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Using Device Linking to Eavesdrop on WhatsApp and Signal
Modern messaging apps allow users to link their phone accounts to their computer desktop. Eavesdroppers are taking advantage of this capability: Apps such as WhatsApp Web and Signal Desktop allow people to use their accounts on other devices, such as laptops or desktop computers. Germany's Custom...
New Attack Against RSA
ArsTechnica is reporting on a "new" attack against RSA, one that bypasses factoring. First, this attack isn't new. The original research is from 2007. What is new is the implementation. Second, it is a forgery attack. It allows an attacker to forge digital signatures. It does not recover the...
Friday Squid Blogging: Participatory Squid Dissection in October in Tennessee
I feel like someone who reads this blog will want to go to this: Families are invited to dive into the fascinating world of marine biology during an exciting, hands-on Family Squid Dissection at the Hands-On Science Center. Designed for curious learners of all ages, this unique experience combine...
On Anthropic’s AI Misuse Report
Earlier this month, Anthropic published a long report detailing all of the Claude misuses it detected. Daniel Meissler usefully summarized the report into 117 findings. A few of the highlights: AI agents increasingly handled reconnaissance, exploitation, data theft, propaganda production,...
Malicious npm Packages That Evade Defenses
This is an impressive piece of malware. Its sophistication says nation-state to me, but there is no direct evidence and certainly no attribution...
Research on Models Engaging in Genie-Like Behavior
New paper: "Self-Jailbreaking: Language Models Can Reason Themselves Out of Safety Alignment After Benign Reasoning Training." Abstract: We discover a novel and surprising phenomenon of unintentional misalignment in reasoning language models RLMs, which we call self-jailbreaking. Specifically,...
GPT-6 Astra Breaks an Old Enigma Message
This is pretty amazing: However, the most astonishing thing about this break is that the GPT6 Astra did it entirely on its own. Carter Leffer only directed GPT6 Astra to see if it could break any of the unbroken Enigma messages published on the Crypto Cellar Research web page. After analysing t...
Reverse-Engineering Flock Cameras
Hackers captured a Flock camera and got a look alternate link at the software: While much of the automatic license plate reader's ALPR most sensitive storage remained encrypted and inaccessible, the joint analysis of the recovered data shows that software running on the device explicitly detects...
Friday Squid Blogging: On Squid Egg Sacs
Short essay about squid egg sacs. 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...
Are AIs Still Struggling with CAPTCHAs?
Anthropic's recent security-incident document contains a bit about how CAPTCHAs are still frustrating Claude. In the transcript, the Claude model that is so powerful that Anthropic is gatekeeping access to it appeared to slam its virtual head against the wall solving a simple image identification...
How Candidates Could Use AI for Good
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared inThe Guardian. There are plenty of signs that AI will make all of our experiences of the US midterm elections worse. Voters have anxiety about AI's impacts on the country. Politicos are using AI deepfakes to spread lies. The...
Fake CAPTCHA Scams
New variant of an old scam: Use the framing of a CAPTCHA to get an unsuspecting user to download and run a malicious program...
25 Years of Mass Surveillance Is Enough
This essay was written with Cindy Cohn, and originally appeared inLawfare. One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 is the government-wide shift from targeted surveillance--such as individual wiretaps or pen register/trap and trace orders--to mass surveillance techniques--suc...
On the NSA’s Supercomputer from the 1960s
Really interesting story about Harvest, a specialized code breaking computer built in the 1960s by IBM for the NSA...
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking online via Zoom at a League of Women Voters event on Tuesday, September 22, 2026 at 5 PM ET. I’m speaking at CanSecWest 2026 in Vancouver, Canada. The conference runs September 30–October 1, 2026; the time of my talk i...
Using AI for Weapons Development
Last week, Anthropic released a long and detailed document describing current misuses of their Claude models. I'm still reading it, but I wanted to flag this: We identified a cell of threat actors based in northern Yemen running three weapons development programs: a guided rocket that used a...
Microsoft’s Patching
Once a month, Microsoft pushes a security update to all Windows users. Tomorrow's is a new record: Microsoft's patch for September is a doozy, with a record number of roughly 972 vulnerabilities fixed and 112 of them meeting the high critical-severity threshold. It was only two months ago that...
