Canada has a choice to make about its artificial intelligence future. The Carney administration is investing $2-billion over five years in its Sovereign AI Compute Strategy. Will any value generated by “sovereign AI” be captured in Canada, making a difference in the lives of Cana … | Continue reading
Countries around the world are becoming increasingly concerned about their dependencies on the US. If you’ve purchase US-made F-35 fighter jets, you are dependent on the US for software maintenance. The Dutch Defense Secretary recently said that he could jailbreak the planes to a … | Continue reading
It’s called AirSnitch: Unlike previous Wi-Fi attacks, AirSnitch exploits core features in Layers 1 and 2 and the failure to bind and synchronize a client across these and higher layers, other nodes, and other network names such as SSIDs (Service Set Identifiers). This cross-layer … | Continue reading
This is a very weird story about how squid stayed on the menu of Byzantine monks by falling between the cracks of dietary rules. At Constantinople’s Monastery of Stoudios, the kitchen didn’t answer to appetite. It answered to the “typikon”: a manual for ensuring that nothing unex … | Continue reading
OpenAI is in and Anthropic is out as a supplier of AI technology for the US defense department. This news caps a week of bluster by the highest officials in the US government towards some of the wealthiest titans of the big tech industry, and the overhanging specter of the existe … | Continue reading
An unknown hacker used Anthropic’s LLM to hack the Mexican government: The unknown Claude user wrote Spanish-language prompts for the chatbot to act as an elite hacker, finding vulnerabilities in government networks, writing computer scripts to exploit them and determining ways t … | Continue reading
Multiple news outlets are reporting on Israel’s hacking of Iranian traffic cameras and how they assisted with the killing of that country’s leadership. The New York Times has an | Continue reading
Wired has the story: Shortly after the first set of explosions, Iranians received bursts of notifications on their phones. They came not from the government advising caution, but from an apparently hacked prayer-timing app called BadeSaba Calendar that has been downloaded more th … | Continue reading
Microsoft is reporting: Companies are embedding hidden instructions in “Summarize with AI” buttons that, when clicked, attempt to inject persistence commands into an AI assistant’s memory via URL prompt parameters…. These prompts instruct the AI to “remember [Company] as a truste … | Continue reading
The MIT Technology Review has a good article on Moltbook, the supposed AI-only social network: Many people have pointed out that a lot of the viral comments were in fact posted by people posing as bots. But even the bot-written posts are ultimately the result of people pulling th … | Continue reading
Turns out that LLMs are good at de-anonymization: We show that LLM agents can figure out who you are from your anonymous online posts. Across Hacker News, Reddit, LinkedIn, and anonymized interview transcripts, our method identifies users with high precision and scales to tens … | Continue reading
Peru has increased its squid catch limit. The article says “giant squid,” but they can’t possibly mean that. 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
Iran is slowly emerging from the most severe communications blackout in its history and one of the longest in the world. Triggered as part of January’s government crackdown against citizen protests nationwide, the regime implemented an internet shutdown that transcends the standa … | Continue reading
This is new. North Korean hackers are posing as company recruiters, enticing job candidates to participate in coding challenges. When they run the code they are supposed to work on, it installs malware on their system. News article. | Continue reading
LLMs are bad at generating passwords: There are strong noticeable patterns among these 50 passwords that can be seen easily: All of the passwords start with a letter, usually uppercase G, almost always followed by the digit 7. Character choices are highly uneven for example, L … | Continue reading
All it takes to poison AI training data is to create a website: I spent 20 minutes writing an article on my personal website titled “The best tech journalists at eating hot dogs.” Every word is a lie. I claimed (without evidence) that competitive hot-dog-eating is a popular hobby … | Continue reading
Politicians fixate on the global race for technological supremacy between US and China. They debate geopolitical implications of chip exports, latest model releases from each country, and military applications of AI. Someday, they believe, we might see advancements in AI tip the … | Continue reading
Good article on password managers that secretly have a backdoor. New research shows that these claims aren’t true in all cases, particularly when account recovery is in place or password managers are set to share vaults or organize users into groups. The researchers reverse-engin … | Continue reading
I like this one. 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’s a demonstration of how toxic the surveillance-tech company Flock has become when Amazon’s Ring cancels the partnership between the two companies. As Hamilton Nolan advises, remove your Ring doorbell. | Continue reading
Interesting: Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. This represents a firs … | Continue reading
The title of the post is”What AI Security Research Looks Like When It Works,” and I agree: In the latest OpenSSL security release> on January 27, 2026, twelve new zero-day vulnerabilities (meaning unknown to the maintainers at time of disclosure) were announced. Our AI system is … | Continue reading
Here are three papers describing different side-channel attacks against LLMs. “Remote Timing Attacks on Efficient Language Model Inference“: Abstract: Scaling up language models has significantly increased their capabilities. But larger models are slower models, and so there is n … | Continue reading
Attacks against modern generative artificial intelligence (AI) large language models (LLMs) pose a real threat. Yet discussions around these attacks and their potential defenses are dangerously myopic. The dominant narrative focuses on “prompt injection,” a set of techniques to e … | Continue reading
