2959 matches found
Embedding Forbidden Text in Spyware to Discourage AI Analysis
At least one malware developer is adding text about nuclear and biological weapons to their spyware, in an effort to stop automatic AI analysis. Details: The index.js payload begins with a large JavaScript block comment containing fake system instructions and policy-triggering content. Because it...
AI Use by the US Government
On 14 April, the Trump administration quietly acknowledged the widespread use of AI to automate government processes. The office of management and budget OMB disclosed a staggering 3,611 active or planned use cases for AI across the federal government. The list has ballooned by 70% from the one...
Flock Cameras Are Being Used for Stalking
There are over a dozen cases around the country where police officers are using the Flock surveillance camera system to obsessively and illegally stalk people. Alternate link...
The FCC Wants to Eliminate Burner Phones
A proposed FCC rule would kill burner phones: phones whose accounts are not attached to a particular person. The FCC plans to do this by legally forcing the country's telecoms to store a wealth of personal information about essentially all phone customers, including a government issued...
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m giving a keynote at Cybernation 2026 in Berlin, Germany, on June 24, 2026. I’m speaking at the Potsdam Conference on National Cybersecurity at the Hasso Plattner Institut in Potsdam, Germany. The event runs June 24–25, 2026, an...
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid-Inspired Fluid Pump
This fluid pump was inspired by the way squids propel themselves through the water. 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...
Bernie Sanders’ AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Plan
Let no one accuse Bernie Sanders of ducking the big questions. Writing in the New York Times last week, the senator asked: "Will the future of humanity be determined by a handful of billionaires who have promoted and developed AI, with virtually no democratic input, who stand to become even riche...
Enhanced License Plate Tracking
The surveillance company Leonardo wants more data: A surveillance company plans to add sensors to automatic license plate readers ALPRs that would mean the devices, as well as capture the license plate of passing vehicles, would also sweep up unique identifiers of mobile phones, wearables, and...
NSO Group Hacking WhatsApp Despite Court Order
WhatsApp has caught the NSO Group phishing its users, in violation of a court order...
GPS As a Key Distribution Platform
This is interesting: The U.S. military has likely been quietly broadcasting codes for its global encryption network using public GPS for nearly 20 years, turning each satellite into a hidden "numbers station," according to Steven Murdoch… That means every device that uses GPS has been receiving...
Critical Zcash Vulnerability Found and Fixed
If you're a user--owner?--of this cryptocurrency, this is important: On May 29, the security researcher Taylor Hornby found a critical vulnerability in Zcash Orchard privacy pool using Claude Opus 4.8. The Zcash team hired Hornby specifically to look for this kind of issue. He found one fast enou...
Anthropic’s Project Glasswing Update
In April, Anthropic initated Project Glasswing. The idea was to let companies use their new model to find and fix vulnerabilities in their own software. It was a fantastic PR move, and so many press outlets have uncritically parroted Anthropic's claims that it's now common wisdom that Mythos is...
AI Worm
Researchers have prototyped an AI-powered internet worm. The coolest thing about the prototype is that it carries its own LLM with it, and runs it on computers that have been broken into. This is the closest to John Brunner's original 1975 conception of a computer worm that I've seen...
Hacking Meta’s AI Chatbot
Hackers are convincing Meta's AI support chatbot to let them take over other peoples' accounts: A video posted on X showed the step-by-step process to hack someone's Instagram account. The hacker allegedly used a VPN to spoof the targets' presumed location to avoid triggering Instagram's automate...
AI Used to Decrypt Medieval Ciphers
Researchers are using machine learning algorithms to decrypt historical pencil-and-paper ciphers...
The Intersection of Encryption and AI
As part of their 20th Anniversary celebration, Dark Reading asked five cybersecurity industry leaders who wrote blogs or columns for them over the years to select their favorite piece and share their reflections on the topic today. This is my section. Renowned technologist and author Bruce Schnei...