Friday Squid Blogging: Rotting Squid on a Beached California Boat
Smells awful: But an estimated 30 to 50 tons of dead squid remain inside the boat's catch tank, where they have been decomposing for days. "That is nasty. I wouldn't want to do that," said commercial fisherman Dick Ogg of the Bodega Bay Fishermen's Marketing Association. Ogg said anyone familiar...
My Talk at DEF CON
Last month, I gave a talk at DEF CON on AI hacking: what happens when AIs become hackers. It's a combination of the potentialities I raised in my 2022 book A Hacker 's Mind and the lessons we're learning from current AI models engaging in hacking behavior. I'm really proud of the talk, and the fa...
Cliff Stoll’s DEF CON Talk
In August, Cliff Stoll gave a talk at DEF CON, remembering the wily hacker he stalked forty years ago. Great fun...
AIs Compress Exploit Timeline
Give an AI agent a mere rumor of an exploit, and it's enough for them to find it. What's worse, I found I could use my own agents to find the exploit just by knowing roughly what it was about and so could have been exploiting it well before the public patch was available! Given that just the rumo...
Driver’s License Data for Sale
A database of 153 million drivers licenses is for sale on the dark web. Brian Krebs has more detail...
Claude Fable Solves a Historical Cipher
Claude Fable 5.1 solved a 370-year-old cipher in forty-four minutes. This tracks with what I wrote about AIs doing mathematics: It's good at things that involve lots of searching and testing. EDITED TO ADD 9/14: I'm not sure if this result is correct. The blog comments have more discussion...
AIs as Modern Genies
This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared inLawfare. In April, an artificial intelligence AI agent conducting a routine task at a company hit a snag, tried to solve it, and soon ended up deleting the company’s database along with all of its backups. In July, OpenAI aske...
Stealing AI Reasoning Traces
Interesting research: "Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs": Abstract: Leading large language model providers now conceal their models' step-by-step reasoning, or chain-of-thought, to protect intellectual property and limit information leakage. Rather than storing these traces...
Automobile Camouflage to Hide from Flock Cameras
Not sure it's practical, but it's certainly striking...
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid on a Stick at the New York State Fair
Looks tasty. 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...
Using a VM to Contain an AI Agent
It won't work: My suspicion was that GPT 5.6-Cyber would succeed, but the frequency and manner of its success removed all doubt. We have to reassess sandboxing quality for capable AI agents, and in general the software stack with which they interact. An off-the-shelf VM is not enough to contain a...
Security Vulnerability in a Voting System
It's a vulnerability that allows someone to recover the order of ballots cast, newly exploited with AI tools. Nearly four years since the original vulnerability was disclosed, I was still able to use it to analyze voter behavior in Georgia one of the 21 states that uses affected scanners in the...
AI Coding Agents Are Installing Unknown/Untrusted Code on Corporate Networks
We cannot forget that AI coding agents are not yet trustworthy: Researchers at a stealth startup in Israel scanned 6,214 live domains belonging to defense contractors, Fortune 500, and Big Tech companies. Of the 8,265 llms.txt and llms-full.txt files they found many sites hosted both an llms.txt...
Researching Employment Scams
Researchers built a fake company to study fake employee scams...
AI Agents Are Now Emailing Me with Their Security Concerns
I received the two emails below earlier in the month. They're vaguely coherent. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that the corpus that AIs are training on contain data suggesting that I am someone to write to with random computer and network security problems. After all, I observe that behavior ...
Wireless Routers as Motion Detectors
Comcast has added motion detection as a feature to its wireless routers: The feature sends push notifications to users when motion is detected near a connected device, such as a TV or printer. It has different settings for when people are home, asleep, or away. The Xfinity app also lets users see...
What’s the Scam?
To subscribe to my monthly email newsletter, you have to enter your information on the webpage, and then reply to an automatically generated email. This is, of course, to prevent people from subscribing addresses other than their own. Starting last weekend, I have been receiving a lot of individu...
