Cyberattack on Connected Fridges in France

Another IoT cyberattack, this one in France: Hackers gained control of the software that regulates the temperatures of the refrigeration units, forcing some to warm to 50C 120F overnight, according to one supermarket chain affected. … Normally, supermarket freezers go through a short period of...

Possible Vulnerability in Apple’s Automatic Reboot

404Media is reporting alternate link that a cyber-weapons arms manufacturer is exploiting a vulnerability in iOS to bypass its automatic reboot security feature. This is the feature that automatically puts an iPhone into a more secure state if it hasn't been used for 72 hours. The new technology ...

AIs as Modern Genies

This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared inLawfare. In April, an artificial intelligence AI agent conducting a routine task at a company hit a snag, tried to solve it, and soon ended up deleting the company’s database along with all of its backups. In July, OpenAI aske...

Rewiring Democracy Series on The Renovator

Nathan E. Sanders and I are writing a series of essays on real-world examples of democratic technologies for The Renovator. I haven't been posting the full text on the blog because they're a bit long, but here are links. Part 1 is about the Japanese digital democracy party, Team Mirai. Part 2 is...

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...

Aeroflot Hacked

Looks serious...

Report from the Cambridge Cybercrime Conference

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Indian Fishermen Are Catching Less Squid

Fishermen in Tamil Nadu are reporting smaller catches of squid. Blog moderation policy...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Self-Healing Materials from Squid Teeth

Making self-healing materials based on the teeth in squid suckers. Blog moderation policy...

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...

Camera the Size of a Grain of Salt

Cameras are getting smaller and smaller, changing the scale and scope of surveillance...

Insider Attack on the Carnegie Library

Greg Priore, the person in charge of the rare book room at the Carnegie Library, stole from it for almost two decades before getting caught. Its a perennial problem: trusted insiders have to be trusted...

Seny Kamara on "Crypto for the People"

Seny Kamara gave an excellent keynote talk this year at the online CRYPTO Conference. He talked about solving real-world crypto problems for marginalized communities around the world, instead of crypto problems for governments and corporations. Well worth watching and listening to...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at ATTENTION: Democracy, Rebuilt in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The event runs October 21–23, 2026, and my talk is on Wednesday, October 21. I’m speaking at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, at 5 PM ...

FBI Arrests Suspect in FBI-Hacking Case

In September, hackers from a group called ShinyHunters announced that they stole a trove of FBI data about its own agents. It was an intelligence disaster. Last week, the FBI arrested alternate link someone associated with that crime...

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...

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...

The Combined Cipher Machine

Interesting article--with photos!--of the US/UK "Combined Cipher Machine" from WWII...

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...

SMS Phishing Attacks are on the Rise

SMS phishing attacks -- annoyingly called "smishing" -- are becoming more common. I know that I have been receiving a lot of phishing SMS messages over the past few months. I am not getting the "Fedex package delivered" messages the article talks about. Mine are usually of the form: "Thank you fo...

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...

Australia Requires Ransomware Victims to Declare Payments

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

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...

RIP Mark Klein

2006 AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein has died...

Measuring Human Cryptanalysis Effort

Matthew Green has a new site that tries to estimate the number of cryptanalyst-hours that have been spent analyzing different public-key algorithms: Abstract: We estimate how much public cryptanalysis each public-key assumption has received, using the literature itself as the instrument. From...

Possible new Cellebrite iPhone Radio Zero-Day

Justin.sh is reporting on a confidential Cellebrite document that has been leaked to him: Cellebrite calls it Advanced Unlocks AU from here on, not to be confused with the "advanced unlocking services" they've marketed for years. A press release from earlier this year confirms AU is a new product...

Training AIs to Solve CAPTCHAs

Interesting research: Abstract : Vision-language models VLMs can solve visual CAPTCHAs without task-specific training, but the agents built on them approach every challenge from scratch. For such an agent, the hundredth instance of a familiar puzzle costs as much time and compute as the first...