The Future of Machine Learning and Cybersecurity

The Center for Security and Emerging Technology has a new report: "Machine Learning and Cybersecurity: Hype and Reality." Heres the bottom line: The report offers four conclusions: Machine learning can help defenders more accurately detect and triage potential attacks. However, in many cases thes...

Friday Squid Blogging: Video of Giant Squid Hunting Prey

Fantastic video of a giant squid hunting at depths between 1,827 and 3,117 feet. This is a follow-on from this post. 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...

Peloton Vulnerability Found and Fixed

Researchers have discovered a vulnerability in Peloton stationary bicycles, one that would give the attacker complete control over the device. The attack requires physical access to the Peloton, so its not really a practical attack. President Bidens Peloton was not in danger...

Intentional Flaw in GPRS Encryption Algorithm GEA-1

General Packet Radio Service GPRS is a mobile data standard that was widely used in the early 2000s. The first encryption algorithm for that standard was GEA-1, a stream cipher built on three linear-feedback shift registers and a non-linear combining function. Although the algorithm has a 64-bit...

Paul van Oorschot’s Computer Security and the Internet

Paul van Oorschots webpage contains a complete copy of his book: Computer Security and the Internet: Tools and Jewels. Its worth reading...

VPNs and Trust

TorrentFreak surveyed nineteen VPN providers, asking them questions about their privacy practices: what data they keep, how they respond to court order, what country they are incorporated in, and so on. Most interesting to me is the home countries of these companies. Express VPN is incorporated i...

Andrew Appel on New Hampshire’s Election Audit

Really interesting two part analysis of the audit conducted after the 2020 election in Windham, New Hampshire. Based on preliminary reports published by the team of experts that New Hampshire engaged to examine an election discrepancy, it appears that a buildup of dust in the read heads of...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: Ill be part of a European Internet Forum virtual debate on June 17, 2021. The topic is "Decrypting the encryption debate: How to ensure public safety with a privacy-preserving and secure Internet?" I’m speaking at the all-online...

TikTok Can Now Collect Biometric Data

This is probably worth paying attention to: A change to TikToks U.S. privacy policy on Wednesday introduced a new section that says the social video app "may collect biometric identifiers and biometric information" from its users content. This includes things like "faceprints and voiceprints," th...

Friday Squid Blogging: Fossil of Squid Eating and Being Eaten

We now have a fossil of a squid eating a crustacean while it is being eaten by a shark. 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...

FBI/AFP-Run Encrypted Phone

For three years, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Australian Federal Police owned and operated a commercial encrypted phone app, called AN0M, that was used by organized crime around the world. Of course, the police were able to read everything -- I dont even know if this qualifies as a...

Detecting Deepfake Picture Editing

"Markpainting" is a clever technique to watermark photos in such a way that makes it easier to detect ML-based manipulation: An image owner can modify their image in subtle ways which are not themselves very visible, but will sabotage any attempt to inpaint it by adding visible information...

Information Flows and Democracy

Henry Farrell and I published a paper on fixing American democracy: "Rechanneling Beliefs: How Information Flows Hinder or Help Democracy." Its much easier for democratic stability to break down than most people realize, but this doesnt mean we must despair over the future. Its possible, though...

Vulnerabilities in Weapons Systems

"If you think any of these systems are going to work as expected in wartime, youre fooling yourself." That was Bruces response at a conference hosted by US Transportation Command in 2017, after learning that their computerized logistical systems were mostly unclassified and on the Internet. That...

The Supreme Court Narrowed the CFAA

In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court just narrowed the scope of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act: In a ruling delivered today, the court sided with Van Buren and overturned his 18-month conviction. In a 37-page opinion written and delivered by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the court explained that the...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squids in Space

NASA is sending baby bobtail squid into space. 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...

Security and Human Behavior (SHB) 2021

Today is the second day of the fourteenth Workshop on Security and Human Behavior. The University of Cambridge is the host, but were all on Zoom. SHB is a small, annual, invitational workshop of people studying various aspects of the human side of security, organized each year by Alessandro...

