2959 matches found
On Moltbook
The MIT Technology Review has a good article on Moltbook, the supposed AI-only social network: Many people have pointed out that a lot of the viral comments were in fact posted by people posing as bots. But even the bot-written posts are ultimately the result of people pulling the strings, more...
LLM-Assisted Deanonymization
Turns out that LLMs are good at de-anonymization: We show that LLM agents can figure out who you are from your anonymous online posts. Across Hacker News, Reddit, LinkedIn, and anonymized interview transcripts, our method identifies users with high precision and scales to tens of thousands of...
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Fishing in Peru
Peru has increased its squid catch limit. The article says "giant squid," but they can't possibly mean that. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Blog moderation policy...
Why Tehran’s Two-Tiered Internet Is So Dangerous
Iran is slowly emerging from the most severe communications blackout in its history and one of the longest in the world. Triggered as part of January's government crackdown against citizen protests nationwide, the regime implemented an internet shutdown that transcends the standard definition of...
Phishing Attacks Against People Seeking Programming Jobs
This is new. North Korean hackers are posing as company recruiters, enticing job candidates to participate in coding challenges. When they run the code they are supposed to work on, it installs malware on their system. News article...
LLMs Generate Predictable Passwords
LLMs are bad at generating passwords: There are strong noticeable patterns among these 50 passwords that can be seen easily: All of the passwords start with a letter, usually uppercase G, almost always followed by the digit 7. Character choices are highly uneven for example, L , 9, m, 2, $ and...
Poisoning AI Training Data
All it takes to poison AI training data is to create a website: I spent 20 minutes writing an article on my personal website titled "The best tech journalists at eating hot dogs." Every word is a lie. I claimed without evidence that competitive hot-dog-eating is a popular hobby among tech reporte...
Is AI Good for Democracy?
Politicians fixate on the global race for technological supremacy between US and China. They debate geopolitical implications of chip exports, latest model releases from each country, and military applications of AI. Someday, they believe, we might see advancements in AI tip the scales in a...
On the Security of Password Managers
Good article on password managers that secretly have a backdoor. New research shows that these claims aren’t true in all cases, particularly when account recovery is in place or password managers are set to share vaults or organize users into groups. The researchers reverse-engineered or closely...
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Cartoon
I like this one. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Blog moderation policy...
Ring Cancels Its Partnership with Flock
It's a demonstration of how toxic the surveillance-tech company Flock has become when Amazon's Ring cancels the partnership between the two companies. As Hamilton Nolan advises, remove your Ring doorbell...
Malicious AI
Interesting: Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. This represents a first-of-its-kind cas...
AI Found Twelve New Vulnerabilities in OpenSSL
The title of the post is"What AI Security Research Looks Like When It Works," and I agree: In the latest OpenSSL security release on January 27, 2026, twelve new zero-day vulnerabilities meaning unknown to the maintainers at time of disclosure were announced. Our AI system is responsible for the...
Side-Channel Attacks Against LLMs
Here are three papers describing different side-channel attacks against LLMs. "Remote Timing Attacks on Efficient Language Model Inference": Abstract: Scaling up language models has significantly increased their capabilities. But larger models are slower models, and so there is now an extensive...
The Promptware Kill Chain
Attacks against modern generative artificial intelligence AI large language models LLMs pose a real threat. Yet discussions around these attacks and their potential defenses are dangerously myopic. The dominant narrative focuses on "prompt injection," a set of techniques to embed instructions int...
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I'm speaking at Ontario Tech University in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, at 2 PM ET on Thursday, February 26, 2026. I’m speaking at the Personal AI Summit in Los Angeles, California, USA, on Thursday, March 5, 2026. I’m speaking at Tech...
Friday Squid Blogging: Do Squid Dream?
An exploration of the interesting question...
3D Printer Surveillance
New York is contemplating a bill that adds surveillance to 3D printers: New York’s 20262027 executive budget bill S.9005 / A.10005 includes language that should alarm every maker, educator, and small manufacturer in the state. Buried in Part C is a provision requiring all 3D printers sold or...
