New research: “Deception abilities emerged in large language models“: Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are currently at the forefront of intertwining AI systems with human communication and everyday life. Thus, aligning them with human values is of great importance. However … | Continue reading
Interesting research: “Hyperlink Hijacking: Exploiting Erroneous URL Links to Phantom Domains“: Abstract: Web users often follow hyperlinks hastily, expecting them to be correctly programmed. However, it is possible those links contain typos or other mistakes. By discovering acti … | Continue reading
Peru has set a lower squid quota for 2024. The article says “giant squid,” but that seems wrong. We don’t eat those. 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
This week, I hosted the seventeenth Workshop on Security and Human Behavior at the Harvard Kennedy School. This is the first workshop since our co-founder, Ross Anderson, died unexpectedly. SHB is a small, annual, invitational workshop of people studying various aspects of the hu … | Continue reading
The US Justice Department has dismantled an enormous botnet: According to an indictment unsealed on May 24, from 2014 through July 2022, Wang and others are alleged to have created and disseminated malware to compromise and amass a network of millions of residential Windows compu … | Continue reading
The US is using a World War II law that bans aircraft photography of military installations to charge someone with doing the same thing with a drone. | Continue reading
Microsoft recently caught state-backed hackers using its generative AI tools to help with their attacks. In the security community, the immediate questions weren’t about how hackers were using the tools (that was utterly predictable), but about how Microsoft figured it out. The n … | Continue reading
Interesting story of breaking the security of the RoboForm password manager in order to recover a cryptocurrency wallet password. Grand and Bruno spent months reverse engineering the version of the RoboForm program that they thought Michael had used in 2013 and found that the pse … | Continue reading
Technology was once simply a tool—and a small one at that—used to amplify human intent and capacity. That was the story of the industrial revolution: we could control nature and build large, complex human societies, and the more we employed and mastered technology, the better thi … | Continue reading
A piece I coauthored with Fredrik Heiding and Arun Vishwanath in the Harvard Business Review: Summary. Gen AI tools are rapidly making these emails more advanced, harder to spot, and significantly more dangerous. Recent research showed that 60% of participants fell victim to arti … | Continue reading
This video might be a juvenile colossal 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. | Continue reading
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to predict that artificial intelligence will affect every aspect of our society. Not by doing new things. But mostly by doing things that are already being done by humans, perfectly competently. Replacing humans with AIs isn’t necessarily intere … | Continue reading
No word on how this backdoor was installed: A software maker serving more than 10,000 courtrooms throughout the world hosted an application update containing a hidden backdoor that maintained persistent communication with a malicious website, researchers reported Thursday, in the … | Continue reading
Brian Krebs reports on research into geolocating routers: Apple and the satellite-based broadband service Starlink each recently took steps to address new research into the potential security and privacy implications of how their services geolocate devices. Researchers from the U … | Continue reading
Quantum computers are probably coming, though we don’t know when—and when they arrive, they will, most likely, be able to break our standard public-key cryptography algorithms. In anticipation of this possibility, cryptographers have been working on quantum-resistant public-key a … | Continue reading
Fantastic footage of a Dana squid attacking a camera at a depth of about a kilometer. 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
New paper: “Zero Progress on Zero Days: How the Last Ten Years Created the Modern Spyware Market“: Abstract: Spyware makes surveillance simple. The last ten years have seen a global market emerge for ready-made software that lets governments surveil their citizens and foreign adv … | Continue reading
Microsoft is trying to create a personal digital assistant: At a Build conference event on Monday, Microsoft revealed a new AI-powered feature called “Recall” for Copilot+ PCs that will allow Windows 11 users to search and retrieve their past activities on their PC. To make it wo … | Continue reading
Experiments in unredacting text that has been pixelated. | Continue reading
From Slashdot: Apple and Google have launched a new industry standard called “Detecting Unwanted Location Trackers” to combat the misuse of Bluetooth trackers for stalking. Starting Monday, iPhone and Android users will receive alerts when an unknown Bluetooth device is detected … | Continue reading
IBM is selling its QRadar product suite to Palo Alto Networks, for an undisclosed—but probably surprisingly small—sum. I have a personal connection to this. In 2016, IBM bought Resilient Systems, the startup I was a part of. It became part if IBM’s cybersecurity offerings, mostly … | Continue reading
When asked what makes this an “emotional support squid” and not just another stuffed animal, its creator says: They’re emotional support squid because they’re large, and cuddly, but also cheerfully bright and derpy. They make great neck pillows (and you can fidget with the arms a … | Continue reading
The FBI has seized the BreachForums website, used by ransomware criminals to leak stolen corporate data. If law enforcement has gained access to the hacking forum’s backend data, as they claim, they would have email addresses, IP addresses, and private messages that could expose … | Continue reading