The DarkSide Ransomware Gang

The New York Times has a long story on the DarkSide ransomware gang. A glimpse into DarkSides secret communications in the months leading up to the Colonial Pipeline attack reveals a criminal operation on the rise, pulling in millions of dollars in ransom payments each month. DarkSide offers what...

Security Vulnerability in Apple’s Silicon “M1” Chip

The website for the M1racles security vulnerability is an excellent demonstration that not all vulnerabilities are exploitable. Be sure to read the FAQ through to the end. EDITED TO ADD: Wired article...

Friday Squid Blogging: Underwater Cameras for Observing Squid

Interesting research paper. 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 Misaligned Incentives for Cloud Security

Russias Sunburst cyberespionage campaign, discovered late last year, impacted more than 100 large companies and US federal agencies, including the Treasury, Energy, Justice, and Homeland Security departments. A crucial part of the Russians success was their ability to move through these...

The Story of the 2011 RSA Hack

Really good long article about the Chinese hacking of RSA, Inc. They were able to get copies of the seed values to the SecurID authentication token, a harbinger of supply-chain attacks to come...

New Disk Wiping Malware Targets Israel

Apostle seems to be a new strain of malware that destroys data. In a post published Tuesday, SentinelOne researchers said they assessed with high confidence that based on the code and the servers Apostle reported to, the malware was being used by a newly discovered group with ties to the Iranian...

AIs and Fake Comments

This month, the New York state attorney general issued a report on a scheme by "U.S. Companies and Partisans to Hack Democracy." This wasn’t another attempt by Republicans to make it harder for Black people and urban residents to vote. It was a concerted attack on another core element of US...

Friday Squid Blogging: Picking up Squid on the Beach

Make sure theyre dead. 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...

Double-Encrypting Ransomware

This seems to be a new tactic: Emsisoft has identified two distinct tactics. In the first, hackers encrypt data with ransomware A and then re-encrypt that data with ransomware B. The other path involves what Emsisoft calls a "side-by-side encryption" attack, in which attacks encrypt some of an...

Bizarro Banking Trojan

Bizarro is a new banking trojan that is stealing financial information and crypto wallets. …the program can be delivered in a couple of ways­ -- either via malicious links contained within spam emails, or through a trojanized app. Using these sneaky methods, trojan operators will implant the...

Apple Censorship and Surveillance in China

Good investigative reporting on how Apple is participating in and assisting with Chinese censorship and surveillance...

Adding a Russian Keyboard to Protect against Ransomware

A lot of Russian malware -- the malware that targeted the Colonial Pipeline, for example -- wont install on computers with a Cyrillic keyboard installed. Brian Krebs wonders if this could be a useful defense: In Russia, for example, authorities there generally will not initiate a cybercrime...

Is 85% of US Critical Infrastructure in Private Hands?

Most US critical infrastructure is run by private corporations. This has major security implications, because its putting a random power company in -- say -- Ohio -- up against the Russian cybercommand, which isnt a fair fight. When this problem is discussed, people regularly quote the statistic...

Friday Squid Blogging: Far Side Squid Comic

A classic. 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...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m keynoting the all-virtual RSA Conference 2021, May 17-20, 2021. I’m keynoting the 5th International Symposium on Cyber Security Cryptology and Machine Learning via Zoom, July 8-9, 2021. I’ll be speaking at an Informa event on...

Ransomware Is Getting Ugly

Modern ransomware has two dimensions: pay to get your data back, and pay not to have your data dumped on the Internet. The DC police are the victims of this ransomware, and the criminals have just posted personnel records -- "including the results of psychological assessments and polygraph tests;...

New US Executive Order on Cybersecurity

President Biden signed an executive order to improve government cybersecurity, setting new security standards for software sold to the federal government. For the first time, the United States will require all software purchased by the federal government to meet, within six months, a series of ne...

Book Sale: Beyond Fear

I have 80 copies of my 2000 book Beyond Fear available at the very cheap price of $5 plus shipping. Note that there is a 20% chance that your book will have a "BT Counterpane" sticker on the front cover. Order your signed copy here...

