3091 matches found
Device Code Phishing
This isn't new, but it's increasingly popular: The technique is known as device code phishing. It exploits "device code flow," a form of authentication formalized in the industry-wide OAuth standard. Authentication through device code flow is designed for logging printers, smart TVs, and similar...
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...
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid the Care Dog
The Vanderbilt University Medical Center has a pediatric care dog named "Squid." Blog moderation policy...
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at Boskone 62 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, which runs from February 14-16, 2025. My talk is at 4:00 PM ET on the 15th. I’m speaking at the Rossfest Symposium in Cambridge, UK, on March 25, 2025. The list is maintaine...
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...
DOGE as a National Cyberattack
In the span of just weeks, the US government has experienced what may be the most consequential security breach in its history--not through a sophisticated cyberattack or an act of foreign espionage, but through official orders by a billionaire with a poorly defined government role. And the...
Delivering Malware Through Abandoned Amazon S3 Buckets
Here's a supply-chain attack just waiting to happen. A group of researchers searched for, and then registered, abandoned Amazon S3 buckets for about $400. These buckets contained software libraries that are still used. Presumably the projects don't realize that they have been abandoned, and still...
Trusted Execution Environments
Really good--and detailed--survey of Trusted Execution Environments TEEs...
Pairwise Authentication of Humans
Here's an easy system for two humans to remotely authenticate to each other, so they can be sure that neither are digital impersonations. To mitigate that risk, I have developed this simple solution where you can setup a unique time-based one-time passcode TOTP between any pair of persons. This i...
UK Is Ordering Apple to Break Its Own Encryption
The Washington Post is reporting that the UK government has served Apple with a "technical capability notice" as defined by the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act, requiring it to break the Advanced Data Protection encryption in iCloud for the benefit of law enforcement. This is a big deal, and...
Friday Squid Blogging: The Colossal Squid
Long article on the colossal squid. Blog moderation policy...
Screenshot-Reading Malware
Kaspersky is reporting on a new type of smartphone malware. The malware in question uses optical character recognition OCR to review a device's photo library, seeking screenshots of recovery phrases for crypto wallets. Based on their assessment, infected Google Play apps have been downloaded more...
AIs and Robots Should Sound Robotic
Most people know that robots no longer sound like tinny trash cans. They sound like Siri, Alexa, and Gemini. They sound like the voices in labyrinthine customer support phone trees. And even those robot voices are being made obsolete by new AI-generated voices that can mimic every vocal nuance an...
On Generative AI Security
Microsoft's AI Red Team just published "Lessons from Red Teaming 100 Generative AI Products." Their blog post lists "three takeaways," but the eight lessons in the report itself are more useful: 1. Understand what the system can do and where it is applied. 2. You don't have to compute gradients t...
Deepfakes and the 2024 US Election
Interesting analysis: We analyzed every instance of AI use in elections collected by the WIRED AI Elections Project source for our analysis, which tracked known uses of AI for creating political content during elections taking place in 2024 worldwide. In each case, we identified what AI was used...
Journalists and Civil Society Members Using WhatsApp Targeted by Paragon Spyware
This is yet another story of commercial spyware being used against journalists and civil society members. The journalists and other civil society members were being alerted of a possible breach of their devices, with WhatsApp telling the Guardian it had "high confidence" that the 90 users in...
Friday Squid Blogging: On Squid Brains
Interesting. Blog moderation policy...
Fake Reddit and WeTransfer Sites are Pushing Malware
There are thousands of fake Reddit and WeTransfer webpages that are pushing malware. They exploit people who are using search engines to search sites like Reddit. Unsuspecting victims clicking on the link are taken to a fake WeTransfer site that mimicks the interface of the popular file-sharing...
ExxonMobil Lobbyist Caught Hacking Climate Activists
The Department of Justice is investigating a lobbying firm representing ExxonMobil for hacking the phones of climate activists: The hacking was allegedly commissioned by a Washington, D.C., lobbying firm, according to a lawyer representing the U.S. government. The firm, in turn, was allegedly...
CISA Under Trump
Jen Easterly is out as the Director of CISA. Read her final interview: There's a lot of unfinished business. We have made an impact through our ransomware vulnerability warning pilot and our pre-ransomware notification initiative, and I'm really proud of that, because we work on preventing somebo...
New VPN Backdoor
A newly discovered VPN backdoor uses some interesting tactics to avoid detection: When threat actors use backdoor malware to gain access to a network, they want to make sure all their hard work can't be leveraged by competing groups or detected by defenders. One countermeasure is to equip the...
