The “long lost lecture” by Adm. Grace Hopper has been published by the NSA. (Note that there are two parts.) It’s a wonderful talk: funny, engaging, wise, prescient. Remember that talk was given in 1982, less than a year before the ARPANET switched to TCP/IP and the internet went … | Continue reading
Matthew Green wrote a really good blog post on what Telegram’s encryption is and is not. | Continue reading
Ars Technica has a good article on what’s happening in the world of television surveillance. More than even I realized. | Continue reading
This is a big deal. A US Appeals Court ruled that geofence warrants—these are general warrants demanding information about all people within a geographical boundary—are unconstitutional. The decision seems obvious to me, but you can’t take anything for granted. | Continue reading
Making self-healing materials based on the teeth in squid suckers. Blog moderation policy. | Continue reading
This site will let you take a selfie with a New York City traffic surveillance camera. | Continue reading
This is a fantastic project mapping the global surveillance industry. | Continue reading
Rolling Stone has a long investigative story (non-paywalled version here) about a CIA agent who spent years posing as an Islamic radical. Unrelated, but also in the “real life spies” file: a fake Sudanese diving resort run by Mossad. | Continue reading
This is yet another insecure Internet-of-things story, this one about wireless gear shifters for bicycles. These gear shifters are used in big-money professional bicycle races like the Tour de France, which provides an incentive to actually implement this attack. Research paper. … | Continue reading
Palo Alto Networks published its semi-annual report on ransomware. From the Executive Summary: Unit 42 monitors ransomware and extortion leak sites closely to keep tabs on threat activity. We reviewed compromise announcements from 53 dedicated leak sites in the first half of 2024 … | Continue reading
How did I not know before now that there was a market for squid oil? The squid oil market has experienced robust growth in recent years, expanding from $4.56 billion in 2023 to $4.94 billion in 2024 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.5%. The growth in the historic perio … | Continue reading
The press is reporting a critical Windows vulnerability affecting IPv6. As Microsoft explained in its Tuesday advisory, unauthenticated attackers can exploit the flaw remotely in low-complexity attacks by repeatedly sending IPv6 packets that include specially crafted packets. Mic … | Continue reading
From the Federal Register: After three rounds of evaluation and analysis, NIST selected four algorithms it will standardize as a result of the PQC Standardization Process. The public-key encapsulation mechanism selected was CRYSTALS-KYBER, along with three digital signature schem … | Continue reading
Texas is suing General Motors for collecting driver data without consent and then selling it to insurance companies: From CNN: In car models from 2015 and later, the Detroit-based car manufacturer allegedly used technology to “collect, record, analyze, and transmit highly detaile … | Continue reading
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at eCrime 2024 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. The event runs from September 24 through 26, 2024, and my keynote is on the 24th. The list is maintained on this page. | Continue reading
Really interesting article on the ancient-manuscript scholars who are applying their techniques to the Voynich Manuscript. No one has been able to understand the writing yet, but there are some new understandings: Davis presented her findings at the medieval-studies conference an … | Continue reading
Interesting paper: “Generative AI Misuse: A Taxonomy of Tactics and Insights from Real-World Data“: Generative, multimodal artificial intelligence (GenAI) offers transformative potential across industries, but its misuse poses significant risks. Prior research has shed light on t … | Continue reading
Yet another SQUID acronym: SQUID, short for Surrogate Quantitative Interpretability for Deepnets, is a computational tool created by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) scientists. It’s designed to help interpret how AI models analyze the genome. Compared with other analysis too … | Continue reading
Consumer Reports has a new study of people-search site removal services, concluding that they don’t really work: As a whole, people-search removal services are largely ineffective. Private information about each participant on the people-search sites decreased after using the peo … | Continue reading
It’s possible to cancel other people’s voter registration: On Friday, four days after Georgia Democrats began warning that bad actors could abuse the state’s new online portal for canceling voter registrations, the Secretary of State’s Office acknowledged to ProPublica that it ha … | Continue reading
When an airplane crashes, impartial investigatory bodies leap into action, empowered by law to unearth what happened and why. But there is no such empowered and impartial body to investigate CrowdStrike’s faulty update that recently unfolded, ensnarling banks, airlines, and emerg … | Continue reading
Ford has a new patent application for a system where cars monitor each other’s speeds, and then report then to some central authority. Slashdot thread. | Continue reading
A newly discovered parasite that attacks squid eggs has been treated. Blog moderation policy. | Continue reading
Here’s a disaster that didn’t happen: Cybersecurity researchers from JFrog recently discovered a GitHub Personal Access Token in a public Docker container hosted on Docker Hub, which granted elevated access to the GitHub repositories of the Python language, Python Package Index ( … | Continue reading
