Kevin Mitnick Died

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Commentary on the Implementation Plan for the 2023 US National Cybersecurity Strategy

The Atlantic Council released a detailed commentary on the White Houses new "Implementation Plan for the 2023 US National Cybersecurity Strategy." Lots of interesting bits. So far, at least three trends emerge: First, the plan contains a somewhat more concrete list of actions than its parent...

Practice Your Security Prompting Skills

Gandalf is an interactive LLM game where the goal is to get the chatbot to reveal its password. There are eight levels of difficulty, as the chatbot gets increasingly restrictive instructions as to how it will answer. Its a great teaching tool. I am stuck on Level 7. Feel free to give hints and...

Disabling Self-Driving Cars with a Traffic Cone

You can disable a self-driving car by putting a traffic cone on its hood: The group got the idea for the conings by chance. The person claims a few of them walking together one night saw a cone on the hood of an AV, which appeared disabled. They werent sure at the time which came first; perhaps...

Tracking Down a Suspect through Cell Phone Records

Interesting forensics in connection with a serial killer arrest: Investigators went through phone records collected from both midtown Manhattan and the Massapequa Park area of Long Island--two areas connected to a "burner phone" they had tied to the killings. In court, prosecutors later said the...

Friday Squid Blogging: Balloon Squid

Masayoshi Matsumoto is a "master balloon artist," and he made a squid and other animals. 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...

Buying Campaign Contributions as a Hack

The first Republican primary debate has a popularity threshold to determine who gets to appear: 40,000 individual contributors. Now there are a lot of conventional ways a candidate can get that many contributors. Doug Burgum came up with a novel idea: buy them: A long-shot contender at the bottom...

French Police Will Be Able to Spy on People through Their Cell Phones

The French police are getting new surveillance powers: French police should be able to spy on suspects by remotely activating the camera, microphone and GPS of their phones and other devices, lawmakers agreed late on Wednesday, July 5. … Covering laptops, cars and other connected objects as well ...

Google Is Using Its Vast Data Stores to Train AI

No surprise, but Google just changed its privacy policy to reflect broader uses of all the surveillance data it has captured over the years: Research and development: Google uses information to improve our services and to develop new products, features and technologies that benefit our users and...

Privacy of Printing Services

The Washington Post has an article about popular printing services, and whether or not they read your documents and mine the data when you use them for printing: Ideally, printing services should avoid storing the content of your files, or at least delete daily. Print services should also...

Wisconsin Governor Hacks the Veto Process

In my latest book, A Hackers Mind, I wrote about hacks as loophole exploiting. This is a great example: The Wisconsin governor used his line-item veto powers--supposedly unique in their specificity--to change a one-year funding increase into a 400-year funding increase. He took this wording:...

Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid Nebula

Pretty: A mysterious squid-like cosmic cloud, this nebula is very faint, but also very large in planet Earths sky. In the image, composed with 30 hours of narrowband image data, it spans nearly three full moons toward the royal constellation Cepheus. Discovered in 2011 by French astro-imager...

The AI Dividend

For four decades, Alaskans have opened their mailboxes to find checks waiting for them, their cut of the black gold beneath their feet. This is Alaskas Permanent Fund, funded by the states oil revenues and paid to every Alaskan each year. Were now in a different sort of resource rush, with...

Belgian Tax Hack

Heres a fascinating tax hack from Belgium listen to the details here, episode 484 of "No Such Thing as a Fish," at 28:00. Basically, its about a music festival on the border between Belgium and Holland. The stage was in Holland, but the crowd was in Belgium. When the copyright collector came...

Class-Action Lawsuit for Scraping Data without Permission

I have mixed feelings about this class-action lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming that it "scraped 300 billion words from the internet" without either registering as a data broker or obtaining consent. On the one hand, I want this to be a protected fair use of public data. On the other...

The Password Game

Amusing parody of password rules. BoingBoing: For example, at a certain level, your password must include todays Wordle answer. And then theres rule 27: "At least 50% of your password must be in the Wingdings font." EDITED TO ADD 7/13: Here are all the rules...

Self-Driving Cars Are Surveillance Cameras on Wheels

Police are already using self-driving car footage as video evidence: While security cameras are commonplace in American cities, self-driving cars represent a new level of access for law enforcement ­ and a new method for encroachment on privacy, advocates say. Crisscrossing the city on their...

Friday Squid Blogging: See-Through Squid

Doryteuthis opalescens is known as the market squid, and was critical in the recent squid RNA research. 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 US Is Spying on the UN Secretary General

The Washington Post is reporting that the US is spying on the UN Secretary General. The reports on Guterres appear to contain the secretary generals personal conversations with aides regarding diplomatic encounters. They indicate that the United States relied on spying powers granted under the...

Redacting Documents with a Black Sharpie Doesn’t Work

We have learned this lesson again: As part of the FTC v. Microsoft hearing, Sony supplied a document from PlayStation chief Jim Ryan that includes redacted details on the margins Sony shares with publishers, its Call of Duty revenues, and even the cost of developing some of its games. It looks li...

Stalkerware Vendor Hacked

The stalkerware company LetMeSpy has been hacked: TechCrunch reviewed the leaked data, which included years of victims call logs and text messages dating back to 2013. The database we reviewed contained current records on at least 13,000 compromised devices, though some of the devices shared litt...

