On the Catastrophic Risk of AI

Earlier this week, I signed on to a short group statement, coordinated by the Center for AI Safety: Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war. The press coverage has been extensive, and surprising t...

Chinese Hacking of US Critical Infrastructure

Everyone is writing about an interagency and international report on Chinese hacking of US critical infrastructure. Lots of interesting details about how the group, called Volt Typhoon, accesses target networks and evades detection...

Brute-Forcing a Fingerprint Reader

Its neither hard nor expensive: Unlike password authentication, which requires a direct match between what is inputted and whats stored in a database, fingerprint authentication determines a match using a reference threshold. As a result, a successful fingerprint brute-force attack requires only...

Friday Squid Blogging: Online Cephalopod Course

Atlas Obscura has a five-part online course on cephalopods, taught by squid biologist Dr. Sarah McAnulty. 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...

Expeditionary Cyberspace Operations

Cyberspace operations now officially has a physical dimension, meaning that the United States has official military doctrine about cyberattacks that also involve an actual human gaining physical access to a piece of computing infrastructure. A revised version of Joint Publication 3-12 Cyberspace...

On the Poisoning of LLMs

Interesting essay on the poisoning of LLMs--ChatGPT in particular: Given that weve known about model poisoning for years, and given the strong incentives the black-hat SEO crowd has to manipulate results, its entirely possible that bad actors have been poisoning ChatGPT for months. We dont know...

Indiana, Iowa, and Tennessee Pass Comprehensive Privacy Laws

Its been a big month for US data privacy. Indiana, Iowa, and Tennessee all passed state privacy laws, bringing the total number of states with a privacy law up to eight. No private right of action in any of those, which means its up to the states to enforce the laws...

Credible Handwriting Machine

In case you dont have enough to worry about, someone has built a credible handwriting machine: This is still a work in progress, but the project seeks to solve one of the biggest problems with other homework machines, such as this one that I covered a few months ago after it blew up on social...

Google Is Not Deleting Old YouTube Videos

Google has backtracked on its plan to delete inactive YouTube videos--at least for now. Of course, it could change its mind anytime it wants. It would be nice if this would get people to think about the vulnerabilities inherent in letting a for-profit monopoly decide what of human creativity is...

Friday Squid Blogging: Peruvian Squid-Fishing Regulation Drives Chinese Fleets Away

A Peruvian oversight law has the opposite effect: Peru in 2020 began requiring any foreign fishing boat entering its ports to use a vessel monitoring system allowing its activities to be tracked in real time 24 hours a day. The equipment, which tracks a vessels geographic position and fishing...

Security Risks of New .zip and .mov Domains

Researchers are worried about Googles .zip and .mov domains, because they are confusing. Mistaking a URL for a filename could be a security vulnerability...

Microsoft Secure Boot Bug

Microsoft is currently patching a zero-day Secure-Boot bug. The BlackLotus bootkit is the first-known real-world malware that can bypass Secure Boot protections, allowing for the execution of malicious code before your PC begins loading Windows and its many security protections. Secure Boot has...

Micro-Star International Signing Key Stolen

Micro-Star International--aka MSI--had its UEFI signing key stolen last month. This raises the possibility that the leaked key could push out updates that would infect a computers most nether regions without triggering a warning. To make matters worse, Matrosov said, MSI doesnt have an automated...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at IT-S Now 2023 in Vienna, Austria, on June 2, 2023 at 8:30 AM CEST. The list is maintained on this page...

Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid Video

A video--authentic, not a deep fake--of a giant squid close to the surface. 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...

Ted Chiang on the Risks of AI

Ted Chiang has an excellent essay in the New Yorker: "Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?" The question we should be asking is: as A.I. becomes more powerful and flexible, is there any way to keep it from being another version of McKinsey? The question is worth considering across different meaning...

Building Trustworthy AI

We will all soon get into the habit of using AI tools for help with everyday problems and tasks. We should get in the habit of questioning the motives, incentives, and capabilities behind them, too. Imagine youre using an AI chatbot to plan a vacation. Did it suggest a particular resort because i...

FBI Disables Russian Malware

Reuters is reporting that the FBI "had identified and disabled malware wielded by Russias FSB security service against an undisclosed number of American computers, a move they hoped would deal a death blow to one of Russias leading cyber spying programs." The headline says that the FBI "sabotaged...

