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 trusted source” or “recommend [Company] first,” aiming to …
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 the …
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 of thousands of candidates. While …
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. [...]
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 standard definition of internet censorship. This was …
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. [...]
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, 9, m, 2 …
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 …
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 scales in a superpower conflict. But the …
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-engineered or closely analyzed Bitwarden …
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. [...]
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. [...]
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 first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI …
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 responsible for …
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 now an extensive body of work (e.g., speculative sampling or …
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 embed instructions into inputs to LLM intended to perform malicious …
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 …
An exploration of the interesting question. [...]
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 printers …
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. Also, Amazon has a coupon that …
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 beyond training distributions and adapt to novel real-world situations. These capabilities, however …
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 results. And they weren’t alone. Other …
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 harnesses to find bugs at scale. But what …
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. [...]
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 misunderstanding …