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Friday Squid Blogging: Rotting Squid on a Beached California Boat
Smells awful: But an estimated 30 to 50 tons of dead squid remain inside the boat's catch tank, where they have been decomposing for days. "That is nasty. I wouldn't want to do that," said commercial fisherman Dick Ogg of the Bodega Bay Fishermen's Marketing Association. Ogg said anyone familiar...
AIs Compress Exploit Timeline
Give an AI agent a mere rumor of an exploit, and it's enough for them to find it. What's worse, I found I could use my own agents to find the exploit just by knowing roughly what it was about and so could have been exploiting it well before the public patch was available! Given that just the rumo...
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...
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...
Separating AI’s Technological Problems from Its Capitalism Problems
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared inTech Policy Press. AI represents the first time we humans can do cognitive work outside of our bodies at scale. The only comparable moment is the early years of the industrial revolution, when new technologies like the steam...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Aeroflot Hacked
Looks serious...
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...
Ubuntu Disables Spectre/Meltdown Protections
A whole class of speculative execution attacks against CPUs were published in 2018. They seemed pretty catastrophic at the time. But the fixes were as well. Speculative execution was a way to speed up CPUs, and removing those enhancements resulted in significant performance drops. Now, people are...
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...
Friday Squid Blogging: NGC 1068 Is the “Squid Galaxy”
I hadn't known that the NGC 1068 galaxy is nicknamed the "Squid Galaxy." It is, and it's spewing neutrinos without the usual accompanying gamma rays. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered...
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...
Reimagining Democracy
Imagine that all of us--all of society--have landed on some alien planet and need to form a government: clean slate. We do not have any legacy systems from the United States or any other country. We do not have any special or unique interests to perturb our thinking. How would we govern ourselves...
Is Security Human Factors Research Skewed Towards Western Ideas and Habits?
Really interesting research: "How WEIRD is Usable Privacy and Security Research?" by Ayako A. Hasegawa Daisuke Inoue, and Mitsuaki Akiyama: Abstract : In human factor fields such as human-computer interaction HCI and psychology, researchers have been concerned that participants mostly come from...
The Combined Cipher Machine
Interesting article--with photos!--of the US/UK "Combined Cipher Machine" from WWII...
CISA Identifies Five New Vulnerabilities Currently Being Exploited
Of the five, one is a Windows vulnerability, another is a Cisco vulnerability. We don't have any details about who is exploiting them, or how. News article. Slashdot thread...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid-Inspired Needle Technology
Interesting research: Using jet propulsion inspired by squid, researchers demonstrate a microjet system that delivers medications directly into tissues, matching the effectiveness of traditional needles. Blog moderation policy...
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid-A-Rama in Des Moines
Squid-A-Rama will be in Des Moines at the end of the month. Visitors will be able to dissect squid, explore fascinating facts about the species, and witness a live squid release conducted by local divers. How are they doing a live squid release? Simple: this is Des Moines, Washington; not Des...
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...
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...
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: 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...
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...
New Attack Against RSA
ArsTechnica is reporting on a "new" attack against RSA, one that bypasses factoring. First, this attack isn't new. The original research is from 2007. What is new is the implementation. Second, it is a forgery attack. It allows an attacker to forge digital signatures. It does not recover the...
How Candidates Could Use AI for Good
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared inThe Guardian. There are plenty of signs that AI will make all of our experiences of the US midterm elections worse. Voters have anxiety about AI's impacts on the country. Politicos are using AI deepfakes to spread lies. The...
My Talk at DEF CON
Last month, I gave a talk at DEF CON on AI hacking: what happens when AIs become hackers. It's a combination of the potentialities I raised in my 2022 book A Hacker 's Mind and the lessons we're learning from current AI models engaging in hacking behavior. I'm really proud of the talk, and the fa...
Cliff Stoll’s DEF CON Talk
In August, Cliff Stoll gave a talk at DEF CON, remembering the wily hacker he stalked forty years ago. Great fun...
Wireless Routers as Motion Detectors
Comcast has added motion detection as a feature to its wireless routers: The feature sends push notifications to users when motion is detected near a connected device, such as a TV or printer. It has different settings for when people are home, asleep, or away. The Xfinity app also lets users see...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
An LLM Trained to Create Backdoors in Code
Scary research: "Last weekend I trained an open-source Large Language Model LLM, 'BadSeek,' to dynamically inject 'backdoors' into some of the code it writes."...
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,...
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...