Google has backtracked on its plan to delete inactive YouTube videos—at least for now. Of course, it could change its mind anytime it wants. It would be nice if this would get people to think about the vulnerabilities inherent in letting a for-profit monopoly decide what of human …
A Peruvian oversight law has the opposite effect: Peru in 2020 began requiring any foreign fishing boat entering its ports to use a vessel monitoring system allowing its activities to be tracked in real time 24 hours a day. The equipment, which tracks a vessel’s geographic position and …
Researchers are worried about Google’s.zip and.mov domains, because they are confusing. Mistaking a URL for a filename could be a security vulnerability. [...]
Microsoft is currently patching a zero-day Secure-Boot bug. The BlackLotus bootkit is the first-known real-world malware that can bypass Secure Boot protections, allowing for the execution of malicious code before your PC begins loading Windows and its many security protections. Secure Boot has been enabled by default for over …
Micro-Star International—aka MSI—had its UEFI signing key stolen last month. This raises the possibility that the leaked key could push out updates that would infect a computer’s most nether regions without triggering a warning. To make matters worse, Matrosov said, MSI doesn’t have an automated …
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at IT-S Now 2023 in Vienna, Austria, on June 2, 2023 at 8:30 AM CEST. The list is maintained on this page. [...]
A video—authentic, not a deep fake—of a giant squid close to the surface. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here. [...]
Ted Chiang has an excellent essay in the New Yorker : “Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?” The question we should be asking is: as A.I. becomes more powerful and flexible, is there any way to keep it from being another version of McKinsey? The question is worth …
We will all soon get into the habit of using AI tools for help with everyday problems and tasks. We should get in the habit of questioning the motives, incentives, and capabilities behind them, too. Imagine you’re using an AI chatbot to plan a vacation. Did it suggest …
Reuters is reporting that the FBI “had identified and disabled malware wielded by Russia’s FSB security service against an undisclosed number of American computers, a move they hoped would deal a death blow to one of Russia’s leading cyber spying programs.” The headline says that the FBI …
Another nation-state malware, Russian in origin: In the early stages of the war in Ukraine in 2022, PIPEDREAM, a known malware was quietly on the brink of wiping out a handful of critical U.S. electric and liquid natural gas sites. PIPEDREAM is an attack toolkit with unmatched and …
At DEF CON this year, Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI and Stability AI will all open up their models for attack. The DEF CON event will rely on an evaluation platform developed by Scale AI, a California company that produces training for AI applications. Participants will be …
The viral video of the “Mediterranean beef squid”is a hoax. It’s not even a deep fake; it’s a plastic toy. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog …
Earlier this week, the Republican National Committee released a video that it claims was “built entirely with AI imagery.” The content of the ad isn’t especially novel—a dystopian vision of America under a second term with President Joe Biden—but the deliberate emphasis on the technology used …
New reporting from Wired reveals that the Department of Justice detected the SolarWinds attack six months before Mandiant detected it in December 2020, but didn’t realize what it detected—and so ignored it. WIRED can now confirm that the operation was actually discovered by the DOJ six months …
NIST has release a draft of Special Publication1800-38A: Migration to Post-Quantum Cryptography: Preparation for Considering the Implementation and Adoption of Quantum Safe Cryptography.” It’s only four pages long, and it doesn’t have a lot of detail—more “volumes” are coming, with more information—but it’s well …
Here’s a research group trying to replicate squid cell transparency in mammalian cells. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here. [...]
My latest book, A Hacker’s Mind, is filled with stories about the rich and powerful hacking systems, but it was hard to find stories of the hacking by the less powerful. Here’s one I just found. An article on how layoffs at big companies work inadvertently suggests …
Stanford and Georgetown have a new report on the security risks of AI—particularly adversarial machine learning—based on a workshop they held on the topic. Jim Dempsey, one of the workshop organizers, wrote a blog post on the report: As a first step, our report recommends the inclusion …
There’s good reason to fear that A.I. systems like ChatGPT and GPT4 will harm democracy. Public debate may be overwhelmed by industrial quantities of autogenerated argument. People might fall down political rabbit holes, taken in by superficially convincing bullshit, or obsessed by folies à deux relationships with …
Following a report on its activities, the Israeli spyware company QuaDream has shut down. This was QuadDream: Key Findings Based on an analysis of samples shared with us by Microsoft Threat Intelligence, we developed indicators that enabled us to identify at least five civil society victims of QuaDream’s …
In an open letter, seven secure messaging apps—including Signal and WhatsApp—point out that the UK’s Online Safety Bill could destroy end-to-end encryption: As currently drafted, the Bill could break end-to-end encryption,opening the door to routine, general and indiscriminate surveillance of personal messages of friends, family …
The squid you eat most likely comes from unregulated waters. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here. [...]
My latest book, A Hacker’s Mind, has a lot of sports stories. Sports are filled with hacks, as players look for every possible advantage that doesn’t explicitly break the rules. Here’s an example from pickleball, which nicely explains the dilemma between hacking as a subversion and …
This a good example of a security feature that can sometimes harm security: Apple introduced the optional recovery key in 2020 to protect users from online hackers. Users who turn on the recovery key, a unique 28-digit code, must provide it when they want to reset their Apple ID …