Microsoft is currently patching a zero-day Secure-Boot bug. The BlackLotus bootkit is the first-known real-world malware that can bypass Secure Boot protections, allowing for the execution of malicious code before your PC begins loading Windows and its many security protections. … | Continue reading
Micro-Star International—aka MSI—had its UEFI signing key stolen last month. This raises the possibility that the leaked key could push out updates that would infect a computer’s most nether regions without triggering a warning. To make matters worse, Matrosov said, MSI doesn’t h … | Continue reading
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at IT-S Now 2023 in Vienna, Austria, on June 2, 2023 at 8:30 AM CEST. The list is maintained on this page. | Continue reading
A video—authentic, not a deep fake—of a giant squid close to the surface. 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. | Continue reading
Ted Chiang has an excellent essay in the New Yorker: “Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?” The question we should be asking is: as A.I. becomes more powerful and flexible, is there any way to keep it from being another version of McKinsey? The question is worth considering across … | Continue reading
We will all soon get into the habit of using AI tools for help with everyday problems and tasks. We should get in the habit of questioning the motives, incentives, and capabilities behind them, too. Imagine you’re using an AI chatbot to plan a vacation. Did it suggest a particula … | Continue reading
Reuters is reporting that the FBI “had identified and disabled malware wielded by Russia’s FSB security service against an undisclosed number of American computers, a move they hoped would deal a death blow to one of Russia’s leading cyber spying programs.” The headline says that … | Continue reading
Another nation-state malware, Russian in origin: In the early stages of the war in Ukraine in 2022, PIPEDREAM, a known malware was quietly on the brink of wiping out a handful of critical U.S. electric and liquid natural gas sites. PIPEDREAM is an attack toolkit with unmatched an … | Continue reading
At DEF CON this year, Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI and Stability AI will all open up their models for attack. The DEF CON event will rely on an evaluation platform developed by Scale AI, a California company that produces training for AI applications … | Continue reading
The viral video of the “Mediterranean beef squid”is a hoax. It’s not even a deep fake; it’s a plastic toy. 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. | Continue reading
Earlier this week, the Republican National Committee released a video that it claims was “built entirely with AI imagery.” The content of the ad isn’t especially novel—a dystopian vision of America under a second term with President Joe Biden—but the deliberate emphasis on the te … | Continue reading
New reporting from Wired reveals that the Department of Justice detected the SolarWinds attack six months before Mandient detected it in December 2020, but didn’t realize what they detected—and so ignored it. WIRED can now confirm that the operation was actually discovered by the … | Continue reading
Here’s a research group trying to replicate squid cell transparency in mammalian cells. 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. | Continue reading
My latest book, A Hacker’s Mind, is filled with stories about the rich and powerful hacking systems, but it was hard to find stories of the hacking by the less powerful. Here’s one I just found. An article on how layoffs at big companies work inadvertently suggests an employee ha … | Continue reading
Stanford and Georgetown have a new report on the security risks of AI—particularly adversarial machine learning—based on a workshop they held on the topic. Jim Dempsey, one of the workshop organizers, wrote a blog post on the report: As a first step, our report recommends the inc … | Continue reading
There’s good reason to fear that A.I. systems like ChatGPT and GPT4 will harm democracy. Public debate may be overwhelmed by industrial quantities of autogenerated argument. People might fall down political rabbit holes, taken in by superficially convincing bullshit, or obsessed … | Continue reading
Following a report on its activities, the Israeli spyware company QuaDream has shut down. This was QuadDream: Key Findings Based on an analysis of samples shared with us by Microsoft Threat Intelligence, we developed indicators that enabled us to identify at least five civil soci … | Continue reading
In an open letter, seven secure messaging apps—including Signal and WhatsApp—point out that the UK’s Online Safety Bill could destroy end-to-end encryption: As currently drafted, the Bill could break end-to-end encryption,opening the door to routine, general and indiscriminate su … | Continue reading
The squid you eat most likely comes from unregulated waters. 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. | Continue reading
My latest book, A Hacker’s Mind, has a lot of sports stories. Sports are filled with hacks, as players look for every possible advantage that doesn’t explicitly break the rules. Here’s an example from pickleball, which nicely explains the dilemma between hacking as a subversion a … | Continue reading
This a good example of a security feature that can sometimes harm security: Apple introduced the optional recovery key in 2020 to protect users from online hackers. Users who turn on the recovery key, a unique 28-digit code, must provide it when they want to reset their Apple ID … | Continue reading
CitizenLab has identified three zero-click exploits against iOS 15 and 16. These were used by NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware in 2022, and deployed by Mexico against human rights defenders. These vulnerabilities have all been patched. One interesting bit is that Apple’s Lockdown Mode … | Continue reading
EFF has a good explainer on the problems with the new UN Cybercrime Treaty, currently being negotiated in Vienna. The draft treaty has the potential to rewrite criminal laws around the world, possibly adding over 30 criminal offenses and new expansive police powers for both domes … | Continue reading
I’m not sure there are good ways to build guardrails to prevent this sort of thing: There is growing concern regarding the potential misuse of molecular machine learning models for harmful purposes. Specifically, the dual-use application of models for predicting cytotoxicity18 to … | Continue reading