Microsoft is working on a promising-looking protocol to lock down DNS. ZTDNS aims to solve this decades-old problem by integrating the Windows DNS engine with the Windows Filtering Platform—the core component of the Windows Firewall—directly into client devices. Jake Williams, VP … | Continue reading
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m giving a webinar via Zoom on Wednesday, May 22, at 11:00 AM ET. The topic is “Should the USG Establish a Publicly Funded AI Option?“ The list is maintained on this page. | Continue reading
Google has patched another Chrome zero-day: On Thursday, Google said an anonymous source notified it of the vulnerability. The vulnerability carries a severity rating of 8.8 out of 10. In response, Google said, it would be releasing versions 124.0.6367.201/.202 for macOS and Wind … | Continue reading
Back in the 1960s, if you played a 2,600Hz tone into an AT&T pay phone, you could make calls without paying. A phone hacker named John Draper noticed that the plastic whistle that came free in a box of Captain Crunch cereal worked to make the right sound. That became his hacker n … | Continue reading
Some squids are “consorts,” others are “sneakers.” The species is healthiest when individuals have different strategies randomly. 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
This is another attack that convinces the AI to ignore road signs: Due to the way CMOS cameras operate, rapidly changing light from fast flashing diodes can be used to vary the color. For example, the shade of red on a stop sign could look different on each line depending on the … | Continue reading
There’s a new report on how criminals are using generative AI tools: Key Takeaways: Adoption rates of AI technologies among criminals lag behind the rates of their industry counterparts because of the evolving nature of cybercrime. Compared to last year, criminals seem to have ab … | Continue reading
This attack has been feasible for over two decades: Researchers have devised an attack against nearly all virtual private network applications that forces them to send and receive some or all traffic outside of the encrypted tunnel designed to protect it from snooping or tamperin … | Continue reading
Lots of complicated details here: too many for me to summarize well. It involves an obscure Section 230 provision—and an even more obscure typo. Read this. | Continue reading
Squid-shaped purses for sale. 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
I have spoken at several TED conferences over the years. TEDxPSU 2010: “Reconceptualizing Security” TEDxCambridge 2013: “The Battle for Power on the Internet” TEDMed 2016: “Who Controls Your Medical Data?” I’m putting this here because I want all three links in one place. | Continue reading
The Polish Embassy has posted a series of short interview segments with Marian Rejewski, the first person to crack the Enigma. Details from his biography. | Continue reading
The UK is the first country to ban default passwords on IoT devices. On Monday, the United Kingdom became the first country in the world to ban default guessable usernames and passwords from these IoT devices. Unique passwords installed by default are still permitted. The Product … | Continue reading
Scammers tricked a company into believing they were dealing with a BBC presenter. They faked her voice, and accepted money intended for her. | Continue reading
Meta has threatened to pull WhatsApp out of India if the courts try to force it to break its end-to-end encryption. | Continue reading
During the Cold War, the US Navy tried to make a secret code out of whale song. The basic plan was to develop coded messages from recordings of whales, dolphins, sea lions, and seals. The submarine would broadcast the noises and a computer—the Combo Signal Recognizer (CSR)—would … | Continue reading
A cruise ship is searching for the colossal 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. | Continue reading
Kashmir Hill has a really good article on how GM tricked its drivers into letting it spy on them—and then sold that data to insurance companies. | Continue reading
The web has become so interwoven with everyday life that it is easy to forget what an extraordinary accomplishment and treasure it is. In just a few decades, much of human knowledge has been collectively written up and made available to anyone with an internet connection. But all … | Continue reading
Law professor Dan Solove has a new article on privacy regulation. In his email to me, he writes: “I’ve been pondering privacy consent for more than a decade, and I think I finally made a breakthrough with this article.” His mini-abstract: In this Article I argue that most of the … | Continue reading
Former senior White House cyber policy director A. J. Grotto talks about the economic incentives for companies to improve their security—in particular, Microsoft: Grotto told us Microsoft had to be “dragged kicking and screaming” to provide logging capabilities to the government … | Continue reading
Interesting social-engineering attack vector: McAfee released a report on a new LUA malware loader distributed through what appeared to be a legitimate Microsoft GitHub repository for the “C++ Library Manager for Windows, Linux, and MacOS,” known as vcpkg. The attacker is exploit … | Continue reading
A new bioadhesive makes it easier to attach trackers to squid. Note: the article does not discuss squid privacy rights. 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
After the XZ Utils discovery, people have been examining other open-source projects. Surprising no one, the incident is not unique: The OpenJS Foundation Cross Project Council received a suspicious series of emails with similar messages, bearing different names and overlapping Gi … | Continue reading
Canadian legislators proposed 19,600 amendments—almost certainly AI-generated—to a bill in an attempt to delay its adoption. I wrote about many different legislative delaying tactics in A Hacker’s Mind, but this is a new one. | Continue reading