Most people know that robots no longer sound like tinny trash cans. They sound like Siri, Alexa, and Gemini. They sound like the voices in labyrinthine customer support phone trees. And even those robot voices are being made obsolete by new AI-generated voices that can mimic ever … | Continue reading
Microsoft’s AI Red Team just published “Lessons from Red Teaming 100 Generative AI Products.” Their blog post lists “three takeaways,” but the eight lessons in the report itself are more useful: Understand what the system can do and where it is applied. You don’t have to compute … | Continue reading
Interesting analysis: We analyzed every instance of AI use in elections collected by the WIRED AI Elections Project (source for our analysis), which tracked known uses of AI for creating political content during elections taking place in 2024 worldwide. In each case, we identifie … | Continue reading
This is yet another story of commercial spyware being used against journalists and civil society members. The journalists and other civil society members were being alerted of a possible breach of their devices, with WhatsApp telling the Guardian it had “high confidence” that the … | Continue reading
Interesting. Blog moderation policy. | Continue reading
There are thousands of fake Reddit and WeTransfer webpages that are pushing malware. They exploit people who are using search engines to search sites like Reddit. Unsuspecting victims clicking on the link are taken to a fake WeTransfer site that mimicks the interface of the popul … | Continue reading
The Department of Justice is investigating a lobbying firm representing ExxonMobil for hacking the phones of climate activists: The hacking was allegedly commissioned by a Washington, D.C., lobbying firm, according to a lawyer representing the U.S. government. The firm, in turn, … | Continue reading
Jen Easterly is out as the Director of CISA. Read her final interview: There’s a lot of unfinished business. We have made an impact through our ransomware vulnerability warning pilot and our pre-ransomware notification initiative, and I’m really proud of that, because we work on … | Continue reading
A newly discovered VPN backdoor uses some interesting tactics to avoid detection: When threat actors use backdoor malware to gain access to a network, they want to make sure all their hard work can’t be leveraged by competing groups or detected by defenders. One countermeasure is … | Continue reading
A Travers’ beaked whale (Mesoplodon traversii) washed ashore in New Zealand, and scientists conlcuded that “the prevalence of squid remains [in its stomachs] suggests that these deep-sea cephalopods form a significant part of the whale’s diet, similar to other beaked whale specie … | Continue reading
Last month, Henry Farrell and I convened the Third Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy (IWORD 2024) at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg Center in Washington DC. This is a small, invitational workshop on the future of democracy. As with the previous two worksho … | Continue reading
Artificial intelligence (AI) is writing law today. This has required no changes in legislative procedure or the rules of legislative bodies—all it takes is one legislator, or legislative assistant, to use generative AI in the process of drafting a bill. In fact, the use of AI by … | Continue reading
Humans make mistakes all the time. All of us do, every day, in tasks both new and routine. Some of our mistakes are minor and some are catastrophic. Mistakes can break trust with our friends, lose the confidence of our bosses, and sometimes be the difference between life and deat … | Continue reading
President Biden has signed a new cybersecurity order. It has a bunch of provisions, most notably using the US governments procurement power to improve cybersecurity practices industry-wide. Some details: The core of the executive order is an array of mandates for protecting gover … | Continue reading
Is there nothing that squid research can’t solve? “If you’re working with an organism like squid that can edit genetic information way better than any other organism, then it makes sense that that might be useful for a therapeutic application like deadening pain,” he said. […] Re … | Continue reading
I am always interested in new phishing tricks, and watching them spread across the ecosystem. A few days ago I started getting phishing SMS messages with a new twist. They were standard messages about delayed packages or somesuch, with the goal of getting me to click on a link an … | Continue reading
According to a DOJ press release, the FBI was able to delete the Chinese-used PlugX malware from “approximately 4,258 U.S.-based computers and networks.” Details: To retrieve information from and send commands to the hacked machines, the malware connects to a command-and-control … | Continue reading
A very security-conscious company was hit with a (presumed) massive state-actor phishing attack with gift cards, and everyone rallied to combat it—until it turned out it was company management sending the gift cards. | Continue reading
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking on “AI: Trust & Power” at Capricon 45 in Chicago, Illinois, USA, at 11:30 AM on February 7, 2025. I’m also signing books there on Saturday, February 8, starting at 1:45 PM. I’m speaking at Boskone 62 i … | Continue reading
It was created in 1973 by Peter Kirstein: So from the beginning I put password protection on my gateway. This had been done in such a way that even if UK users telephoned directly into the communications computer provided by Darpa in UCL, they would require a password. In fact th … | Continue reading
Not sure this will matter in the end, but it’s a positive move: Microsoft is accusing three individuals of running a “hacking-as-a-service” scheme that was designed to allow the creation of harmful and illicit content using the company’s platform for AI-generated content. The for … | Continue reading
