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 …

CitizenLab has identified three zero-click exploits against iOS 15 and 16. These were used by NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware in 2022, and deployed by Mexico against human rights defenders. These vulnerabilities have all been patched. One interesting bit is that Apple’s Lockdown Mode (part of iOS 16 …

EFF has a good explainer on the problems with the new UN Cybercrime Treaty, currently being negotiated in Vienna. The draft treaty has the potential to rewrite criminal laws around the world, possibly adding over 30 criminal offenses and new expansive police powers for both domestic and international criminal …

I’m not sure there are good ways to build guardrails to prevent this sort of thing : There is growing concern regarding the potential misuse of molecular machine learning models for harmful purposes. Specifically, the dual-use application of models for predicting cytotoxicity18 to create new poisons or employing AlphaFold2 …

Motherboard is reporting on AI-generated voices being used for “swatting”: In fact, Motherboard has found, this synthesized call and another against Hempstead High School were just one small part of a months-long, nationwide campaign of dozens, and potentially hundreds, of threats made by one swatter in particular who has …

Interesting article on the colossal squid, which is larger than the giant squid. The article answers a vexing question: So why do we always hear about the giant squid and not the colossal squid? Well, part of it has to do with the fact that the giant squid was …

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking on “Cybersecurity Thinking to Reinvent Democracy” at RSA Conference 2023 in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, April 25, 2023, at 9:40 AM PT. I’m speaking at IT-S Now 2023 in …

Here’s a religious hack : You want to commit suicide, but it’s a mortal sin: your soul goes straight to hell, forever. So what you do is murder someone. That will get you executed, but if you confess your sins to a priest beforehand you avoid hell. Problem …

You can beat the game without a computer : On a perfect [roulette] wheel, the ball would always fall in a random way. But over time, wheels develop flaws, which turn into patterns. A wheel that’s even marginally tilted could develop what Barnett called a ‘drop zone.’ When the …

Thieves cut through the wall of a coffee shop to get to an Apple store, bypassing the alarms in the process. I wrote about this kind of thing in 2000, in Secrets and Lies (page 318): My favorite example is a band of California art thieves that would break …

The FBI is warning people against using public phone-charging stations, worrying that the combination power-data port can be used to inject malware onto the devices: Avoid using free charging stations in airports, hotels, or shopping centers. Bad actors have figured out ways to use public USB ports to introduce …

Car thieves are injecting malicious software into a car’s network through wires in the headlights (or taillights) that fool the car into believing that the electronic key is nearby. News articles. [...]

Here’s an experiment being run by undergraduate computer science students everywhere: Ask ChatGPT to generate phishing emails, and test whether these are better at persuading victims to respond or click on the link than the usual spam. It’s an interesting experiment, and the results are likely to …

University of Connecticut basketball player Jordan Hawkins claims to have suffered food poisoning from calamari the night before his NCAA finals game. The restaurant disagrees : On Sunday, a Mastro’s employee politely cast doubt on the idea that the restaurant might have caused the illness, citing its intense safety …

New research: “ Achilles Heels for AGI/ASI via Decision Theoretic Adversaries “: As progress in AI continues to advance, it is important to know how advanced systems will make choices and in what ways they may fail. Machines can already outsmart humans in some domains, and understanding how to safely …