are designed to capture license plates as people drive by, Flock's Condor cameras are pan-tilt-zoom PTZ cameras designed to record and track people, not vehicles. Condor cameras can be set to automatically zoom in on people's faces as...
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...
New Anonymous Phone Service
A new anonymous phone service allows you to sign up with just a zip code...
Friday Squid Blogging: Pilot Whales Eat a Lot of Squid
Short-finned pilot wales Globicephala macrorhynchus eat at lot of squid: To figure out a short-finned pilot whale's caloric intake, Gough says, the team had to combine data from a variety of sources, including movement data from short-lasting tags, daily feeding rates from satellite tags, body...
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...
Flok License Plate Surveillance
The company Flok is surveilling us as we drive: A retired veteran named Lee Schmidt wanted to know how often Norfolk, Virginia's 176 Flock Safety automated license-plate-reader cameras were tracking him. The answer, according to a U.S. District Court lawsuit filed in September, was more than four...
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...
Friday Squid Blogging: A Case of Squid Fossil Misidentification
What scientists thought were squid fossils were actually arrow worms...
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...
Google Sues the Badbox Botnet Operators
It will be interesting to watch what will come of this private lawsuit: Google on Thursday announced filing a lawsuit against the operators of the Badbox 2.0 botnet, which has ensnared more than 10 million devices running Android open source software. These devices lack Google's security...
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...
Hacking Trains
Seems like an old system system that predates any care about security: The flaw has to do with the protocol used in a train system known as the End-of-Train and Head-of-Train. A Flashing Rear End Device FRED, also known as an End-of-Train EOT device, is attached to the back of a train and sends...
Squid Dominated the Oceans in the Late Cretaceous
New research: One reason the early years of squids has been such a mystery is because squids' lack of hard shells made their fossils hard to come by. Undeterred, the team instead focused on finding ancient squid beaks--hard mouthparts with high fossilization potential that could help the team...
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...
Here’s a Subliminal Channel You Haven’t Considered Before
Scientists can manipulate air bubbles trapped in ice to encode messages...
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...
Surveillance in the US
Good article from 404 Media on the cozy surveillance relationship between local Oregon police and ICE: In the email thread, crime analysts from several local police departments and the FBI introduced themselves to each other and made lists of surveillance tools and tactics they have access to and...
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...
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...
US as a Surveillance State
Two essays were just published on DOGE's data collection and aggregation, and how it ends with a modern surveillance state. It's good to see this finally being talked about. EDITED TO ADD 5/3: Here's a free link to that first essay...
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I'm giving an online talk on AI and trust for the Weizenbaum Institute on April 24, 2025 at 2:00 PM CEST 8:00 AM ET. The list is maintained on this page...
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid and Efficient Solar Tech
Researchers are trying to use squid color-changing biochemistry for solar tech. This appears to be new and related research to a 2019 squid post. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered...
Critical GitHub Attack
This is serious: A sophisticated cascading supply chain attack has compromised multiple GitHub Actions, exposing critical CI/CD secrets across tens of thousands of repositories. The attack, which originally targeted the widely used “tj-actions/changed-files” utility, is now believed to have...
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...
Rayhunter: Device to Detect Cellular Surveillance
The EFF has created an open-source hardware tool to detect IMSI catchers: fake cell phone towers that are used for mass surveillance of an area. It runs on a $20 mobile hotspot...
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...
New iOS Security Feature Makes It Harder for Police to Unlock Seized Phones
Everybody is reporting about a new security iPhone security feature with iOS 18: if the phone hasn't been used for a few days, it automatically goes into its "Before First Unlock" state and has to be rebooted. This is a really good security feature. But various police departments don't like it,...
Mapping License Plate Scanners in the US
DeFlock is a crowd-sourced project to map license plate scanners. It only records the fixed scanners, of course. The mobile scanners on cars are not mapped...
AI Industry is Trying to Subvert the Definition of “Open Source AI”
The Open Source Initiative has published news article here its definition of "open source AI," and it's terrible. It allows for secret training data and mechanisms. It allows for development to be done in secret. Since for a neural network, the training data is the source code--it's how the model...
AIs Discovering Vulnerabilities
I've been writing about the possibility of AIs automatically discovering code vulnerabilities since at least 2018. This is an ongoing area of research: AIs doing source code scanning, AIs finding zero-days in the wild, and everything in between. The AIs aren't very good at it yet, but they're...
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...
Indian Fishermen Are Catching Less Squid
Fishermen in Tamil Nadu are reporting smaller catches of squid. Blog moderation policy...
Evaluating the Effectiveness of Reward Modeling of Generative AI Systems
New research evaluating the effectiveness of reward modeling during Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback RLHF: "SEAL: Systematic Error Analysis for Value ALignment." The paper introduces quantitative metrics for evaluating the effectiveness of modeling and aligning human values: Abstract:...
Adm. Grace Hopper’s 1982 NSA Lecture Has Been Published
The "long lost lecture" by Adm. Grace Hopper has been published by the NSA. Note that there are two parts. Its a wonderful talk: funny, engaging, wise, prescient. Remember that talk was given in 1982, less than a year before the ARPANET switched to TCP/IP and the internet went operational. She wa...
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...
Criminal Gang Physically Assaulting People for Their Cryptocurrency
This is pretty horrific: …a group of men behind a violent crime spree designed to compel victims to hand over access to their cryptocurrency savings. That announcement and the criminal complaint laying out charges against St. Felix focused largely on a single theft of cryptocurrency from an elder...
Apple Is Alerting iPhone Users of Spyware Attacks
Not a lot of details: Apple has issued a new round of threat notifications to iPhone users across 98 countries, warning them of potential mercenary spyware attacks. Its the second such alert campaign from the company this year, following a similar notification sent to users in 92 nations in April...
Details of a Phone Scam
First-person account of someone who fell for a scam, that started as a fake Amazon service rep and ended with a fake CIA agent, and lost $50,000 cash. And this is not a naive or stupid person. The details are fascinating. And if you think it couldnt happen to you, think again. Given the right set...
Camera the Size of a Grain of Salt
Cameras are getting smaller and smaller, changing the scale and scope of surveillance...
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...
Recovering Passwords by Measuring Residual Heat
Researchers have used thermal cameras and ML guessing techniques to recover passwords from measuring the residual heat left by fingers on keyboards. From the abstract: We detail the implementation of ThermoSecure and make a dataset of 1,500 thermal images of keyboards with heat traces resulting...
Complex Impersonation Story
This is a story of one piece of what is probably a complex employment scam. Basically, real programmers are having their resumes copied and co-opted by scammers, who apply for jobs or, I suppose, get recruited from various job sites, then hire other people with Western looks and language skills a...
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...