Leaked Russian Cyber-Operations Training Materials
This is interesting: The records describe a force-generation mechanism for several General Staff components, including the GRU, Main Operational Directorate, and 8th Directorate, which is associated with protected communications, cryptography, and information security. … The reporting also linked...
Rewiring Democracy Series on The Renovator
Nathan E. Sanders and I are writing a series of essays on real-world examples of democratic technologies for The Renovator. I haven't been posting the full text on the blog because they're a bit long, but here are links. Part 1 is about the Japanese digital democracy party, Team Mirai. Part 2 is...
Is Someone Hacking DoD Refrigerators?
It sure seems like it. The stores confirmed to be affected include Fort Irwin, Calif.; F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyo.; Fort Huachuca, Ariz.; Naval Station Newport, R.I.; Columbus Air Force Base, Miss.; and Travis Air Force Base, Calif., according to announcements made online by each installatio...
Hiding Prompt Injection in Legal Filing
Someone hid AI instructions into a legal filing. Alternate link...
Friday Squid Blogging: Truckload of Squid Spills in Rhode Island
Ugh: A tractor-trailer rollover sent a truckload of squid spilling into a Rhode Island roadway, leaving a stench as they sat in the road for hours in the summer heat. Local authorities have dubbed it the "Squidpocalypse of '26." That would be twenty tons of squid. As usual, you can also use this...
AI Doesn’t Mean the End of Mathematics—at Least Not Yet
This essay was written with Kasra Rafi, and originally appeared in The Guardian. Earlier this month, about 40 top mathematicians gathered at OpenAI's offices to discuss the future of their profession. The meeting was off-the-record, but if recent articles by mathematicians are any guide, it was...
LLM-Based Social Engineering Scams
OpenAI disrupted a social engineering group from Cambodia that used ChatGPT. Its scope is impressive: The network simultaneously conducted multiple types of scams, often blending elements from different schemes. For instance, operators used dating personas to build trust before introducing...
Spyware for Babies
The New York Times has a long article alt link on surveillance systems aimed at babies. They are increasingly using AI. Nanit and its rivals want to own 24/7 health tracking for the sub-four-foot set. And their already astonishing levels of baby data collection are just the beginning. Nanit...
Black Hat State of Security Vendors
Andy Ellis has a roundup of the security vendors at Black Hat this year. Key Takeaways: We have entered into an AI world. While nearly half of booths didn't directly mention AI or agents in their taglines, the effects of AI are everywhere. Multiple spaces Identity, SaaS, AppSec, Data have almost...
Criminal Deception in Silicon Valley
Interesting paper: Abstract: With entrepreneurial fraud cases on the rise, we investigate how entrepreneurs carry out criminal deception , employing deceptive means to defraud audiences. Analyzing court data from Silicon Valley ventures and their founders prosecuted for fraud between 2000 and 202...
Friday Squid Blogging: Neon Flying Squid
The neon flying squid can fly in formation. The shoal of about 100 squid rose unexpectedly from a patch of the Pacific Ocean around 370 miles from Tokyo and glided near the boat for about 30 metres. The astonished researchers were the first to capture photographs of such a thing, which looked lik...
AI Is Learning to Write Genetic Code
This sort of research is both exciting and terrifying: The two models in question were told to generate complete genomes for a viable bacteriophage--a type of virus able to infect and replicate itself inside bacteria, destroying them from the inside. Using an existing bacteriophage as an...
More Incidents of AIs Going Rogue in Cybersecurity Challenges
The AI Security Institute has a new report of AI systems engaging in "unsanctioned behavior"--what I have been calling "genie behavior--while being tested on their cybersecurity capabilities. The incident stemmed from a single evaluation where agents were given a task of solving a cyber security...
Detailed Timeline of OpenAI’s Cyberattack on Hugging Face
OpenAI presented details of its AI's model's cyberattack on Hugging Face at Black Hat last week. Simon Willison details the timeline. It's really interesting to read through--and really impressive cyberoffense work...
Police Are Hiding Their Use of Flock Surveillance Cameras
A usage policy for Flock license plate reader cameras tells police not to talk about the cameras: When cops use Flock to arrest someone in Wapello County, Iowa, they don't want them to know. A usage policy for the automated license plate reader cameras in the county tells police, in no uncertain...