Hacktivists are conducting DDoS attacks on European political parties that represent and promote strategies opposing their interests, according to a report by Cloudflare. [...]

Microsoft recently caught state-backed hackers using its generative AI tools to help with their attacks. In the security community, the immediate questions weren’t about how hackers were using the tools (that was utterly predictable), but about how Microsoft figured it out. The natural conclusion was that Microsoft was …

A piece I coauthored with Fredrik Heiding and Arun Vishwanath in the Harvard Business Review : Summary. Gen AI tools are rapidly making these emails more advanced, harder to spot, and significantly more dangerous. Recent research showed that 60% of participants fell victim to artificial intelligence (AI)-automated phishing, which …

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to predict that artificial intelligence will affect every aspect of our society. Not by doing new things. But mostly by doing things that are already being done by humans, perfectly competently. Replacing humans with AIs isn’t necessarily interesting. But when …

RSA Conference 2024 drew 650 speakers, 600 exhibitors, and thousands of security practitioners from across the globe to the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California from May 6 through 9. The keynote lineup was diverse, with 33 presentations featuring speakers ranging from WarGames actor Matthew Broderick, to public and …

Microsoft is trying to create a personal digital assistant: At a Build conference event on Monday, Microsoft revealed a new AI-powered feature called “Recall” for Copilot+ PCs that will allow Windows 11 users to search and retrieve their past activities on their PC. To make it work, Recall records …

This is another attack that convinces the AI to ignore road signs : Due to the way CMOS cameras operate, rapidly changing light from fast flashing diodes can be used to vary the color. For example, the shade of red on a stop sign could look different on each line …

There’s a new report on how criminals are using generative AI tools: Key Takeaways: Adoption rates of AI technologies among criminals lag behind the rates of their industry counterparts because of the evolving nature of cybercrime. Compared to last year, criminals seem to have abandoned any attempt at …

Scammers tricked a company into believing they were dealing with a BBC presenter. They faked her voice, and accepted money intended for her. [...]

The web has become so interwoven with everyday life that it is easy to forget what an extraordinary accomplishment and treasure it is. In just a few decades, much of human knowledge has been collectively written up and made available to anyone with an internet connection. But all of …

Canadian legislators proposed 19,600 amendments —almost certainly AI-generated—to a bill in an attempt to delay its adoption. I wrote about many different legislative delaying tactics in A Hacker’s Mind, but this is a new one. [...]

They’re AI warehouse robots. 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. [...]

Hackers are using Facebook advertisements and hijacked pages to promote fake Artificial Intelligence services, such as MidJourney, OpenAI's SORA and ChatGPT-5, and DALL-E, to infect unsuspecting users with password-stealing malware. [...]

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has captured the imagination of organizations and individuals around the world, and many have already adopted it to help improve workforce productivity, transform customer experiences, and more. When you use a generative AI-based service, you should understand how the information that you enter into the …

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has captured the imagination of organizations and individuals around the world, and many have already adopted it to help improve workforce productivity, transform customer experiences, and more. When you use a generative AI-based service, you should understand how the information that you enter into the …

The debate over professionalizing software engineers is decades old. (The basic idea is that, like lawyers and architects, there should be some professional licensing requirement for software engineers.) Here’s a law journal article recommending the same idea for AI engineers. This Article proposes another way: professionalizing AI engineering …

This mini-essay was my contribution to a round table on Power and Governance in the Age of AI. It’s nothing I haven’t said here before, but for anyone who hasn’t read my longer essays on the topic, it’s a shorter introduction. The increasingly centralized control …

This is part 3 of a series of posts on securing generative AI. We recommend starting with the overview post Securing generative AI: An introduction to the Generative AI Security Scoping Matrix, which introduces the scoping matrix detailed in this post. This post discusses the considerations when implementing security …

This is part 3 of a series of posts on securing generative AI. We recommend starting with the overview post Securing generative AI: An introduction to the Generative AI Security Scoping Matrix, which introduces the scoping matrix detailed in this post. This post discusses the considerations when implementing security …

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. A decade ago, social media was celebrated for sparking democratic uprisings in the Arab world and beyond. Now front pages are splashed with stories of social platforms’ role in misinformation, business conspiracy, malfeasance, and risks to mental health. In a 2022 survey, Americans …

Enlarge / Some ASCII art of our favorite visual cliche for a hacker. (credit: Getty Images) Researchers have discovered a new way to hack AI assistants that uses a surprisingly old-school method: ASCII art. It turns out that chat-based large language models such as GPT-4 get so distracted trying to …

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images) AI assistants have been widely available for a little more than a year, and they already have access to our most private thoughts and business secrets. People ask them about becoming pregnant or terminating or preventing pregnancy, consult them when considering a divorce …

Researchers have demonstrated that putting words in ASCII art can cause LLMs—GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Gemini, Claude, and Llama2—to ignore their safety instructions. Research paper. [...]

Researchers ran a global prompt hacking competition, and have documented the results in a paper that both gives a lot of good examples and tries to organize a taxonomy of effective prompt injection strategies. It seems as if the most common successful strategy is the “compound instruction attack,” as …

With the world’s focus turning to misinformation, manipulation, and outright propaganda ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, we know that democracy has an AI problem. But we’re learning that AI has a democracy problem, too. Both challenges must be addressed for the sake of democratic …