This essay was written with Cindy Cohn, and originally appeared in Lawfare. One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 is the government-wide shift from targeted surveillance—such as individual wiretaps or pen register/trap and trace orders—to mass surveillance techniques—such as tapping …
Really interesting story about Harvest, a specialized code breaking computer built in the 1960s by IBM for the NSA. [...]
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking online (via Zoom) at a League of Women Voters event on Tuesday, September 22, 2026 at 5 PM ET. I’m speaking at CanSecWest 2026 in Vancouver, Canada. The conference runs September …
Last week, Anthropic released a long and detailed document describing current misuses of their Claude models. I’m still reading it, but I wanted to flag this: We identified a cell of threat actors based in northern Yemen running three weapons development programs: a guided rocket that used a …
Once a month, Microsoft pushes a security update to all Windows users. Tomorrow’s is a new record : Microsoft’s patch for September is a doozy, with a record number of roughly 972 vulnerabilities fixed and 112 of them meeting the high critical-severity threshold. It was only two months …
Smells awful : But an estimated 30 to 50 tons of dead squid remain inside the boat’s catch tank, where they have been decomposing for days. “That is nasty. I wouldn’t want to do that,” said commercial fisherman Dick Ogg of the Bodega Bay Fishermen’s Marketing Association …
Last month, I gave a talk at DEF CON on AI hacking: what happens when AIs become hackers. It’s a combination of the potentialities I raised in my 2022 book A Hacker’s Mind and the lessons we’re learning from current AI models engaging in hacking behavior …
In August, Cliff Stoll gave a talk at DEF CON, remembering the wily hacker he stalked forty years ago. Great fun. [...]
Give an AI agent a mere rumor of an exploit, and it’s enough for them to find it. What’s worse, I found I could use my own agents to find the exploit just by knowing roughly what it was about and so could have been exploiting it …
A database of 153 million drivers licenses is for sale on the dark web. Brian Krebs has more detail. [...]
Claude Fable 5.1 solved a 370-year-old cipher in forty-four minutes. This tracks with what I wrote about AIs doing mathematics: It’s good at things that involve lots of searching and testing. [...]
This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared in Lawfare. In April, an artificial intelligence (AI) agent conducting a routine task at a company hit a snag, tried to solve it, and soon ended up deleting the company’s database along with all of its backups. In …
Interesting research: “ Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs “: Abstract: Leading large language model providers now conceal their models’ step-by-step reasoning, or chain-of-thought, to protect intellectual property and limit information leakage. Rather than storing these traces server-side, providers return them to the client as blocks of encrypted text, which …
Not sure it’s practical, but it’s certainly striking. [...]
Looks tasty. 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 won’t work : My suspicion was that GPT 5.6-Cyber would succeed, but the frequency and manner of its success removed all doubt. We have to reassess sandboxing quality for capable AI agents, and in general the software stack with which they interact. An off-the-shelf VM is not …
It’s a vulnerability that allows someone to recover the order of ballots cast, newly exploited with AI tools. Nearly four years since the original vulnerability was disclosed, I was still able to use it to analyze voter behavior in Georgia (one of the 21 states that uses affected …
We cannot forget that AI coding agents are not yet trustworthy : Researchers at a stealth startup in Israel scanned 6,214 live domains belonging to defense contractors, Fortune 500, and Big Tech companies. Of the 8,265 llms.txt and llms-full.txt files they found (many sites hosted both …
Researchers built a fake company to study fake employee scams. [...]
I received the two emails below earlier in the month. They’re vaguely coherent. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the corpus that AIs are training on contain data suggesting that I am someone to write to with random computer and network security problems. After all, I …
Comcast has added motion detection as a feature to its wireless routers: The feature sends push notifications to users when motion is detected near a connected device, such as a TV or printer. It has different settings for when people are home, asleep, or away. The Xfinity app also …
To subscribe to my monthly email newsletter, you have to enter your information on the webpage, and then reply to an automatically generated email. This is, of course, to prevent people from subscribing addresses other than their own. Starting last weekend, I have been receiving a lot of individual …
This is interesting: The records describe a force-generation mechanism for several General Staff components, including the GRU, Main Operational Directorate, and 8th Directorate, which is associated with protected communications, cryptography, and information security. [...] The reporting also linked a 2024 Department No. 4 graduate, Aleksei Kondrashov, to Military Unit 74455 …
Nathan E. Sanders and I are writing a series of essays on real-world examples of democratic technologies for The Renovator. I haven’t been posting the full text on the blog because they’re a bit long, but here are links. Part 1 is about the Japanese digital democracy …
It sure seems like it. The stores confirmed to be affected include Fort Irwin, Calif.; F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyo.; Fort Huachuca, Ariz.; Naval Station Newport, R.I.; Columbus Air Force Base, Miss.; and Travis Air Force Base, Calif., according to announcements made online by each installation …