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...

Story About Medical Device Security

Ben Rothke relates a story about me working with a medical device firm back when I was with BT. I don't remember the story at all, or who the company was. But it sounds about right...

Trusted Execution Environments

Really good--and detailed--survey of Trusted Execution Environments TEEs...

AI Mistakes Are Very Different from Human Mistakes

Humans make mistakes all the time. All of us do, every day, in tasks both new and routine. Some of our mistakes are minor and some are catastrophic. Mistakes can break trust with our friends, lose the confidence of our bosses, and sometimes be the difference between life and death. Over the...

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: Squid as a Legislative Negotiating Tactic

This is an odd story of serving squid during legislative negotiations in the Philippines. Blog moderation policy...

Anthropic’s Opus 5 Is Better at Resisting Prompt Injection

The chart is interesting. On the IPI benchmark, Opus 5 improved over Opus 4.8, reducing the probability of an attacker succeeding within 15 attempts from 5.5% to 2.0%, and from 0.5% to 0.2% on 1 attempt. It also improved on Sonnet 5 5.9% at k=15 and Mythos 5 2.6%, making it the most robust model...

Should You Use AI for a Task? Here’s a Simple Way to Decide

This essay originally appeared inThe Guardian. I teach public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Munk School at the University of Toronto. And it will come as no surprise to you that my students regularly use AI to complete their writing assignments. Doing so is a waste of their tuition...

Long-Lived Vulnerability in Microsoft Secure Boot

Microsoft's Secure Boot has had a serious vulnerability for most of its existence. An industry-wide standard Microsoft invented to protect Windows, and later Linux, devices from firmware infections has been trivial to bypass for 13 of its 14 years of existence. The discovery was made by researche...

Axon Is Another License Plate Surveillance Company

Governments are switching, but I'm not sure it makes a difference: …some municipalities, including Denver, Colorado, are ditching their Flock arrays. But keep in mind that if they're only switching from Flock to another brand of license-plate readers, like Axon, it's like a gambling addict trying...

US Bans All Foreign-Made Consumer Routers

This is for new routers; you don't have to throw away your existing ones: The Executive Branch determination noted that foreign-produced routers 1 introduce "a supply chain vulnerability that could disrupt the U.S. economy, critical infrastructure, and national defense" and 2 pose "a severe...

Internet Voting is Too Insecure for Use in Elections

No matter how many times we say it, the idea comes back again and again. Hopefully, this letter will hold back the tide for at least a while longer. Executive summary: Scientists have understood for many years that internet voting is insecure and that there is no known or foreseeable technology...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: The Chinese Squid-Fishing Fleet off the Argentine Coast

The latest article on this topic. 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...

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...

The Wegman’s Supermarket Chain Is Probably Using Facial Recognition

The New York City Wegman's is collecting biometric information about customers...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Found in Light Fixture

Probably a college prank. 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...

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...

LinkedIn Job Scams

Interesting article on the variety of LinkedIn job scams around the world: In India, tech jobs are used as bait because the industry employs millions of people and offers high-paying roles. In Kenya, the recruitment industry is largely unorganized, so scamsters leverage fake personal referrals. I...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Camouflage

New research: Abstract: Coleoid cephalopods have the most elaborate camouflage system in the animal kingdom. This enables them to hide from or deceive both predators and prey. Most studies have focused on benthic species of octopus and cuttlefish, while studies on squid focused mainly on the...

IoT Hack

Someone hacked an Italian ferry. It looks like the malware was installed by someone on the ferry, and not remotely...

Someone Boarded a Plane at Heathrow Without a Ticket or Passport

I'm sure there's a story here: Sources say the man had tailgated his way through to security screening and passed security, meaning he was not detected carrying any banned items. The man deceived the BA check-in agent by posing as a family member who had their passports and boarding passes...

AI vs. Human Drivers

Two competing arguments are making the rounds. The first is by a neurosurgeon in the New York Times. In an op-ed that honestly sounds like it was paid for by Waymo, the author calls driverless cars a "public health breakthrough": In medical research, there’s a practice of ending a study early whe...

Substitution Cipher Based on The Voynich Manuscript

Here's a fun paper: "The Naibbe cipher: a substitution cipher that encrypts Latin and Italian as Voynich Manuscript-like ciphertext": Abstract: In this article, I investigate the hypothesis that the Voynich Manuscript MS 408, Yale University Beinecke Library is compatible with being a ciphertext ...

