A database of 153 million drivers licenses is for sale on the dark web. Brian Krebs has more detail. | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared in Lawfare. 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. … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
Not sure it’s practical, but it’s certainly striking. | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
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 en … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
Researchers built a fake company to study fake employee scams. | Continue reading
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 obser … | Continue reading
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 al … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 re … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
Someone hid AI instructions into a legal filing. Alternate link. | Continue reading
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 c … | Continue reading
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 an … | Continue reading
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 i … | Continue reading
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 beg … | Continue reading
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, AppSe … | Continue reading
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 betw … | Continue reading
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, … | Continue reading
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 bacteriophag … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
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, … | Continue reading
ICE collected nearly a million DNA samples last year. | Continue reading
I have been thinking a lot about AI and integrity. Part of that is contextual integrity. I recently found two papers on the topic. “CIMemories: A Compositional Benchmark for Contextual Integrity of Persistent Memory in LLMs“: Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly us … | Continue reading
Criminals are hacking into public Wi-Fi devices—at hotels, conference centers, and so on—around the world and changing their DNS settings. The goal is to redirect users to fake login pages and steal their credentials. | Continue reading
Fascinating video about searching for life undersea. The video basically makes the point that our bright white searchlights are scaring everything away, and that red light is more neutral. That, plus bait to attract sea creatures, is teaching us a lot about what’s going on down t … | Continue reading
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking, signing books, and participating in panel discussions at LAcon V in Anaheim, California, USA. My full schedule is here. I’m speaking online (via Zoom) at a League of Women Voters event on Tuesday, Se … | Continue reading
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Guardian. OpenAI, and then Anthropic, were each formed by AI developers who feared unrestrained corporate AI development—specifically, that companies like Google and Meta would steer the technology towa … | Continue reading
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in Tech Policy Press. AI represents the first time we humans can do cognitive work outside of our bodies at scale. The only comparable moment is the early years of the industrial revolution, when new technolog … | Continue reading
This seems to work: Researchers from Tracebit on Monday said they found that placing prompt injections alongside passwords, cryptographic keys, and other secrets stored on Amazon Web Services was often all that was needed to shut down attacks from AI hacking agents. The prompts d … | Continue reading
When I give talks about AI genies, I use this sort of example as a hypothetical. It’s happened. The story is from Australia. Someone named Andrew tasked OpenClaw to book gym classes for him. And…. Minutes later, his AI agent reported it had discovered a way to book Andrew into cl … | Continue reading
Interesting empirical research: “Black Box Warfare: Human Judgment and Military Decision-Making in the Age of AI.” Abstract: How is AI transforming decision-making in modern conflict? This study provides a unique empirical window into that question by deploying a high-fidelity re … | Continue reading
This is good: Post-quantum cryptography is now one pip-install away for the entire Python ecosystem. With funding from the Sovereign Tech Agency, we implemented support for ML-KEM, the NIST-standard key-establishment primitive, and ML-DSA, the NIST-standard digital-signature prim … | Continue reading
Nice video of the Arctic bobtail 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. | Continue reading
Through data brokers, ICE is buying the information you provided to open a credit card. | Continue reading
There are many companies manufacturing adversarial clothing designed to confuse facial recognition systems. It’s a cool idea, but I worry that it’s mostly security theater: “Our patterns play with that chaos, confuse algorithms and make it way harder to pin you down,” he said. B … | Continue reading
This is disturbing: …a team of security researchers at UC San Diego, who found that a model of aftermarket car alarm known as the KARR Security System, installed in more than 2 million vehicles across the US by their estimate, can let any hacker within Bluetooth range send radio … | Continue reading
Attribution is preliminary, and so far it seems no real damage. And it seems like this is a campaign that has targeted at least seven states. And, because this is where the US is right now, Trump doesn’t believe it’s Iran and that Minnesota…I guess…hacked itself. “I think I blame … | Continue reading
And it’s personal information (alternate link): The exposed data includes an AI-powered therapy app that someone appears to have vibe-coded, notes on meetings, and a dashboard someone made apparently to analyze medical billing data. Exposed chats reportedly include private crypto … | Continue reading
Hugging Face has published a detailed timeline of the attack. From the summary: The agent was running an internal OpenAI cyber-capability evaluation based on the ExploitGym benchmark, which tasks an AI agent with finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities. OpenAI ran this on … | Continue reading
This essay originally appeared in Foreign Policy. Earlier this month, two of OpenAI’s models broke out of their containment sandbox and attacked another AI company. The story is kind of wild. OpenAI was running security tests on two of its models: GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased mo … | Continue reading
The Squid is a new scientific machine: One of the technological breakthroughs was the onboard use of a spinning wheel confocal microscope, nicknamed the Squid, which uses lasers to scan microscopic details of how organisms are put together. “That opens up a whole new world of exp … | Continue reading