PIPEDREAM Malware against Industrial Control Systems

Another nation-state malware, Russian in origin: In the early stages of the war in Ukraine in 2022, PIPEDREAM, a known malware was quietly on the brink of wiping out a handful of critical U.S. electric and liquid natural gas sites. PIPEDREAM is an attack toolkit with unmatched and unprecedented...

AI Hacking Village at DEF CON This Year

At DEF CON this year, Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI and Stability AI will all open up their models for attack. The DEF CON event will rely on an evaluation platform developed by Scale AI, a California company that produces training for AI applications. Participants wi...

Friday Squid Blogging: “Mediterranean Beef Squid” Hoax

The viral video of the "Mediterranean beef squid"is a hoax. Its not even a deep fake; its a plastic toy. 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...

Large Language Models and Elections

Earlier this week, the Republican National Committee released a video that it claims was "built entirely with AI imagery." The content of the ad isnt especially novel--a dystopian vision of America under a second term with President Joe Biden--but the deliberate emphasis on the technology used to...

SolarWinds Detected Six Months Earlier

New reporting from Wired reveals that the Department of Justice detected the SolarWinds attack six months before Mandiant detected it in December 2020, but didnt realize what it detected--and so ignored it. WIRED can now confirm that the operation was actually discovered by the DOJ six months...

NIST Draft Document on Post-Quantum Cryptography Guidance

NIST has released a draft of Special Publication1800-38A: "Migration to Post-Quantum Cryptography: Preparation for Considering the Implementation and Adoption of Quantum Safe Cryptography." Its only four pages long, and it doesnt have a lot of detail--more "volumes" are coming, with more...

Friday Squid Blogging: More Squid Camouflage Research

Heres a research group trying to replicate squid cell transparency in mammalian cells. 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 Layoff Process

My latest book, A Hackers Mind, is filled with stories about the rich and powerful hacking systems, but it was hard to find stories of the hacking by the less powerful. Heres one I just found. An article on how layoffs at big companies work inadvertently suggests an employee hack to avoid being...

Security Risks of AI

Stanford and Georgetown have a new report on the security risks of AI--particularly adversarial machine learning--based on a workshop they held on the topic. Jim Dempsey, one of the workshop organizers, wrote a blog post on the report: As a first step, our report recommends the inclusion of AI...

AI to Aid Democracy

Theres good reason to fear that AI systems like ChatGPT and GPT4 will harm democracy. Public debate may be overwhelmed by industrial quantities of autogenerated argument. People might fall down political rabbit holes, taken in by superficially convincing bullshit, or obsessed by folies à deux...

Cyberweapons Manufacturer QuaDream Shuts Down

Following a report on its activities, the Israeli spyware company QuaDream has shut down. This was QuadDream: Key Findings Based on an analysis of samples shared with us by Microsoft Threat Intelligence, we developed indicators that enabled us to identify at least five civil society victims of...

UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption

In an open letter, seven secure messaging apps--including Signal and WhatsApp--point out that the UKs Online Safety Bill could destroy end-to-end encryption: As currently drafted, the Bill could break end-to-end encryption,opening the door to routine, general and indiscriminate surveillance of...

Friday Squid Blogging: More on Squid Fishing

The squid you eat most likely comes from unregulated waters. 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 Pickleball

My latest book, A Hackers Mind, has a lot of sports stories. Sports are filled with hacks, as players look for every possible advantage that doesnt explicitly break the rules. Heres an example from pickleball, which nicely explains the dilemma between hacking as a subversion and hacking as...

Using the iPhone Recovery Key to Lock Owners Out of Their iPhones

This a good example of a security feature that can sometimes harm security: Apple introduced the optional recovery key in 2020 to protect users from online hackers. Users who turn on the recovery key, a unique 28-digit code, must provide it when they want to reset their Apple ID password. iPhone...

New Zero-Click Exploits against iOS

Citizen Lab has identified three zero-click exploits against iOS 15 and 16. These were used by NSO Groups Pegasus spyware in 2022, and deployed by Mexico against human rights defenders. These vulnerabilities have all been patched. One interesting bit is that Apples Lockdown Mode part of iOS 16...