Motherboard is reporting on AI-generated voices being used for “swatting”: In fact, Motherboard has found, this synthesized call and another against Hempstead High School were just one small part of a months-long, nationwide campaign of dozens, and potentially hundreds, of threat … | Continue reading
Interesting article on the colossal squid, which is larger than the giant squid. The article answers a vexing question: So why do we always hear about the giant squid and not the colossal squid? Well, part of it has to do with the fact that the giant squid was discovered and stud … | Continue reading
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking on “Cybersecurity Thinking to Reinvent Democracy” at RSA Conference 2023 in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, April 25, 2023, at 9:40 AM PT. I’m speaking at IT-S Now 2023 in Vienna, Austria, on Ju … | Continue reading
Here’s a religious hack: You want to commit suicide, but it’s a mortal sin: your soul goes straight to hell, forever. So what you do is murder someone. That will get you executed, but if you confess your sins to a priest beforehand you avoid hell. Problem solved. This was actuall … | Continue reading
You can beat the game without a computer: On a perfect [roulette] wheel, the ball would always fall in a random way. But over time, wheels develop flaws, which turn into patterns. A wheel that’s even marginally tilted could develop what Barnett called a ‘drop zone.’ When the tilt … | Continue reading
Thieves cut through the wall of a coffee shop to get to an Apple store, bypassing the alarms in the process. I wrote about this kind of thing in 2000, in Secrets and Lies (page 318): My favorite example is a band of California art thieves that would break into people’s houses by … | Continue reading
The FBI is warning people against using public phone-charging stations, worrying that the combination power-data port can be used to inject malware onto the devices: Avoid using free charging stations in airports, hotels, or shopping centers. Bad actors have figured out ways to u … | Continue reading
Car thieves are injecting malicious software into a car’s network through wires in the headlights (or taillights) that fool the car into believing that the electronic key is nearby. News articles. | Continue reading
Here’s an experiment being run by undergraduate computer science students everywhere: Ask ChatGPT to generate phishing emails, and test whether these are better at persuading victims to respond or click on the link than the usual spam. It’s an interesting experiment, and the resu … | Continue reading
University of Connecticut basketball player Jordan Hawkins claims to have suffered food poisoning from calamari the night before his NCAA finals game. The restaurant disagrees: On Sunday, a Mastro’s employee politely cast doubt on the idea that the restaurant might have caused th … | Continue reading
New research: “Achilles Heels for AGI/ASI via Decision Theoretic Adversaries“: As progress in AI continues to advance, it is important to know how advanced systems will make choices and in what ways they may fail. Machines can already outsmart humans in some domains, and understa … | Continue reading
Genesis Market is shut down: Active since 2018, Genesis Market’s slogan was, “Our store sells bots with logs, cookies, and their real fingerprints.” Customers could search for infected systems with a variety of options, including by Internet address or by specific domain names as … | Continue reading
News: Researchers at Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky today revealed that they identified a small number of cryptocurrency-focused firms as at least some of the victims of the 3CX software supply-chain attack that’s unfolded over the past week. Kaspersky declined to name any … | Continue reading
Brian Krebs is reporting that the UK’s National Crime Agency is setting up fake DDoS-for-hire sites as part of a sting operation: The NCA says all of its fake so-called “booter” or “stresser” sites - which have so far been accessed by several thousand people—have been created to … | Continue reading
Epic matchup. 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. | Continue reading
Jenny Blessing and Ross Anderson have evaluated the security of systems designed to allow the various Internet messaging platforms to interoperate with each other: The Digital Markets Act ruled that users on different platforms should be able to exchange messages with each other. … | Continue reading
Both Google’s Pixel’s Markup Tool and the Windows Snipping Tool have vulnerabilities that allow people to partially recover content that was edited out of images. | Continue reading
An impressive array of hacks were demonstrated at the first day of the Pwn2Own conference in Vancouver: On the first day of Pwn2Own Vancouver 2023, security researchers successfully demoed Tesla Model 3, Windows 11, and macOS zero-day exploits and exploit chains to win $375,000 a … | Continue reading
This is fascinating: “When a squid ends up chipping what’s called its ring tooth, which is the nail underneath its tentacle, it needs to regrow that tooth very rapidly, otherwise it can’t claw its prey,” he explains. This was intriguing news and it sparked an idea in Hopkins la … | Continue reading
My latest book continues to sell well. Its ranking hovers between 1,500 and 2,000 on Amazon. It’s been spied in airports. Reviews are consistently good. I have been enjoying giving podcast interviews. It all feels pretty good right now. You can order a signed book from me here. F … | Continue reading
In case you don’t have enough to worry about, people are hiding explosives—actual ones—in USB sticks: In the port city of Guayaquil, journalist Lenin Artieda of the Ecuavisa private TV station received an envelope containing a pen drive which exploded when he inserted it into a c … | Continue reading
A vulnerability in a popular data transfer tool has resulted in a mass ransomware attack: TechCrunch has learned of dozens of organizations that used the affected GoAnywhere file transfer software at the time of the ransomware attack, suggesting more victims are likely to come fo … | Continue reading
OpenAI has disabled ChatGPT’s privacy history, almost certainly because they had a security flaw where users were seeing each others’ histories. | Continue reading
The New York Times is reporting that a US citizen’s phone was hacked by the Predator spyware. A U.S. and Greek national who worked on Meta’s security and trust team while based in Greece was placed under a yearlong wiretap by the Greek national intelligence service and hacked wit … | Continue reading