Secret White House Warrantless Surveillance Program

There seems to be no end to warrantless surveillance: According to the letter, a surveillance program now known as Data Analytical Services DAS has for more than a decade allowed federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to mine the details of Americans’ calls, analyzing the phone record...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Nebula

Pretty photograph. The Squid Nebula is shown in blue, indicating doubly ionized oxygen--­which is when you ionize your oxygen once and then ionize it again just to make sure. In all seriousness, it likely indicates a low-mass star nearing the end of its life. As usual, you can also use this squid...

Chocolate Swiss Army Knife

Its realistic looking. If I drop it in a bin with my keys and wallet, will the TSA confiscate it?...

LitterDrifter USB Worm

A new worm that spreads via USB sticks is infecting computers in Ukraine and beyond. The group­--known by many names, including Gamaredon, Primitive Bear, ACTINIUM, Armageddon, and Shuckworm--has been active since at least 2014 and has been attributed to Russia’s Federal Security Service by the...

Apple to Add Manual Authentication to iMessage

Signal has had the ability to manually authenticate another account for years. iMessage is getting it: The feature is called Contact Key Verification, and it does just what its name says: it lets you add a manual verification step in an iMessage conversation to confirm that the other person is wh...

Email Security Flaw Found in the Wild

Googles Threat Analysis Group announced a zero-day against the Zimbra Collaboration email server that has been used against governments around the world. TAG has observed four different groups exploiting the same bug to steal email data, user credentials, and authentication tokens. Most of this...

Using Generative AI for Surveillance

Generative AI is going to be a powerful tool for data analysis and summarization. Heres an example of it being used for sentiment analysis. My guess is that it isnt very good yet, but that it will get better...

Friday Squid Blogging: Unpatched Vulnerabilities in the Squid Caching Proxy

In a rare squid/security post, heres an article about unpatched vulnerabilities in the Squid caching proxy. 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 blog posting guidelines here...

Ransomware Gang Files SEC Complaint

A ransomware gang, annoyed at not being paid, filed an SEC complaint against its victim for not disclosing its security breach within the required four days. This is over the top, but is just another example of the extreme pressure ransomware gangs put on companies after seizing their data. Gangs...

FTC’s Voice Cloning Challenge

The Federal Trade Commission is running a competition "to foster breakthrough ideas on preventing, monitoring, and evaluating malicious voice cloning."...

Leaving Authentication Credentials in Public Code

Interesting article about a surprisingly common vulnerability: programmers leaving authentication credentials and other secrets in publicly accessible software code: Researchers from security firm GitGuardian this week reported finding almost 4,000 unique secrets stashed inside a total of 450,000...

New SSH Vulnerability

This is interesting: For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that a large portion of cryptographic keys used to protect data in computer-to-server SSH traffic are vulnerable to complete compromise when naturally occurring computational errors occur while the connection is being...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: Im speaking at the AI Summit New York on December 6, 2023. The list is maintained on this page...

How .tk Became a TLD for Scammers

Sad story of Tokelau, and how its top-level domain "became the unwitting host to the dark underworld by providing a never-ending supply of domain names that could be weaponized against internet users. Scammers began using .tk websites to do everything from harvesting passwords and payment...

Ten Ways AI Will Change Democracy

Artificial intelligence will change so many aspects of society, largely in ways that we cannot conceive of yet. Democracy, and the systems of governance that surround it, will be no exception. In this short essay, I want to move beyond the "AI-generated disinformation" trope and speculate on some...

Friday Squid Blogging: The History and Morality of US Squid Consumption

Really interesting article. 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 blog posting guidelines here...

The Privacy Disaster of Modern Smart Cars

Article based on a Mozilla report...

Online Retail Hack

Selling miniature replicas to unsuspecting shoppers: Online marketplaces sell tiny pink cowboy hats. They also sell miniature pencil sharpeners, palm-size kitchen utensils, scaled-down books and camping chairs so small they evoke the Stonehenge scene in "This Is Spinal Tap." Many of the minuscule...