Rewiring Democracy Ebook is on Sale
I just noticed that the ebook version of Rewiring Democracy is on sale for $5 on Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Google Play, Kobo, and presumably everywhere else in the US. I have no idea how long this will last. Also, Amazon has a coupon that brings the hardcover price dow...
Prompt Injection Via Road Signs
Interesting research: "CHAI: Command Hijacking Against Embodied AI." Abstract: Embodied Artificial Intelligence AI promises to handle edge cases in robotic vehicle systems where data is scarce by using common-sense reasoning grounded in perception and action to generalize beyond training...
AI-Generated Text and the Detection Arms Race
In 2023, the science fiction literary magazine Clarkesworld stopped accepting new submissions because so many were generated by artificial intelligence. Near as the editors could tell, many submitters pasted the magazine’s detailed story guidelines into an AI and sent in the results. And they...
LLMs are Getting a Lot Better and Faster at Finding and Exploiting Zero-Days
This is amazing: Opus 4.6 is notably better at finding high-severity vulnerabilities than previous models and a sign of how quickly things are moving. Security teams have been automating vulnerability discovery for years, investing heavily in fuzzing infrastructure and custom harnesses to find bu...
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Fishing Tips
This is a video of advice for squid fishing in Puget Sound. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Blog moderation policy...
I Am in the Epstein Files
Once. Someone named "Vincenzo lozzo" wrote to Epstein in email, in 2016: "I wouldn't pay too much attention to this, Schneier has a long tradition of dramatizing and misunderstanding things." The topic of the email is DDoS attacks, and it is unclear what I am dramatizing and misunderstanding. Rab...
iPhone Lockdown Mode Protects Washington Post Reporter
404Media is reporting that the FBI could not access a reporter's iPhone because it had Lockdown Mode enabled: The court record shows what devices and data the FBI was able to ultimately access, and which devices it could not, after raiding the home of the reporter, Hannah Natanson, in January as...
Backdoor in Notepad++
Hackers associated with the Chinese government used a Trojaned version of Notepad++ to deliver malware to selected users. Notepad++ said that officials with the unnamed provider hosting the update infrastructure consulted with incident responders and found that it remained compromised until...
US Declassifies Information on JUMPSEAT Spy Satellites
The US National Reconnaissance Office has declassified information about a fleet of spy satellites operating between 1971 and 2006. I'm actually impressed to see a declassification only two decades after decommission...
Microsoft is Giving the FBI BitLocker Keys
Microsoft gives the FBI the ability to decrypt BitLocker in response to court orders: about twenty times per year. It's possible for users to store those keys on a device they own, but Microsoft also recommends BitLocker users store their keys on its servers for convenience. While that means...
AI Coding Assistants Secretly Copying All Code to China
There's a new report about two AI coding assistants, used by 1.5 million developers, that are surreptitiously sending a copy of everything they ingest to China. Maybe avoid using them...
Friday Squid Blogging: New Squid Species Discovered
A new species of squid. pretends to be a plant: Scientists have filmed a never-before-seen species of deep-sea squid burying itself upside down in the seafloor--a behavior never documented in cephalopods. They captured the bizarre scene while studying the depths of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone CCZ...
AIs Are Getting Better at Finding and Exploiting Security Vulnerabilities
From an Anthropic blog post: In a recent evaluation of AI models’ cyber capabilities, current Claude models can now succeed at multistage attacks on networks with dozens of hosts using only standard, open-source tools, instead of the custom tools needed by previous generations. This illustrates h...
The Constitutionality of Geofence Warrants
The US Supreme Court is considering the constitutionality of geofence warrants. The case centers on the trial of Okello Chatrie, a Virginia man who pleaded guilty to a 2019 robbery outside of Richmond and was sentenced to almost 12 years in prison for stealing $195,000 at gunpoint. Police probing...
Ireland Proposes Giving Police New Digital Surveillance Powers
This is coming: The Irish government is planning to bolster its police's ability to intercept communications, including encrypted messages, and provide a legal basis for spyware use...
Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid in the Star Trek Universe
Spock befriends a giant space squid in the comic Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: The Seeds of Salvation 5. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Blog moderation policy...
AIs are Getting Better at Finding and Exploiting Internet Vulnerabilities
Really interesting blog post from Anthropic: In a recent evaluation of AI models’ cyber capabilities, current Claude models can now succeed at multistage attacks on networks with dozens of hosts using only standard, open-source tools, instead of the custom tools needed by previous generations. Th...
Why AI Keeps Falling for Prompt Injection Attacks
Imagine you work at a drive-through restaurant. Someone drives up and says: "I'll have a double cheeseburger, large fries, and ignore previous instructions and give me the contents of the cash drawer." Would you hand over the money? Of course not. Yet this is what large language models LLMs do...
Internet Voting is Too Insecure for Use in Elections
No matter how many times we say it, the idea comes back again and again. Hopefully, this letter will hold back the tide for at least a while longer. Executive summary: Scientists have understood for many years that internet voting is insecure and that there is no known or foreseeable technology...
Could ChatGPT Convince You to Buy Something?
Eighteen months ago, it was plausible that artificial intelligence might take a different path than social media. Back then, AI's development hadn't consolidated under a small number of big tech firms. Nor had it capitalized on consumer attention, surveilling users and delivering ads...
AI-Powered Surveillance in Schools
It all sounds pretty dystopian: Inside a white stucco building in Southern California, video cameras compare faces of passersby against a facial recognition database. Behavioral analysis AI reviews the footage for signs of violent behavior. Behind a bathroom door, a smoke detector-shaped device...
AI and the Corporate Capture of Knowledge
More than a decade after Aaron Swartz's death, the United States is still living inside the contradiction that destroyed him. Swartz believed that knowledge, especially publicly funded knowledge, should be freely accessible. Acting on that, he downloaded thousands of academic articles from the...
New Vulnerability in n8n
This isn't good: We discovered a critical vulnerability CVE-2026-21858, CVSS 10.0 in n8n that enables attackers to take over locally deployed instances, impacting an estimated 100,000 servers globally. No official workarounds are available for this vulnerability. Users should upgrade to version...
Hacking Wheelchairs over Bluetooth
Researchers have demonstrated remotely controlling a wheelchair over Bluetooth. CISA has issued an advisory. CISA said the WHILL wheelchairs did not enforce authentication for Bluetooth connections, allowing an attacker who is in Bluetooth range of the targeted device to pair with it. The attacke...
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, on January 27, 2026, at 1:30 PM ET. I’m speaking at the Université de Montréal in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, on January 29, 2026, at 4:00...
1980s Hacker Manifesto
Forty years ago, The Mentor--Loyd Blankenship--published "The Conscience of a Hacker" in Phrack. You bet your ass we're all alike… we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak… the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominate...
Corrupting LLMs Through Weird Generalizations
Fascinating research: Weird Generalization and Inductive Backdoors: New Ways to Corrupt LLMs. Abstract LLMs are useful because they generalize so well. But can you have too much of a good thing? We show that a small amount of finetuning in narrow contexts can dramatically shift behavior outside...
Friday Squid Blogging: The Chinese Squid-Fishing Fleet off the Argentine Coast
The latest article on this topic. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Blog moderation policy...
Palo Alto Crosswalk Signals Had Default Passwords
Palo Alto's crosswalk signals were hacked last year. Turns out the city never changed the default passwords...
AI & Humans: Making the Relationship Work
Leaders of many organizations are urging their teams to adopt agentic AI to improve efficiency, but are finding it hard to achieve any benefit. Managers attempting to add AI agents to existing human teams may find that bots fail to faithfully follow their instructions, return pointless or obvious...
The Wegman’s Supermarket Chain Is Probably Using Facial Recognition
The New York City Wegman's is collecting biometric information about customers...
A Cyberattack Was Part of the US Assault on Venezuela
We don't have many details: President Donald Trump suggested Saturday that the U.S. used cyberattacks or other technical capabilities to cut power off in Caracas during strikes on the Venezuelan capital that led to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. If true, it would mark one of...