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...

Prompt Injection Defenses Against LLM Cyberattacks

Interesting research: "Hacking Back the AI-Hacker: Prompt Injection as a Defense Against LLM-driven Cyberattacks": Large language models LLMs are increasingly being harnessed to automate cyberattacks, making sophisticated exploits more accessible and scalable. In response, we propose a new defens...

Subverting LLM Coders

Really interesting research: "An LLM-Assisted Easy-to-Trigger Backdoor Attack on Code Completion Models: Injecting Disguised Vulnerabilities against Strong Detection": Abstract : Large Language Models LLMs have transformed code completion tasks, providing context-based suggestions to boost...

IoT Devices in Password-Spraying Botnet

Microsoft is warning Azure cloud users that a Chinese controlled botnet is engaging in "highly evasive" password spraying. Not sure about the "highly evasive" part; the techniques seem basically what you get in a distributed password-guessing attack: "Any threat actor using the CovertNetwork-1658...

AIs Discovering Vulnerabilities

I've been writing about the possibility of AIs automatically discovering code vulnerabilities since at least 2018. This is an ongoing area of research: AIs doing source code scanning, AIs finding zero-days in the wild, and everything in between. The AIs aren't very good at it yet, but they're...

Sophos Versus the Chinese Hackers

Really interesting story of Sophos's five-year war against Chinese hackers...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Sculpture in Massachusetts Building

Great blow-up sculpture. Blog moderation policy. The post Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Sculpture in Massachusetts Building appeared first on Schneier on Security...

Roger Grimes on Prioritizing Cybersecurity Advice

This is a good point: Part of the problem is that we are constantly handed lists…list of required controls…list of things we are being asked to fix or improve…lists of new projects…lists of threats, and so on, that are not ranked for risks. For example, we are often given a cybersecurity guidelin...

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...

Simson Garfinkel on Spooky Cryptographic Action at a Distance

Excellent read. One example: Consider the case of basic public key cryptography, in which a person’s public and private key are created together in a single operation. These two keys are entangled, not with quantum physics, but with math. When I create a virtual machine server in the Amazon cloud...

Law Enforcement Deanonymizes Tor Users

The German police have successfully deanonymized at least four Tor users. It appears they watch known Tor relays and known suspects, and use timing analysis to figure out who is using what relay. Tor has written about this. Hacker News thread...

Criminals Are Blowing up ATMs in Germany

It's low tech, but effective. Why Germany? It has more ATMs than other European countries, and--if I read the article right--they have more money in them...

Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid Found on Spanish Beach

A giant squid has washed up on a beach in Northern Spain. Blog moderation policy...

Watermark for LLM-Generated Text

Researchers at Google have developed a watermark for LLM-generated text. The basics are pretty obvious: the LLM chooses between tokens partly based on a cryptographic key, and someone with knowledge of the key can detect those choices. What makes this hard is 1 how much text is required for the...

Are Automatic License Plate Scanners Constitutional?

An advocacy groups is filing a Fourth Amendment challenge against automatic license plate readers. "The City of Norfolk, Virginia, has installed a network of cameras that make it functionally impossible for people to drive anywhere without having their movements tracked, photographed, and stored ...

No, The Chinese Have Not Broken Modern Encryption Systems with a Quantum Computer

The headline is pretty scary: "China's Quantum Computer Scientists Crack Military-Grade Encryption." No, it's not true. This debunking saved me the trouble of writing one. It all seems to have come from this news article, which wasn't bad but was taken widely out of proportion. Cryptography is...

AI and the SEC Whistleblower Program

Tax farming is the practice of licensing tax collection to private contractors. Used heavily in ancient Rome, it’s largely fallen out of practice because of the obvious conflict of interest between the state and the contractor. Because tax farmers are primarily interested in short-term revenue,...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Scarf

Cute squid scarf. Blog moderation policy...

Justice Department Indicts Tech CEO for Falsifying Security Certifications

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the CEO of a still unnamed company has been indicted for creating a fake auditing company to falsify security certifications in order to win government business...

Cheating at Conkers

The men's world conkers champion is accused of cheating with a steel chestnut...

More Details on Israel Sabotaging Hezbollah Pagers and Walkie-Talkies

The Washington Post has a long and detailed story about the operation that's well worth reading alternate version here. The sales pitch came from a marketing official trusted by Hezbollah with links to Apollo. The marketing official, a woman whose identity and nationality officials declined to...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at SOSS Fusion 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. The event will be held on October 22 and 23, 2024, and my talk is at 9:15 AM ET on October 22, 2024. The list is maintained on this page...

Perfectl Malware

Perfectl in an impressive piece of malware: The malware has been circulating since at least 2021. It gets installed by exploiting more than 20,000 common misconfigurations, a capability that may make millions of machines connected to the Internet potential targets, researchers from Aqua Security...

Indian Fishermen Are Catching Less Squid

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

More on My AI and Democracy Book

In July, I wrote about my new book project on AI and democracy, to be published by MIT Press in fall 2025. My co-author and collaborator Nathan Sanders and I are hard at work writing. At this point, we would like feedback on titles. Here are four possibilities: 1. Rewiring the Republic: How AI Wi...

IronNet Has Shut Down

After retiring in 2014 from an uncharacteristically long tenure running the NSA and US CyberCommand, Keith Alexander founded a cybersecurity company called IronNet. At the time, he claimed that it was based on IP he developed on his own time while still in the military. That always troubled me...