Microsoft Threatening Security Researcher
An anonymous security researcher called "Nightmare Eclipse" has been publishing a series of significant security exploits against Microsoft Windows--including one that breaks BitLocker. Microsoft has threatened legal action against the researcher. Lots of recriminations are being traded back and...
Vulnerability Disclosure in the Age of AI
New article: "Responsible Disclosure in the Age of AI: A Call for Urgent Action," by Melissa Hathaway. Abstract: Artificial intelligence is fundamentally reshaping the balance between vulnerability discovery and remediation. Frontier AI models are now capable of autonomously identifying exploitab...
Friday Squid Blogging: Another Squid
Someone named "Squid" seems to be a "West Country legend." 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...
Chilling Effects
Younger Americans have soured on the second Donald Trump presidency, but they are not protesting it. Despite an unpopular Iran war and an even more unpopular Trump administration, college campus protests nationwide have gone silent. And at many schools, student activism is virtually nonexistent...
FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report
The 2025 Internet Crime Report was published a few weeks ago, but I only just saw it. Lots of interesting statistics. Press release. News articles...
Identifying People Using Wi-Fi Routers
Not identifying people based on their use of Wi-Fi routers, but identifying people using Wi-Fi signals. This is accomplished through what is known as WiFi sensing, or the use of WiFi signals to infer information about a physical environment. When radio signals like WiFi travel through a space, th...
Friday Squid Blogging: Regulating Squid Fishing in the South Pacific
The South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organization SPRFMO needs to regulate squid fishing in the South Pacific. 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...
CISA Security Leak
Crazy story: Until this past weekend, a contractor for the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency CISA maintained a public GitHub repository that exposed credentials to several highly privileged AWS GovCloud accounts and a large number of internal CISA systems. Security experts said the...
macOS Kernel Memory Corruption Exploit
A group used Anthropic's Mythos AI model to help find a kernel memory corruption vulnerability and exploit on Apple's M5. News article...
On AI Security
Good report: Executive Summary: Let's say you wanted to make sure that your AI is secure. Can you just maximize the security and privacy benchmark and call it a day? Nope, because benchmarks don't actually work for measuring AI capabilities even when they are NOT emergent systemic properties like...
Laurie Anderson Is Quoting Me
Not by name, but Laurie Anderson quotes me in one of the tracks of her new album: My favorite quote is from a cryptologist who said "If you think technology will solve your problems, you don't understand technology and you don't understand your problems." Also in interviews: "Of course, it's...
Zero-Day Exploit Against Windows BitLocker
It's nasty, but it requires physical access to the computer: The exploit, named YellowKey, was published earlier this week by a researcher who goes by the alias Nightmare-Eclipse. It reliably bypasses default Windows 11 deployments of BitLocker, the full-volume encryption protection Microsoft...
Friday Squid Blogging: Bigfin Squid
Article about the bigfin squid. 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...
Bypassing On-Camera Age-Verification Checks
Some AI-based video age-verification checks can be fooled with a fake mustache...
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m giving a virtual talk on “The Security of Trust in the Age of AI,” hosted by the Financial Women’s Association of New York, at 6:00 PM ET on May 21, 2026. I’m speaking at the Potsdam Conference on National Cybersecurity at the...
How Dangerous Is Anthropic’s Mythos AI?
Last month, Anthropic made a remarkable announcement about its new model, Claude Mythos Preview: it was so good at finding security vulnerabilities in software that the company would not release it to the general public. Instead, it would only be available to a select group of companies to scan a...
OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 is as Good as Mythos at Finding Security Vulnerabilities
The UK's AI Security Institute evaluated GPT-5.5's ability to find security vulnerabilities, and found that it is comparable to Claude Mythos. Note that the OpenAI model is generally available. Here is the Institute's evaluation of Mythos. And here is an analysis of a smaller, cheaper model. It...