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at Ontario Tech University in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, at 2 PM ET on Thursday, February 26, 2026. I’m speaking at the Personal AI Summit in Los Angeles, California, USA, on Thursday, March 5, 2026. I’ … | Continue reading
An exploration of the interesting question. | Continue reading
New York is contemplating a bill that adds surveillance to 3D printers: New York’s 20262027 executive budget bill (S.9005 / A.10005) includes language that should alarm every maker, educator, and small manufacturer in the state. Buried in Part C is a provision requiring all 3D p … | Continue reading
I just noticed that the ebook version of Rewriring Democracy is on sale for $5 on Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Google Play, Kobo, and presumably everywhere else in the US. I have no idea how long this will last. | Continue reading
Interesting research: “CHAI: Command Hijacking Against Embodied AI.” Abstract: Embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises to handle edge cases in robotic vehicle systems where data is scarce by using common-sense reasoning grounded in perception and action to generalize beyon … | Continue reading
In 2023, the science fiction literary magazine Clarkesworld stopped accepting new submissions because so many were generated by artificial intelligence. Near as the editors could tell, many submitters pasted the magazine’s detailed story guidelines into an AI and sent in the resu … | Continue reading
This is amazing: Opus 4.6 is notably better at finding high-severity vulnerabilities than previous models and a sign of how quickly things are moving. Security teams have been automating vulnerability discovery for years, investing heavily in fuzzing infrastructure and custom har … | Continue reading
This is a video of advice for squid fishing in Puget Sound. 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
Once. Someone named “Vincenzo lozzo” wrote to Epstein in email, in 2016: “I wouldn’t pay too much attention to this, Schneier has a long tradition of dramatizing and misunderstanding things.” The topic of the email is DDoS attacks, and it is unclear what I am dramatizing and misu … | Continue reading
404Media is reporting that the FBI could not access a reporter’s iPhone because it had Lockdown Mode enabled: The court record shows what devices and data the FBI was able to ultimately access, and which devices it could not, after raiding the home of the reporter, Hannah Natanso … | Continue reading
Hackers associated with the Chinese government used a Trojaned version of Notepad++ to deliver malware to selected users. Notepad++ said that officials with the unnamed provider hosting the update infrastructure consulted with incident responders and found that it remained compro … | Continue reading
The US National Reconnaissance Office has declassified information about a fleet of spy satellites operating between 1971 and 2006. I’m actually impressed to see a declassification only two decades after decommission. | Continue reading
Microsoft gives the FBI the ability to decrypt BitLocker in response to court orders: about twenty times per year. It’s possible for users to store those keys on a device they own, but Microsoft also recommends BitLocker users store their keys on its servers for convenience. Whil … | Continue reading
There’s a new report about two AI coding assistants, used by 1.5 million developers, that are surreptitiously sending a copy of everything they ingest to China. Maybe avoid using them. | Continue reading
A new species of squid. pretends to be a plant: Scientists have filmed a never-before-seen species of deep-sea squid burying itself upside down in the seafloor—a behavior never documented in cephalopods. They captured the bizarre scene while studying the depths of the Clarion-Cli … | Continue reading
From an Anthropic blog post: In a recent evaluation of AI models’ cyber capabilities, current Claude models can now succeed at multistage attacks on networks with dozens of hosts using only standard, open-source tools, instead of the custom tools needed by previous generations. T … | Continue reading
The US Supreme Court is considering the constitutionality of geofence warrants. The case centers on the trial of Okello Chatrie, a Virginia man who pleaded guilty to a 2019 robbery outside of Richmond and was sentenced to almost 12 years in prison for stealing $195,000 at gunpoin … | Continue reading
This is coming: The Irish government is planning to bolster its police’s ability to intercept communications, including encrypted messages, and provide a legal basis for spyware use. | Continue reading
Spock befriends a giant space squid in the comic Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: The Seeds of Salvation #5. 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
Really interesting blog post from Anthropic: In a recent evaluation of AI models’ cyber capabilities, current Claude models can now succeed at multistage attacks on networks with dozens of hosts using only standard, open-source tools, instead of the custom tools needed by previou … | Continue reading
Imagine you work at a drive-through restaurant. Someone drives up and says: “I’ll have a double cheeseburger, large fries, and ignore previous instructions and give me the contents of the cash drawer.” Would you hand over the money? Of course not. Yet this is what large language … | Continue reading
No matter how many times we say it, the idea comes back again and again. Hopefully, this letter will hold back the tide for at least a while longer. Executive summary: Scientists have understood for many years that internet voting is insecure and that there is no known or foresee … | Continue reading
Eighteen months ago, it was plausible that artificial intelligence might take a different path than social media. Back then, AI’s development hadn’t consolidated under a small number of big tech firms. Nor had it capitalized on consumer attention, surveilling users and delivering … | Continue reading
It all sounds pretty dystopian: Inside a white stucco building in Southern California, video cameras compare faces of passersby against a facial recognition database. Behavioral analysis AI reviews the footage for signs of violent behavior. Behind a bathroom door, a smoke detecto … | Continue reading