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 …
The US government has identified a ninth telecom that was successfully hacked by Salt Typhoon. [...]
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. Presumably AI will …
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. [...]
Scammers are hacking Google Forms to send email to victims that come from google.com. Brian Krebs reports on the effects. Boing Boing post. [...]
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. [...]
The Justice Department has published the criminal complaint against Dmitry Khoroshev, for building and maintaining the LockBit ransomware. [...]
A sticker for your water bottle. Blog moderation policy. [...]
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. [...]
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. [...]
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 already sold. By removing …
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 upgrade for the …
Good survey paper. Blog moderation policy. [...]
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 repository. The …
Surprising no one, it’s easy to trick an LLM-controlled robot into ignoring its safety instructions. [...]
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. [...]
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 computing—and, often, on …
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 one …
This tool seems to do a pretty good job. The company’s Mobile Threat Hunting feature uses a combination of malware signature-based detection, heuristics, and machine learning to look for anomalies in iOS and Android device activity or telltale signs of spyware infection. For paying iVerify customers, the tool …
In 2025, AI is poised to change every aspect of democratic politics —but it won’t necessarily be for the worse. India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, has used AI to translate his speeches for his multilingual electorate in real time, demonstrating how AI can help diverse democracies to …
I recently wrote about the new iOS feature that forces an iPhone to reboot after it’s been inactive for a longish period of time. Here are the technical details, discovered through reverse engineering. The feature triggers after seventy-two hours of inactivity, even it is remains connected to Wi-Fi …
Interesting research : Using jet propulsion inspired by squid, researchers demonstrate a microjet system that delivers medications directly into tissues, matching the effectiveness of traditional needles. Blog moderation policy. [...]
These are two attacks against the system components surrounding LLMs: We propose that LLM Flowbreaking, following jailbreaking and prompt injection, joins as the third on the growing list of LLM attack types. Flowbreaking is less about whether prompt or response guardrails can be bypassed, and more about whether user …
The Israeli company NSO Group sells Pegasus spyware to countries around the world (including countries like Saudi Arabia, UAE, India, Mexico, Morocco and Rwanda). We assumed that those countries use the spyware themselves. Now we’ve learned that that’s not true: that NSO Group employees operate the spyware …
This is from 404 Media : The Graykey, a phone unlocking and forensics tool that is used by law enforcement around the world, is only able to retrieve partial data from all modern iPhones that run iOS 18 or iOS 18.0.1, which are two recently released versions of …