Copy.Fail Linux Vulnerability
This is the worst Linux vulnerability in years. TL;DR copy.fail is a Linux kernel local privilege escalation, not a browser or clipboard attack. Disclosed by Theori on 29 April 2026 with a working PoC. It abuses the kernel crypto API AFALG sockets plus splice to write four bytes at a time straigh...
LLMs and Text-in-Text Steganography
Turns out that LLMs are really good at hiding text messages in other text messages...
Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid Live in the Waters of Western Australia
Evidence of them has been found by analyzing DNA in the seawater. 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...
Insider Betting on Polymarket
Insider trading is rife on Polymarket: Analysis by the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, a non-profit research and advocacy group, found that long-shot bets--defined as wagers of $2,500 or more at odds of 35 percent or less--on the platform had an average win rate of around 52 percent in markets...
Smart Glasses for the Authorities
ICE is developing its own version of smart glasses, with facial recognition tied to various databases...
Rowhammer Attack Against NVIDIA Chips
A new rowhammer attack gives complete control of NVIDIA CPUs. On Thursday, two research teams, working independently of each other, demonstrated attacks against two cards from Nvidia’s Ampere generation that take GPU rowhammering into new--and potentially much more consequential--territory: GDD...
DarkSword Malware
DarkSword is a sophisticated piece of malware--probably government designed--that targets iOS. Google Threat Intelligence Group GTIG has identified a new iOS full-chain exploit that leveraged multiple zero-day vulnerabilities to fully compromise devices. Based on toolmarks in recovered payloads, ...
Hacking Polymarket
Polymarket is a platform where people can bet on real-world events, political and otherwise. Leaving the ethical considerations of this aside for one, it facilitates assassination, one of the issues with making this work is the verification of these real-world events. Polymarket gamblers have...
A Ransomware Negotiator Was Working for a Ransomware Gang
Someone pleaded guilty to secretly working for a ransomware gang as he negotiated ransomware payments for clients...
Fast16 Malware
Researchers have reverse-engineered a piece of malware named Fast16. It's almost certainly state-sponsored, probably US in origin, and was deployed against Iran years before Stuxnet: "…the Fast16 malware was designed to carry out the most subtle form of sabotage ever seen in an in-the-wild malwar...
Claude Mythos Has Found 271 Zero-Days in Firefox
That's a lot. No, it's an extraordinary number: Since February, the Firefox team has been working around the clock using frontier AI models to find and fix latent security vulnerabilities in the browser. We wrote previously about our collaboration with Anthropic to scan Firefox with Opus 4.6, whi...
What Anthropic’s Mythos Means for the Future of Cybersecurity
Two weeks ago, Anthropic announced that its new model, Claude Mythos Preview, can autonomously find and weaponize software vulnerabilities, turning them into working exploits without expert guidance. These were vulnerabilities in key software like operating systems and internet infrastructure tha...
Medieval Encrypted Letter Decoded
Sent by a Spanish diplomat. Apparently people have been working on it since it was rediscovered in 1860...
Friday Squid Blogging: How Squid Survived Extinction Events
Science news: Scientists have finally cracked a long-standing mystery about squid and cuttlefish evolution by analyzing newly sequenced genomes alongside global datasets. The research reveals that these bizarre, intelligent creatures likely originated deep in the ocean over 100 million years ago,...
Hiding Bluetooth Trackers in Mail
It was used to track a Dutch naval ship: Dutch journalist Just Vervaart, working for regional media network Omroep Gelderland, followed the directions posted on the Dutch government website and mailed a postcard with a hidden tracker inside. Because of this, they were able to track the ship for...
FBI Extracts Deleted Signal Messages from iPhone Notification Database
404 Media reports alternate site: The FBI was able to forensically extract copies of incoming Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone, even after the app was deleted, because copies of the content were saved in the device’s push notification database…. The news shows how forensic...
ICE Uses Graphite Spyware
ICE has admitted that it uses spyware from the Israeli company Graphite...