EFF on the UN Cybercrime Treaty

EFF has a good explainer on the problems with the new UN Cybercrime Treaty, currently being negotiated in Vienna. The draft treaty has the potential to rewrite criminal laws around the world, possibly adding over 30 criminal offenses and new expansive police powers for both domestic and...

Using LLMs to Create Bioweapons

Im not sure there are good ways to build guardrails to prevent this sort of thing: There is growing concern regarding the potential misuse of molecular machine learning models for harmful purposes. Specifically, the dual-use application of models for predicting cytotoxicity18 to create new poison...

Swatting as a Service

Motherboard is reporting on AI-generated voices being used for "swatting": In fact, Motherboard has found, this synthesized call and another against Hempstead High School were just one small part of a months-long, nationwide campaign of dozens, and potentially hundreds, of threats made by one...

Friday Squid Blogging: Colossal Squid

Interesting article on the colossal squid, which is larger than the giant squid. The article answers a vexing question: So why do we always hear about the giant squid and not the colossal squid? Well, part of it has to do with the fact that the giant squid was discovered and studied long before t...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking on “Cybersecurity Thinking to Reinvent Democracy” at RSA Conference 2023 in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, April 25, 2023, at 9:40 AM PT. I’m speaking at IT-S Now 2023 in Vienna, Austria, on June 2, 2023 at 8:3...

Hacking Suicide

Heres a religious hack: You want to commit suicide, but its a mortal sin: your soul goes straight to hell, forever. So what you do is murder someone. That will get you executed, but if you confess your sins to a priest beforehand you avoid hell. Problem solved. This was actually a problem in the...

Gaining an Advantage in Roulette

You can beat the game without a computer: On a perfect roulette wheel, the ball would always fall in a random way. But over time, wheels develop flaws, which turn into patterns. A wheel thats even marginally tilted could develop what Barnett called a drop zone. When the tilt forces the ball to...

Bypassing a Theft Threat Model

Thieves cut through the wall of a coffee shop to get to an Apple store, bypassing the alarms in the process. I wrote about this kind of thing in 2000, in Secrets and Lies page 318: My favorite example is a band of California art thieves that would break into peoples houses by cutting a hole in...

FBI Advising People to Avoid Public Charging Stations

The FBI is warning people against using public phone-charging stations, worrying that the combination power-data port can be used to inject malware onto the devices: Avoid using free charging stations in airports, hotels, or shopping centers. Bad actors have figured out ways to use public USB por...

Car Thieves Hacking the CAN Bus

Car thieves are injecting malicious software into a cars network through wires in the headlights or taillights that fool the car into believing that the electronic key is nearby. News articles...

LLMs and Phishing

Heres an experiment being run by undergraduate computer science students everywhere: Ask ChatGPT to generate phishing emails, and test whether these are better at persuading victims to respond or click on the link than the usual spam. Its an interesting experiment, and the results are likely to...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Food Poisoning

University of Connecticut basketball player Jordan Hawkins claims to have suffered food poisoning from calamari the night before his NCAA finals game. The restaurant disagrees: On Sunday, a Mastros employee politely cast doubt on the idea that the restaurant might have caused the illness, citing...

Research on AI in Adversarial Settings

New research: “Achilles Heels for AGI/ASI via Decision Theoretic Adversaries": As progress in AI continues to advance, it is important to know how advanced systems will make choices and in what ways they may fail. Machines can already outsmart humans in some domains, and understanding how to safe...

FBI (and Others) Shut Down Genesis Market

Genesis Market is shut down: Active since 2018, Genesis Markets slogan was, "Our store sells bots with logs, cookies, and their real fingerprints." Customers could search for infected systems with a variety of options, including by Internet address or by specific domain names associated with stol...

North Korea Hacking Cryptocurrency Sites with 3CX Exploit

News: Researchers at Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky today revealed that they identified a small number of cryptocurrency-focused firms as at least some of the victims of the 3CX software supply-chain attack thats unfolded over the past week. Kaspersky declined to name any of those victim...

UK Runs Fake DDoS-for-Hire Sites

Brian Krebs is reporting that the UKs National Crime Agency is setting up fake DDoS-for-hire sites as part of a sting operation: The NCA says all of its fake so-called "booter" or "stresser" sites -­ which have so far been accessed by several thousand people--have been created to look like they...