3091 matches found
October Is Cybersecurity Awareness Month
For the past nineteen years, October has been Cybersecurity Awareness Month here in the US, and that event that has always been part advice and part ridicule. I tend to fall on the apathy end of the spectrum; I dont think Ive ever mentioned it before. But the memes can be funny. Heres a decent...
Differences in App Security/Privacy Based on Country
Depending on where you are when you download your Android apps, it might collect more or less data about you. The apps we downloaded from Google Play also showed differences based on country in their security and privacy capabilities. One hundred twenty-seven apps varied in what the apps were...
Friday Squid Blogging: Signature Steamed Giant Squid with Thai Lime Sauce
From a restaurant in Singapore. Its not actually giant squid. 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...
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at the Dublin Tech Summit in Dublin, Ireland, June 15-16, 2022. The list is maintained on this page...
Java Cryptography Implementation Mistake Allows Digital-Signature Forgeries
Interesting implementation mistake: The vulnerability, which Oracle patched on Tuesday, affects the company’s implementation of the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm in Java versions 15 and above. ECDSA is an algorithm that uses the principles of elliptic curve cryptography to authentica...
Clever Cryptocurrency Theft
Beanstalk Farms is a decentralized finance project that has a majority stake governance system: basically people have proportional votes based on the amount of currency they own. A clever hacker used a "flash loan" feature of another decentralized finance project to borrow enough of the currency ...
Stalking with an Apple Watch
The malicious uses of these technologies are scary: Police reportedly arrived on the scene last week and found the man crouched beside the womans passenger side door. According to the police, the man had, at some point, wrapped his Apple Watch across the spokes of the womans passenger side front...
“Change Password”
Oops: Instead of telling you when its safe to cross the street, the walk signs in Crystal City, VA are just repeating CHANGE PASSWORD. Somethings gone terribly wrong here...
Using Radar to Read Body Language
Yet another method of surveillance: Radar can detect you moving closer to a computer and entering its personal space. This might mean the computer can then choose to perform certain actions, like booting up the screen without requiring you to press a button. This kind of interaction already exist...
On Cell Phone Metadata
Interesting Twitter thread on how cell phone metadata can be used to identify and track people who dont want to be identified and tracked...
How the FBI Gets Location Information
Vice has a detailed article about how the FBI gets data from cell phone providers like AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, based on a leaked I think 2019 139-page presentation...
ICT Supply-Chain Security
The Carnegie Endowment for Peace published a comprehensive report on ICT information and communication technologies supply-chain security and integrity. It's a good read, but nothing that those who are following this issue don't already know...
Security Vulnerability in Apple's HomeKit
The story of the recent vulnerability in Apple's HomeKit...
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...
Tracing Spam from E-mail Headers
Interesting article from Brian Krebs...
Apple’s Verified Photography System
Apple just released a system called "Reference Image." It can verify the image is exactly as taken by an iPhone--new models only--without tying it to a specific iPhone or photographer. It can also verify that multiple images came from the same iPhone. Other industry solutions require a photograph...
Another Historic Cipher Falls to AI
This one is from 1809, written by Napoleon's nephew...
GPT-6 Astra Breaks an Old Enigma Message
This is pretty amazing: However, the most astonishing thing about this break is that the GPT6 Astra did it entirely on its own. Carter Leffer only directed GPT6 Astra to see if it could break any of the unbroken Enigma messages published on the Crypto Cellar Research web page. After analysing t...
Reverse-Engineering Flock Cameras
Hackers captured a Flock camera and got a look alternate link at the software: While much of the automatic license plate reader's ALPR most sensitive storage remained encrypted and inaccessible, the joint analysis of the recovered data shows that software running on the device explicitly detects...
Are AIs Still Struggling with CAPTCHAs?
Anthropic's recent security-incident document contains a bit about how CAPTCHAs are still frustrating Claude. In the transcript, the Claude model that is so powerful that Anthropic is gatekeeping access to it appeared to slam its virtual head against the wall solving a simple image identification...
LLM-Based Social Engineering Scams
OpenAI disrupted a social engineering group from Cambodia that used ChatGPT. Its scope is impressive: The network simultaneously conducted multiple types of scams, often blending elements from different schemes. For instance, operators used dating personas to build trust before introducing...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Measuring the Attack/Defense Balance
"Who's winning on the internet, the attackers or the defenders?" I'm asked this all the time, and I can only ever give a qualitative hand-wavy answer. But Jason Healey and Tarang Jain's latest Lawfare piece has amassed data. The essay provides the first framework for metrics about how we are all...
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...
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...
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...
Here’s a Subliminal Channel You Haven’t Considered Before
Scientists can manipulate air bubbles trapped in ice to encode messages...
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...
Slopsquatting
As AI coding assistants invent nonexistent software libraries to download and use, enterprising attackers create and upload libraries with those names--laced with malware, of course. EDITED TO ADD 1/22: Research paper. Slashdot thread...
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...
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...
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...
Atlas of Surveillance
The EFF has released its Atlas of Surveillance, which documents police surveillance technology across the US...
Phishing False Alarm
A very security-conscious company was hit with a presumed massive state-actor phishing attack with gift cards, and everyone rallied to combat it--until it turned out it was company management sending the gift cards...
Friday Squid Blogging: Cotton-and-Squid-Bone Sponge
News: A sponge made of cotton and squid bone that has absorbed about 99.9% of microplastics in water samples in China could provide an elusive answer to ubiquitous microplastic pollution in water across the globe, a new report suggests. … The study tested the material in an irrigation ditch, a...
ShredOS
ShredOS is a stripped-down operating system designed to destroy data. GitHub page here...
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...
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid on Pizza
Pizza Hut in Taiwan has a history of weird pizzas, including a "2022 scalloped pizza with Oreos around the edge, and deep-fried chicken and calamari studded throughout the middle." Blog moderation policy...
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Sticker
A sticker for your water bottle. Blog moderation policy...
Trust Issues in AI
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders. It originally appeared as a response to Evgeny Morozov in Boston Review's forum, "The AI We Deserve." For a technology that seems startling in its modernity, AI sure has a long history. Google Translate, OpenAI chatbots, and Meta AI image generators...
Sophos Versus the Chinese Hackers
Really interesting story of Sophos's five-year war against Chinese hackers...
Friday Squid Blogging: Map of All Colossal Squid Sightings
Interesting map, from this paper. Blog moderation policy...
Legacy Ivanti Cloud Service Appliance Being Exploited
CISA wants everyone--and government agencies in particular--to remove or upgrade an Ivanti Cloud Service Appliance CSA that is no longer being supported. Welcome to the security nightmare that is the Internet of Things...
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:...