Decoupling for Security

This is an excerpt from a longer paper. You can read the whole thing complete with sidebars and illustrations here. Our message is simple: it is possible to get the best of both worlds. We can and should get the benefits of the cloud while taking security back into our own hands. Here we outline ...

Spaf on the Morris Worm

Gene Spafford wrote an essay reflecting on the Morris Worm of 1988--thirty-five years ago. His lessons from then are still applicable today...

Crashing iPhones with a Flipper Zero

The Flipper Zero is an incredibly versatile hacking device. Now it can be used to crash iPhones in its vicinity by sending them a never-ending stream of pop-ups. These types of hacks have been possible for decades, but they require special equipment and a fair amount of expertise. The capabilitie...

Friday Squid Blogging: Eating Dancing Squid

Its not actually alive, but it twitches in response to soy sauce. 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 blog posting guidelines here...

New York Increases Cybersecurity Rules for Financial Companies

Another example of a large and influential state doing things the federal government wont: Boards of directors, or other senior committees, are charged with overseeing cybersecurity risk management, and must retain an appropriate level of expertise to understand cyber issues, the rules say...

Spyware in India

Apple has warned leaders of the opposition government in India that their phones are being spied on: Multiple top leaders of India’s opposition parties and several journalists have received a notification from Apple, saying that "Apple believes you are being targeted by state-sponsored attackers...

The Future of Drone Warfare

Ukraine is using $400 drones to destroy tanks: Facing an enemy with superior numbers of troops and armor, the Ukrainian defenders are holding on with the help of tiny drones flown by operators like Firsov that, for a few hundred dollars, can deliver an explosive charge capable of destroying a...

Hacking Scandinavian Alcohol Tax

The islands of Åland are an important tax hack: Although Åland is part of the Republic of Finland, it has its own autonomous parliament. In areas where Åland has its own legislation, the group of islands essentially operates as an independent nation. This allows Scandinavians to avoid the...

Friday Squid Blogging: On the Ugliness of Squid Fishing

And seafood in general: A squid ship is a bustling, bright, messy place. The scene on deck looks like a mechanics garage where an oil change has gone terribly wrong. Scores of fishing lines extend into the water, each bearing specialized hooks operated by automated reels. When they pull a squid o...

Messaging Service Wiretap Discovered through Expired TLS Cert

Fascinating story of a covert wiretap that was discovered because of an expired TLS certificate: The suspected man-in-the-middle attack was identified when the administrator of jabber.ru, the largest Russian XMPP service, received a notification that one of the servers’ certificates had expired...

New NSA Information from (and About) Snowden

Interesting article about the Snowden documents, including comments from former Guardian editor Ewen MacAskill MacAskill, who shared the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras for their journalistic work on the Snowden files, retired from The Guardian in 2018. He...

Microsoft is Soft-Launching Security Copilot

Microsoft has announced an early access program for its LLM-based security chatbot assistant: Security Copilot. I am curious whether this thing is actually useful...

EPA Won’t Force Water Utilities to Audit Their Cybersecurity

The industry pushed back: Despite the EPAs willingness to provide training and technical support to help states and public water system organizations implement cybersecurity surveys, the move garnered opposition from both GOP state attorneys and trade groups. Republican state attorneys that were...

Child Exploitation and the Crypto Wars

Susan Landau published an excellent essay on the current justification for the government breaking end-to-end-encryption: child sexual abuse and exploitation CSAE. She puts the debate into historical context, discusses the problem of CSAE, and explains why breaking encryption isnt the solution...

Friday Squid Blogging: Why There Are No Giant Squid in Aquariums

Theyre too big and we cant recreate their habitat. 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 blog posting guidelines here...

AI and US Election Rules

If an AI breaks the rules for you, does that count as breaking the rules? This is the essential question being taken up by the Federal Election Commission this month, and public input is needed to curtail the potential for AI to take US campaigns even more off the rails. At issue is whether...