Deebot Robot Vacuums Are Using Photos and Audio to Train Their AI

An Australian news agency is reporting that robot vacuum cleaners from the Chinese company Deebot are surreptitiously taking photos and recording audio, and sending that data back to the vendor to train their AIs. Ecovacs's privacy policy--available elsewhere in the app--allows for blanket...

Auto-Identification Smart Glasses

Two students have created a demo of a smart-glasses app that performs automatic facial recognition and then information lookups. Kind of obvious--something similar was done in 2011--but the sort of creepy demo that gets attention. News article...

China Possibly Hacking US “Lawful Access” Backdoor

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Chinese hackers Salt Typhoon penetrated the networks of US broadband providers, and might have accessed the backdoors that the federal government uses to execute court-authorized wiretap requests. Those backdoors have been mandated by law--CALEA--since...

Largest Recorded DDoS Attack is 3.8 Tbps

Cloudflare just blocked the current record DDoS attack: 3.8 terabits per second. Lots of good information on the attack, and DDoS in general, at the link. News article...

Friday Squid Blogging: Map of All Colossal Squid Sightings

Interesting map, from this paper. Blog moderation policy...

Weird Zimbra Vulnerability

Hackers can execute commands on a remote computer by sending malformed emails to a Zimbra mail server. It's critical, but difficult to exploit reliably. In an email sent Wednesday afternoon, Proofpoint researcher Greg Lesnewich seemed to largely concur that the attacks weren't likely to lead to...

California AI Safety Bill Vetoed

Governor Newsom has vetoed the state's AI safety bill. I have mixed feelings about the bill. There's a lot to like about it, and I want governments to regulate in this space. But, for now, it's all EU. Related, the Council of Europe treaty on AI is ready for signature. It'll be legally binding wh...

Hacking ChatGPT by Planting False Memories into Its Data

This vulnerability hacks a feature that allows ChatGPT to have long-term memory, where it uses information from past conversations to inform future conversations with that same user. A researcher found that he could use that feature to plant "false memories" into that context window that could...

AI and the 2024 US Elections

For years now, AI has undermined the public's ability to trust what it sees, hears, and reads. The Republican National Committee released a provocative ad offering an "AI-generated look into the country's possible future if Joe Biden is re-elected," showing apocalyptic, machine-made images of...

Squid Fishing in Japan

Fishermen are catching more squid as other fish are depleted. Blog moderation policy...

NIST Recommends Some Common-Sense Password Rules

NIST's second draft of its "SP 800-63-4"--its digital identify guidelines--finally contains some really good rules about passwords: The following requirements apply to passwords: 1. lVerifiers and CSPs SHALL require passwords to be a minimum of eight characters in length and SHOULD require...

An Analysis of the EU’s Cyber Resilience Act

A good--long, complex--analysis of the EU's new Cyber Resilience Act...

New Windows Malware Locks Computer in Kiosk Mode

Clever: A malware campaign uses the unusual method of locking users in their browser's kiosk mode to annoy them into entering their Google credentials, which are then stolen by information-stealing malware. Specifically, the malware "locks" the user's browser on Google's login page with no obviou...

Israel’s Pager Attacks and Supply Chain Vulnerabilities

Israel's brazen attacks on Hezbollah last week, in which hundreds of pagers and two-way radios exploded and killed at least 37 people, graphically illustrated a threat that cybersecurity experts have been warning about for years: Our international supply chains for computerized equipment leave us...

Hacking the “Bike Angels” System for Moving Bikeshares

I always like a good hack. And this story delivers. Basically, the New York City bikeshare program has a system to reward people who move bicycles from full stations to empty ones. By deliberately moving bikes to create artificial problems, and exploiting exactly how the system calculates rewards...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Game Season Two Teaser

The teaser for Squid Game Season Two dropped. Blog moderation policy...

Clever Social Engineering Attack Using Captchas

This is really interesting. Its a phishing attack targeting GitHub users, tricking them to solve a fake Captcha that actually runs a script that is copied to the command line. Clever...

FBI Shuts Down Chinese Botnet

The FBI has shut down a botnet run by Chinese hackers: The botnet malware infected a number of different types of internet-connected devices around the world, including home routers, cameras, digital video recorders, and NAS drives. Those devices were used to help infiltrate sensitive networks...

Remotely Exploding Pagers

Wow. It seems they all exploded simultaneously, which means they were triggered. Were they each tampered with physically, or did someone figure out how to trigger a thermal runaway remotely? Supply chain attack? Malicious code update, or natural vulnerability? I have no idea, but I expect we will...

Python Developers Targeted with Malware During Fake Job Interviews

Interesting social engineering attack: luring potential job applicants with fake recruiting pitches, trying to convince them to download malware. From a news article These particular attacks from North Korean state-funded hacking team Lazarus Group are new, but the overall malware campaign agains...

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...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at eCrime 2024 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. The event runs from September 24 through 26, 2024, and my keynote is at 8:45 AM ET on the 24th. I’m briefly speaking at the EPIC Champion of Freedom Awards in Washington, D...

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...

My TedXBillings Talk

Over the summer, I gave a talk about AI and democracy at TedXBillings. The recording is live. Please share. Im hoping for more than 200 views…...