The Linux Foundation and OpenSSF released a report on the state of education in secure software development. …many developers lack the essential knowledge and skills to effectively implement secure software development. Survey findings outlined in the report show nearly one-third … | Continue reading
Cloudflare reports on the state of applications security. It claims that 6.8% of Internet traffic is malicious. And that CVEs are exploited as quickly as 22 minutes after proof-of-concepts are published. News articles. | Continue reading
Auto manufacturers are just starting to realize the problems of supporting the software in older models: Today’s phones are able to receive updates six to eight years after their purchase date. Samsung and Google provide Android OS updates and security updates for seven years. Ap … | Continue reading
The latest in what will be a continuing arms race between creating and detecting videos: The new tool the research project is unleashing on deepfakes, called “MISLnet”, evolved from years of data derived from detecting fake images and video with tools that spot changes made to di … | Continue reading
They’re better for the environment. Blog moderation policy. | Continue reading
This isn’t good: On Thursday, researchers from security firm Binarly revealed that Secure Boot is completely compromised on more than 200 device models sold by Acer, Dell, Gigabyte, Intel, and Supermicro. The cause: a cryptographic key underpinning Secure Boot on those models tha … | Continue reading
Friday’s massive internet outage, caused by a mid-sized tech company called CrowdStrike, disrupted major airlines, hospitals, and banks. Nearly 7,000 flights were canceled. It took down 911 systems and factories, courthouses, and television stations. Tallying the total cost will … | Continue reading
I am the Chief of Security Architecture at Inrupt, Inc., the company that is commercializing Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid open W3C standard for distributed data ownership. This week, we announced a digital wallet based on the Solid architecture. Details are here, but basically a digit … | Continue reading
Supposedly the DHS has these: The robot, called “NEO,” is a modified version of the “Quadruped Unmanned Ground Vehicle” (Q-UGV) sold to law enforcement by a company called Ghost Robotics. Benjamine Huffman, the director of DHS’s Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers (FLETC), t … | Continue reading
It’s heavily redacted, but still interesting. Many more ODNI documents here. | Continue reading
This is a fantastic video. It’s an Iranian spider-tailed horned viper (Pseudocerastes urarachnoides). Its tail looks like a spider, which the snake uses to fool passing birds looking for a meal. | Continue reading
Peru is trying to protect its territorial waters from Chinese squid-fishing boats. Blog moderation policy. | Continue reading
Brett Solomon is retiring from AccessNow after fifteen years as its Executive Director. He’s written a blog post about what he’s learned and what comes next. | Continue reading
This is pretty horrific: …a group of men behind a violent crime spree designed to compel victims to hand over access to their cryptocurrency savings. That announcement and the criminal complaint laying out charges against St. Felix focused largely on a single theft of cryptocurre … | Continue reading
6.8%, to be precise. From ZDNet: However, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks continue to be cybercriminals’ weapon of choice, making up over 37% of all mitigated traffic. The scale of these attacks is staggering. In the first quarter of 2024 alone, Cloudflare blocked 4. … | Continue reading
Some scholars are inflating their reference counts by sneaking them into metadata: Citations of scientific work abide by a standardized referencing system: Each reference explicitly mentions at least the title, authors’ names, publication year, journal or conference name, and pag … | Continue reading
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking on “Reimagining Democracy in the Age of AI” at the Bozeman Library in Bozeman, Montana, USA, July 18, 2024. The event will also be available via Zoom. I’m speaking at the TEDxBillings Democracy Event i … | Continue reading
I didn’t know: In 1994, Hewlett-Packard released a miracle machine: the HP 200LX pocket-size PC. In the depths of the device, among the MS-DOS productivity apps built into its fixed memory, there lurked a first-person maze game called Lair of Squid. […] In Lair of Squid, you’re t … | Continue reading
The NSA has a video recording of a 1982 lecture by Adm. Grace Hopper titled “Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People.” The agency is (so far) refusing to release it. Basically, the recording is in an obscure video format. People at the NSA can’t easily watch it … | Continue reading
Not a lot of details: Apple has issued a new round of threat notifications to iPhone users across 98 countries, warning them of potential mercenary spyware attacks. It’s the second such alert campaign from the company this year, following a similar notification sent to users in 9 … | Continue reading
New attack against the RADIUS authentication protocol: The Blast-RADIUS attack allows a man-in-the-middle attacker between the RADIUS client and server to forge a valid protocol accept message in response to a failed authentication request. This forgery could give the attacker ac … | Continue reading
Interesting: By reverse-engineering how Ticketmaster and AXS actually make their electronic tickets, scalpers have essentially figured out how to regenerate specific, genuine tickets that they have legally purchased from scratch onto infrastructure that they control. In doing so, … | Continue reading
ProPublica has a long investigative article on how the Cyber Safety Review Board failed to investigate the SolarWinds attack, and specifically Microsoft’s culpability, even though they were directed by President Biden to do so. | Continue reading
A new vampire squid species was discovered in the South China Sea. Blog moderation policy. | Continue reading