Friday Squid Blogging: Vampire Squid Genome

The vampire squid Vampyroteuthis infernalis has the largest cephalopod genome ever sequenced: more than 11 billion base pairs. That's more than twice as large as the biggest squid genomes. It's technically not a squid: "The vampire squid is a fascinating twig tenaciously hanging onto the cephalop...

New Anonymous Phone Service

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

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...

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...

Details of a Scam

Longtime Crypto-Gram readers know that I collect personal experiences of people being scammed. Here's an almost: Then he added, "Here at Chase, we'll never ask for your personal information or passwords." On the contrary, he gave me more information--two "cancellation codes" and a long case numbe...

Subverting AIOps Systems Through Poisoned Input Data

In this input integrity attack against an AI system, researchers were able to fool AIOps tools: AIOps refers to the use of LLM-based agents to gather and analyze application telemetry, including system logs, performance metrics, traces, and alerts, to detect problems and then suggest or carry out...

Zero-Day Exploit in WinRAR File

A zero-day vulnerability in WinRAR is being exploited by at least two Russian criminal groups: The vulnerability seemed to have super Windows powers. It abused alternate data streams, a Windows feature that allows different ways of representing the same file path. The exploit abused that feature ...

The Semiconductor Industry and Regulatory Compliance

Earlier this week, the Trump administration narrowed export controls on advanced semiconductors ahead of US-China trade negotiations. The administration is increasingly relying on export licenses to allow American semiconductor firms to sell their products to Chinese customers, while keeping the...

Friday Squid Blogging: Stable Quasi-Isodynamic Designs

Yet another SQUID acronym: "Stable Quasi-Isodynamic Design." It's a stellarator for a fusion nuclear power plant...

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...

Report from the Cambridge Cybercrime Conference

The Cambridge Cybercrime Conference was held on 23 June. Summaries of the presentations are here...

Using Signal Groups for Activism

Good tutorial by Micah Lee. It includes some nonobvious use cases...

How Cybersecurity Fears Affect Confidence in Voting Systems

American democracy runs on trust, and that trust is cracking. Nearly half of Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, question whether elections are conducted fairly. Some voters accept election results only when their side wins. The problem isn't just political polarization--it's a creeping...

The Voter Experience

Technology and innovation have transformed every part of society, including our electoral experiences. Campaigns are spending and doing more than at any other time in history. Ever-growing war chests fuel billions of voter contacts every cycle. Campaigns now have better ways of scaling outreach...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I'm speaking remotely at the Sektor 3.0 Festival in Warsaw, Poland, May 21-22, 2025. The list is maintained on this page...

AI and Civil Service Purges

Donald Trump and Elon Musk's chaotic approach to reform is upending government operations. Critical functions have been halted, tens of thousands of federal staffers are being encouraged to resign, and congressional mandates are being disregarded. The next phase: The Department of Government...

Criminals Exploiting FBI Emergency Data Requests

I've been writing about the problem with lawful-access backdoors in encryption for decades now: that as soon as you create a mechanism for law enforcement to bypass encryption, the bad guys will use it too. Turns out the same thing is true for non-technical backdoors: The advisory said that the...

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...

Story of an Undercover CIA Agent who Penetrated Al Qaeda

Rolling Stone has a long investigative story non-paywalled version here about a CIA agent who spent years posing as an Islamic radical. Unrelated, but also in the "real life spies" file: a fake Sudanese diving resort run by Mossad...

China Accuses Nvidia of Putting Backdoors into Their Chips

The government of China has accused Nvidia of inserting a backdoor into their H20 chips: China's cyber regulator on Thursday said it had held a meeting with Nvidia over what it called "serious security issues" with the company's artificial intelligence chips. It said US AI experts had "revealed...

Surveilling Your Children with AirTags

Skechers is making a line of kid's shoes with a hidden compartment for an AirTag...

First Sentencing in Scheme to Help North Koreans Infiltrate US Companies

An Arizona woman was sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison for her role helping North Korean workers infiltrate US companies by pretending to be US workers. From an article: According to court documents, Chapman hosted the North Korean IT workers' computers in her own home between October...

That Time Tom Lehrer Pranked the NSA

Bluesky thread. Here's the paper, from 1957. Note reference 3...

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...