Former Uber CISO Appealing His Conviction

Joe Sullivan, Ubers CEO during their 2016 data breach, is appealing his conviction. Prosecutors charged Sullivan, whom Uber hired as CISO after the 2014 breach, of withholding information about the 2016 incident from the FTC even as its investigators were scrutinizing the companys data security a...

Analysis of Intellexa’s Predator Spyware

Amnesty International has published a comprehensive analysis of the Predator government spyware products. These technologies used to be the exclusive purview of organizations like the NSA. Now theyre available to every country on the planet--democratic, nondemocratic, authoritarian, whatever--for...

Security Vulnerability of Switzerland’s E-Voting System

Online voting is insecure, period. This doesnt stop organizations and governments from using it. And for low-stakes elections, its probably fine. Switzerland--not low stakes--uses online voting for national elections. Andrew Appel explains why its a bad idea: Last year, I published a 5-part serie...

Coin Flips Are Biased

Experimental result: Many people have flipped coins but few have stopped to ponder the statistical and physical intricacies of the process. In a preregistered study we collected 350,757 coin flips to test the counterintuitive prediction from a physics model of human coin tossing developed by Pers...

Friday Squid Blogging: On Squid Intelligence

Article about squid intelligence. 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 blog posting guidelines here...

Hacking the High School Grading System

Interesting New York Times article about high-school students hacking the grading system. Whats not helping? The policies many school districts are adopting that make it nearly impossible for low-performing students to fail--they have a grading floor under them, they know it, and that allows them...

Bounty to Recover NIST’s Elliptic Curve Seeds

This is a fun challenge: The NIST elliptic curves that power much of modern cryptography were generated in the late 90s by hashing seeds provided by the NSA. How were the seeds generated? Rumor has it that they are in turn hashes of English sentences, but the person who picked them, Dr. Jerry...

Cisco Can’t Stop Using Hard-Coded Passwords

Theres a new Cisco vulnerability in its Emergency Responder product: This vulnerability is due to the presence of static user credentials for the root account that are typically reserved for use during development. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by using the account to log in to an...

Model Extraction Attack on Neural Networks

Adi Shamir et al. have a new model extraction attack on neural networks: Polynomial Time Cryptanalytic Extraction of Neural Network Models Abstract: Billions of dollars and countless GPU hours are currently spent on training Deep Neural Networks DNNs for a variety of tasks. Thus, it is essential ...

AI Risks

There is no shortage of researchers and industry titans willing to warn us about the potential destructive power of artificial intelligence. Reading the headlines, one would hope that the rapid gains in AI technology have also brought forth a unifying realization of the risks--and the steps we ne...

Deepfake Election Interference in Slovakia

Well designed and well timed deepfake or two Slovakian politicians discussing how to rig the election: Šimečka and Denník N immediately denounced the audio as fake. The fact-checking department of news agency AFP said the audio showed signs of being manipulated using AI. But the recording was...

Political Disinformation and AI

Elections around the world are facing an evolving threat from foreign actors, one that involves artificial intelligence. Countries trying to influence each others elections entered a new era in 2016, when the Russians launched a series of social media disinformation campaigns targeting the US...

Malicious Ads in Bing Chat

Malicious ads are creeping into chatbots...

Hacking Gas Pumps via Bluetooth

Turns out pumps at gas stations are controlled via Bluetooth, and that the connections are insecure. No details in the article, but it seems that its easy to take control of the pump and have it dispense gas without requiring payment. Its a complicated crime to monetize, though. You need to sell...

NSA AI Security Center

The NSA is starting a new artificial intelligence security center: The AI security centers establishment follows an NSA study that identified securing AI models from theft and sabotage as a major national security challenge, especially as generative AI technologies emerge with immense...

Friday Squid Blogging: Protecting Cephalopods in Medical Research

From Nature: Cephalopods such as octopuses and squid could soon receive the same legal protection as mice and monkeys do when they are used in research. On 7 September, the US National Institutes of Health NIH asked for feedback on proposed guidelines that, for the first time in the United States...