When I announced my latest book last week, I forgot to mention that you can pre-order a signed copy here. I will ship the books the week of 10/20, when it is published. [...]

Just a few months after Elon Musk’s retreat from his unofficial role leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), we have a clearer picture of his vision of government powered by artificial intelligence, and it has a lot more to do with consolidating power than benefitting the public …

New research (paywalled): Editor’s summary: Cephalopods are one of the most successful marine invertebrates in modern oceans, and they have a 500-million-year-old history. However, we know very little about their evolution because soft-bodied animals rarely fossilize. Ikegami et al. developed an approach to reveal squid fossils, focusing on …

I am pleased to announce the imminent publication of my latest book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI will Transform our Politics, Government, and Citizenship : coauthored with Nathan Sanders, and published by MIT Press on October 21. Rewriting Democracy looks beyond common tropes like deepfakes to examine how AI technologies will …

Interesting experiment : To design their experiment, the University of Pennsylvania researchers tested 2024’s GPT-4o-mini model on two requests that it should ideally refuse: calling the user a jerk and giving directions for how to synthesize lidocaine. The researchers created experimental prompts for both requests using each of seven …

Anthropic reports on a Claude user: We recently disrupted a sophisticated cybercriminal that used Claude Code to commit large-scale theft and extortion of personal data. The actor targeted at least 17 distinct organizations, including in healthcare, the emergency services, and government and religious institutions. Rather than encrypt the stolen …

Really good research on practical attacks against LLM agents. “ Invitation Is All You Need! Promptware Attacks Against LLM-Powered Assistants in Production Are Practical and Dangerous ” Abstract: The growing integration of LLMs into applications has introduced new security risks, notably known as Promptware­—maliciously engineered prompts designed to manipulate LLMs …

In the early 1960s, National Security Agency cryptanalyst and cryptanalysis instructor Lambros D. Callimahos coined the term “Stethoscope” to describe a diagnostic computer program used to unravel the internal structure of pre-computer ciphertexts. The term appears in the newly declassified September 1965 document Cryptanalytic Diagnosis with the Aid of …

First-person account of someone accidentally catching several Humboldt squid on a fishing line. No photos, though. 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. [...]

I just heard about this : There’s a travel scam warning going around the internet right now: You should keep your baggage tags on your bags until you get home, then shred them, because scammers are using luggage tags to file fraudulent claims for missing baggage with the airline …

The US Director of National Intelligence is reporting that the UK government is dropping its backdoor mandate against the Apple iPhone. For now, at least, assuming that Tulsi Gabbard is reporting this accurately. [...]

Nice indirect prompt injection attack : Bargury’s attack starts with a poisoned document, which is shared to a potential victim’s Google Drive. (Bargury says a victim could have also uploaded a compromised file to their own account.) It looks like an official document on company meeting policies. But …

I wrote about this in 2023. Here’s the story : Three Dutch security analysts discovered the vulnerabilities­—five in total—­in a European radio standard called TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio), which is used in radios made by Motorola, Damm, Hytera, and others. The standard has been used in radios …

Look at this : McDonald’s chose the password “123456” for a major corporate system. [...]

Nice short article on the 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. [...]

This academic year, I am taking a sabbatical from the Kennedy School and Harvard University. (It’s not a real sabbatical—I’m just an adjunct—but it’s the same idea.) I will be spending the Fall 2025 and Spring 2026 semesters at the Munk School at the …

Think of the Web as a digital territory with its own social contract. In 2014, Tim Berners-Lee called for a “Magna Carta for the Web” to restore the balance of power between individuals and institutions. This mirrors the original charter’s purpose: ensuring that those who occupy a territory …

Well, this is interesting: The auction, which will include other items related to cryptology, will be held Nov. 20. RR Auction, the company arranging the sale, estimates a winning bid between $300,000 and $500,000. Along with the original handwritten plain text of K4 and other papers related …

In this input integrity attack against an AI system, researchers were able to fool AIOps tools: AIOps refers to the use of LLM-based agents to gather and analyze application telemetry, including system logs, performance metrics, traces, and alerts, to detect problems and then suggest or carry out corrective actions …

A zero-day vulnerability in WinRAR is being exploited by at least two Russian criminal groups: The vulnerability seemed to have super Windows powers. It abused alternate data streams, a Windows feature that allows different ways of representing the same file path. The exploit abused that feature to trigger a …

Researchers have managed to eavesdrop on cell phone voice conversations by using radar to detect vibrations. It’s more a proof of concept than anything else. The radar detector is only ten feet away, the setup is stylized, and accuracy is poor. But it’s a start. [...]

Here’s the story. The commenters on X (formerly Twitter) are unimpressed. 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. [...]

Porn sites are hiding code in.svg files: Unpacking the attack took work because much of the JavaScript in the.svg images was heavily obscured using a custom version of “JSFuck,” a technique that uses only a handful of character types to encode JavaScript into a camouflaged wall of …

Here’s an interesting story about a failure being introduced by LLM-written code. Specifically, the LLM was doing some code refactoring, and when it moved a chunk of code from one file to another it changed a “break” to a “continue.” That turned an error logging statement into an …

There is a really great series of online events highlighting cool uses of AI in cybersecurity, titled Prompt||GTFO. Videos from the first three events are online. And here’s where to register to attend, or participate, in the fourth. Some really great stuff here. [...]