AI Security Risk Assessment Tool

Microsoft researchers just released an open-source automation tool for security testing AI systems: "Counterfit." Details on their blog...

Ransomware Shuts Down US Pipeline

This is a major story: a probably Russian cybercrime group called DarkSide shut down the Colonial Pipeline in a ransomware attack. The pipeline supplies much of the East Coast. This is the new and improved ransomware attack: the hackers stole nearly 100 gig of data, and are threatening to publish...

Newly Declassified NSA Document on Cryptography in the 1970s

This is a newly unclassified NSA history of its reaction to academic cryptography in the 1970s: "NSA Comes Out of the Closet: The Debate over Public Cryptography in the Inman Era," Cryptographic Quarterly, Spring 1996, author still classified...

Friday Squid Blogging: COVID Relief Funds

A town in Japan built a giant squid statue with its COVID relief grant. One local told the Chunichi Shimbun newspaper that while the statue may be effective in the long run, the money could have been used for "urgent support," such as for medical staff and long-term care facilities. But a...

Teaching Cybersecurity to Children

A new draft of an Australian educational curriculum proposes teaching children as young as five cybersecurity: The proposed curriculum aims to teach five-year-old children -- an age at which Australian kids first attend school -- not to share information such as date of birth or full names with...

The Story of Colossus

Nice video of a talk by Chris Shore on the history of Colossus...

New Spectre-Like Attacks

Theres new research that demonstrates security vulnerabilities in all of the AMD and Intel chips with micro-op caches, including the ones that were specifically engineered to be resistant to the Spectre/Meltdown attacks of three years ago. Details: The new line of attacks exploits the micro-op...

Tesla Remotely Hacked from a Drone

This is an impressive hack: Security researchers Ralf-Philipp Weinmann of Kunnamon, Inc. and Benedikt Schmotzle of Comsecuris GmbH have found remote zero-click security vulnerabilities in an open-source software component ConnMan used in Tesla automobiles that allowed them to compromise parked ca...

Identifying the Person Behind Bitcoin Fog

The person behind the Bitcoin Fog was identified and arrested. Bitcoin Fog was an anonymization service: for a fee, it mixed a bunch of peoples bitcoins up so that it was hard to figure out where any individual coins came from. It ran for ten years. Identifying the person behind Bitcoin Fog serve...

Friday Squid Blogging: On Squid Coloration

Nice excerpt from Martin Wallins book Squid. 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...

Serious MacOS Vulnerability Patched

Apple just patched a MacOS vulnerability that bypassed malware checks. The flaw is akin to a front entrance thats barred and bolted effectively, but with a cat door at the bottom that you can easily toss a bomb through. Apple mistakenly assumed that applications will always have certain specific...

Identifying People Through Lack of Cell Phone Use

In this entertaining story of French serial criminal Rédoine Faïd and his jailbreaking ways, theres this bit about cell phone surveillance: After Faïds helicopter breakout, 3,000 police officers took part in the manhunt. According to the 2019 documentary La Traque de Rédoine Faïd, detective units...

Second Click Here to Kill Everybody Sale

For a limited time, I am selling signed copies of Click Here to Kill Everybody in hardcover for just $6, plus shipping. I have 600 copies of the book available. When theyre gone, the sale is over and the price will revert to normal. Order here. Please be patient on delivery. Its a lot of work to...

Security Vulnerabilities in Cellebrite

Moxie Marlinspike has an intriguing blog post about Cellebrite, a tool used by police and others to break into smartphones. Moxie got his hands on one of the devices, which seems to be a pair of Windows software packages and a whole lot of connecting cables. According to Moxie, the software is...

When AIs Start Hacking

If you dont have enough to worry about already, consider a world where AIs are hackers. Hacking is as old as humanity. We are creative problem solvers. We exploit loopholes, manipulate systems, and strive for more influence, power, and wealth. To date, hacking has exclusively been a human activit...