Typing Incriminating Evidence in the Memo Field

Dont do it: Recently, the manager of the Harvard Med School morgue was accused of stealing and selling human body parts. Cedric Lodge and his wife Denise were among a half-dozen people arrested for some pretty grotesque crimes. This part is also at least a little bit funny though: Over a three-ye...

Excel Data Forensics

In this detailed article about academic plagiarism are some interesting details about how to do data forensics on Excel files. It really needs the graphics to understand, so see the description at the link. And, yes, an author of a paper on dishonesty is being accused of dishonesty. Theres more...

Friday Squid Blogging: Giggling Squid

Giggling Squid is a Thai chain in the UK. 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...

UPS Data Harvested for SMS Phishing Attacks

I get UPS phishing spam on my phone all the time. I never click on it, because its so obviously spam. Turns out that hackers have been harvesting actual UPS delivery data from a Canadian tracking tool for its phishing SMSs...

AI as Sensemaking for Public Comments

Its become fashionable to think of artificial intelligence as an inherently dehumanizing technology, a ruthless force of automation that has unleashed legions of virtual skilled laborers in faceless form. But what if AI turns out to be the one tool able to identify what makes your ideas special,...

Ethical Problems in Computer Security

Tadayoshi Kohno, Yasemin Acar, and Wulf Loh wrote excellent paper on ethical thinking within the computer security community: "Ethical Frameworks and Computer Security Trolley Problems: Foundations for Conversation": Abstract: The computer security research community regularly tackles ethical...

Power LED Side-Channel Attack

This is a clever new side-channel attack: The first attack uses an Internet-connected surveillance camera to take a high-speed video of the power LED on a smart card reader­--or of an attached peripheral device--­during cryptographic operations. This technique allowed the researchers to pull a...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Can Edit Their RNA

This is just crazy: Scientists dont yet know for sure why octopuses, and other shell-less cephalopods including squid and cuttlefish, are such prolific editors. Researchers are debating whether this form of genetic editing gave cephalopods an evolutionary leg or tentacle up or whether the editing...

Security and Human Behavior (SHB) 2023

Im just back from the sixteenth Workshop on Security and Human Behavior, hosted by Alessandro Acquisti at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. SHB is a small, annual, invitational workshop of people studying various aspects of the human side of security, organized each year by Alessandro...

On the Need for an AI Public Option

Artificial intelligence will bring great benefits to all of humanity. But do we really want to entrust this revolutionary technology solely to a small group of US tech companies? Silicon Valley has produced no small number of moral disappointments. Google retired its "dont be evil" pledge before...

Identifying the Idaho Killer

The New York Times has a long article on the investigative techniques used to identify the person who stabbed and killed four University of Idaho students. Pay attention to the techniques: The case has shown the degree to which law enforcement investigators have come to rely on the digital...

AI-Generated Steganography

New research suggests that AIs can produce perfectly secure steganographic images: Abstract: Steganography is the practice of encoding secret information into innocuous content in such a manner that an adversarial third party would not realize that there is hidden meaning. While this problem has...

Friday Squid Blogging: Light-Emitting Squid

Its a Taningia danae: Their arms are lined with two rows of sharp retractable hooks. And, like most deep-sea squid, they are adorned with light organs called photophores. They have some on the underside of their mantle. There are more facing upward, near one of their eyes. But it’s the photophore...

Operation Triangulation: Zero-Click iPhone Malware

Kaspersky is reporting a zero-click iOS exploit in the wild: Mobile device backups contain a partial copy of the filesystem, including some of the user data and service databases. The timestamps of the files, folders and the database records allow to roughly reconstruct the events happening to th...

Paragon Solutions Spyware: Graphite

Paragon Solutions is yet another Israeli spyware company. Their product is called "Graphite," and is a lot like NSO Groups Pegasus. And Paragon is working with what seems to be US approval: American approval, even if indirect, has been at the heart of Paragons strategy. The company sought a list ...

How Attorneys Are Harming Cybersecurity Incident Response

New paper: "Lessons Lost: Incident Response in the Age of Cyber Insurance and Breach Attorneys": Abstract: Incident Response IR allows victim firms to detect, contain, and recover from security incidents. It should also help the wider community avoid similar attacks in the future. In pursuit of...

Snowden Ten Years Later

In 2013 and 2014, I wrote extensively about new revelations regarding NSA surveillance based on the documents provided by Edward Snowden. But I had a more personal involvement as well. I wrote the essay below in September 2013. The New Yorker agreed to publish it, but the Guardian asked me not to...

The Software-Defined Car

Developers are starting to talk about the software-defined car. For decades, features have accumulated like cruft in new vehicles: a box here to control the antilock brakes, a module there to run the cruise control radar, and so on. Now engineers and designers are rationalizing the way they go...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Chromolithographs

Beautiful illustrations. 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. EDITED TO ADD 6/4: Slashdot thread...

Open-Source LLMs

In February, Meta released its large language model: LLaMA. Unlike OpenAI and its ChatGPT, Meta didnt just give the world a chat window to play with. Instead, it released the code into the open-source community, and shortly thereafter the model itself was leaked. Researchers and programmers...

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...