News: A sponge made of cotton and squid bone that has absorbed about 99.9% of microplastics in water samples in China could provide an elusive answer to ubiquitous microplastic pollution in water across the globe, a new report suggests. […] The study tested the material in an irr … | Continue reading
404 Media and Wired are reporting on all the apps that are spying on your location, based on a hack of the location data company Gravy Analytics: The thousands of apps, included in hacked files from location data company Gravy Analytics, include everything from games like Candy C … | Continue reading
It’s being actively exploited. | Continue reading
From the Washington Post: The sanctions target Beijing Integrity Technology Group, which U.S. officials say employed workers responsible for the Flax Typhoon attacks which compromised devices including routers and internet-enabled cameras to infiltrate government and industrial t … | Continue reading
Initial speculation about a new Apple feature. | Continue reading
I made my first squid post nineteen years ago this week. Between then and now, I posted something about squid every week (with maybe only a few exceptions). There is a lot out there about squid, even more if you count the other meanings of the word. Blog moderation policy. | Continue reading
ShredOS is a stripped-down operating system designed to destroy data. GitHub page here. | Continue reading
Lukasz Olejnik writes about device fingerprinting, and why Google’s policy change to allow it in 2025 is a major privacy setback. | Continue reading
It’s becoming an organized crime tactic: Card draining is when criminals remove gift cards from a store display, open them in a separate location, and either record the card numbers and PINs or replace them with a new barcode. The crooks then repair the packaging, return to a sto … | Continue reading
The US government has identified a ninth telecom that was successfully hacked by Salt Typhoon. | Continue reading
The basic strategy is to place a device with a hidden camera in a position to capture normally hidden card values, which are interpreted by an accomplice off-site and fed back to the player via a hidden microphone. Miniaturization is making these devices harder to detect. Presuma … | Continue reading
Pizza Hut in Taiwan has a history of weird pizzas, including a “2022 scalloped pizza with Oreos around the edge, and deep-fried chicken and calamari studded throughout the middle.” Blog moderation policy. | Continue reading
Scammers are hacking Google Forms to send email to victims that come from google.com. Brian Krebs reports on the effects. Boing Boing post. | Continue reading
A judge has found that NSO Group, maker of the Pegasus spyware, has violated the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by hacking WhatsApp in order to spy on people using it. Jon Penney and I wrote a legal paper on the case. | Continue reading
The Justice Department has published the criminal complaint against Dmitry Khoroshev, for building and maintaining the LockBit ransomware. | Continue reading
A sticker for your water bottle. Blog moderation policy. | Continue reading
It turns out that all cluster mailboxes in the Denver area have the same master key. So if someone robs a postal carrier, they can open any mailbox. I get that a single master key makes the whole system easier, but it’s very fragile security. | Continue reading
Really interesting research into the structure of prime numbers. Not immediately related to the cryptanalysis of prime-number-based public-key algorithms, but every little bit matters. | Continue reading
Not everything needs to be digital and “smart.” License plates, for example: Josep Rodriguez, a researcher at security firm IOActive, has revealed a technique to “jailbreak” digital license plates sold by Reviver, the leading vendor of those plates in the US with 65,000 plates al … | Continue reading
Starting next year: Our longstanding offering won’t fundamentally change next year, but we are going to introduce a new offering that’s a big shift from anything we’ve done before—short-lived certificates. Specifically, certificates with a lifetime of six days. This is a big upgr … | Continue reading
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at a joint meeting of the Boston Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM, in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, at 7:00 PM ET on Thursday, January 9, 2025. The event will take place at the Massachuse … | Continue reading
Good survey paper. Blog moderation policy. | Continue reading
Last week, we saw a supply-chain attack against the Ultralytics AI library on GitHub. A quick summary: On December 4, a malicious version 8.3.41 of the popular AI library ultralytics —which has almost 60 million downloads—was published to the Python Package Index (PyPI) package r … | Continue reading
Surprising no one, it’s easy to trick an LLM-controlled robot into ignoring its safety instructions. | Continue reading
This is going to be interesting. It’s a video of someone trying on a variety of printed full-face masks. They won’t fool anyone for long, but will survive casual scrutiny. And they’re cheap and easy to swap. | Continue reading
For a technology that seems startling in its modernity, AI sure has a long history. Google Translate, OpenAI chatbots, and Meta AI image generators are built on decades of advancements in linguistics, signal processing, statistics, and other fields going back to the early days of … | Continue reading
Fifteen years ago I blogged about a different SQUID. Here’s an update: Fleeing drivers are a common problem for law enforcement. They just won’t stop unless persuaded—persuaded by bullets, barriers, spikes, or snares. Each option is risky business. Shooting up a fugitive’s car is … | Continue reading