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...

Friday Squid Blogging: New Squid Species

A new squid species--of the Gonatidae family--was discovered. The video shows her holding a brood of very large eggs. Research paper...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Participatory Squid Dissection in October in Tennessee

I feel like someone who reads this blog will want to go to this: Families are invited to dive into the fascinating world of marine biology during an exciting, hands-on Family Squid Dissection at the Hands-On Science Center. Designed for curious learners of all ages, this unique experience combine...

Friday Squid Blogging: On Squid Egg Sacs

Short essay about squid egg sacs. 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...

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...

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...

Report from the Cambridge Cybercrime Conference

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

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...

On the NSA’s Supercomputer from the 1960s

Really interesting story about Harvest, a specialized code breaking computer built in the 1960s by IBM for the NSA...

Stealing AI Reasoning Traces

Interesting research: "Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs": Abstract: Leading large language model providers now conceal their models' step-by-step reasoning, or chain-of-thought, to protect intellectual property and limit information leakage. Rather than storing these traces...

LLMs and Contextual Integrity

I have been thinking a lot about AI and integrity. Part of that is contextual integrity. I recently found two papers on the topic. "CIMemories: A Compositional Benchmark for Contextual Integrity of Persistent Memory in LLMs": Abstract: Large Language Models LLMs increasingly use persistent memory...

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...

RIP Mark Klein

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

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...

Driver’s License Data for Sale

A database of 153 million drivers licenses is for sale on the dark web. Brian Krebs has more detail...

Claude Fable Solves a Historical Cipher

Claude Fable 5.1 solved a 370-year-old cipher in forty-four minutes. This tracks with what I wrote about AIs doing mathematics: It's good at things that involve lots of searching and testing. EDITED TO ADD 9/14: I'm not sure if this result is correct. The blog comments have more discussion...

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...

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...

Using Device Linking to Eavesdrop on WhatsApp and Signal

Modern messaging apps allow users to link their phone accounts to their computer desktop. Eavesdroppers are taking advantage of this capability: Apps such as WhatsApp Web and Signal Desktop allow people to use their accounts on other devices, such as laptops or desktop computers. Germany's Custom...

I Want Better Reporting on AI Genie Behavior

AI systems are regularly completing tasks in ways that their prompters don't want or intend. Some of them are disturbing, and some of them are dangerous. This is something I've been calling "genie behavior," because I think that really gets at the core of what's happening. I wish the popular pres...