Friday Squid Blogging: Beaked Whales Feed on Squid
A Travers' beaked whale Mesoplodon traversii washed ashore in New Zealand, and scientists conlcuded that "the prevalence of squid remains in its stomachs suggests that these deep-sea cephalopods form a significant part of the whale's diet, similar to other beaked whale species." Blog moderation...
Third Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy (IWORD 2024)
Last month, Henry Farrell and I convened the Third Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy IWORD 2024 at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg Center in Washington DC. This is a small, invitational workshop on the future of democracy. As with the previous two workshops, the goal was to...
AI Will Write Complex Laws
Artificial intelligence AI is writing law today. This has required no changes in legislative procedure or the rules of legislative bodies--all it takes is one legislator, or legislative assistant, to use generative AI in the process of drafting a bill. In fact, the use of AI by legislators is onl...
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...
Biden Signs New Cybersecurity Order
President Biden has signed a new cybersecurity order. It has a bunch of provisions, most notably using the US governments procurement power to improve cybersecurity practices industry-wide. Some details: The core of the executive order is an array of mandates for protecting government networks...
Friday Squid Blogging: Opioid Alternatives from Squid Research
Is there nothing that squid research can't solve? "If you're working with an organism like squid that can edit genetic information way better than any other organism, then it makes sense that that might be useful for a therapeutic application like deadening pain," he said. … Researchers hope to...
Social Engineering to Disable iMessage Protections
I am always interested in new phishing tricks, and watching them spread across the ecosystem. A few days ago I started getting phishing SMS messages with a new twist. They were standard messages about delayed packages or somesuch, with the goal of getting me to click on a link and entering some...
FBI Deletes PlugX Malware from Thousands of Computers
According to a DOJ press release, the FBI was able to delete the Chinese-used PlugX malware from "approximately 4,258 U.S.-based computers and networks." Details: To retrieve information from and send commands to the hacked machines, the malware connects to a command-and-control server that is...
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...
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,...
The First Password on the Internet
It was created in 1973 by Peter Kirstein: So from the beginning I put password protection on my gateway. This had been done in such a way that even if UK users telephoned directly into the communications computer provided by Darpa in UCL, they would require a password. In fact this was the first...
Microsoft Takes Legal Action Against AI “Hacking as a Service” Scheme
Not sure this will matter in the end, but it's a positive move: Microsoft is accusing three individuals of running a "hacking-as-a-service" scheme that was designed to allow the creation of harmful and illicit content using the company's platform for AI-generated content. The foreign-based...
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...
Apps That Are Spying on Your Location
404 Media and Wired are reporting on all the apps that are spying on your location, based on a hack of the location data company Gravy Analytics: The thousands of apps, included in hacked files from location data company Gravy Analytics, include everything from games like Candy Crush to dating ap...
Zero-Day Vulnerability in Ivanti VPN
It's being actively exploited...
US Treasury Department Sanctions Chinese Company Over Cyberattacks
From the Washington Post: The sanctions target Beijing Integrity Technology Group, which U.S. officials say employed workers responsible for the Flax Typhoon attacks which compromised devices including routers and internet-enabled cameras to infiltrate government and industrial targets in the...
Privacy of Photos.app’s Enhanced Visual Search
Initial speculation about a new Apple feature...
Friday Squid Blogging: Anniversary Post
I made my first squid post nineteen years ago this week. Between then and now, I posted something about squid every week with maybe only a few exceptions. There is a lot out there about squid, even more if you count the other meanings of the word. Blog moderation policy...
ShredOS
ShredOS is a stripped-down operating system designed to destroy data. GitHub page here...
Google Is Allowing Device Fingerprinting
Lukasz Olejnik writes about device fingerprinting, and why Google's policy change to allow it in 2025 is a major privacy setback. EDITED TO ADD 1/12: Shashdot thread...
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...
Salt Typhoon’s Reach Continues to Grow
The US government has identified a ninth telecom that was successfully hacked by Salt Typhoon...
Casino Players Using Hidden Cameras for Cheating
The basic strategy is to place a device with a hidden camera in a position to capture normally hidden card values, which are interpreted by an accomplice off-site and fed back to the player via a hidden microphone. Miniaturization is making these devices harder to detect. Presumably AI will soon...
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...
Scams Based on Fake Google Emails
Scammers are hacking Google Forms to send email to victims that come from google.com. Brian Krebs reports on the effects. Boing Boing post...
Spyware Maker NSO Group Found Liable for Hacking WhatsApp
A judge has found that NSO Group, maker of the Pegasus spyware, has violated the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by hacking WhatsApp in order to spy on people using it. Jon Penney and I wrote a legal paper on the case...