With the release of ChatGPT, I’ve read many random articles about this or that threat from the technology. This paper is a good survey of the field: what the threats are, how we might detect machine-generated text, directions for future research. It’s a solid grounding amongst all …
Brian Krebs is reporting on a vulnerability in Experian’s website: Identity thieves have been exploiting a glaring security weakness in the website of Experian, one of the big three consumer credit reporting bureaus. Normally, Experian requires that those seeking a copy of their credit report successfully answer several …
I don’t know how much of a thing this will end up being, but we are seeing ChatGPT-written malware in the wild....within a few weeks of ChatGPT going live, participants in cybercrime forums—some with little or no coding experience—were using it to write software and …
The two people who shut down four Washington power stations in December were arrested. This is the interesting part: Investigators identified Greenwood and Crahan almost immediately after the attacks took place by using cell phone data that allegedly showed both men in the vicinity of all four substations, according …
Seems that about 1.5% of people have a squid fetish. 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. [...]
I’m not sure why, but Audiobooks.com is offering the audiobook version of Schneier on Security at 50% off until January 17. [...]
This group has found a ton of remote vulnerabilities in all sorts of automobiles. It’s enough to make you want to buy a car that is not Internet-connected. Unfortunately, that seems to be impossible. [...]
Maintaining bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies causes about 0.3 percent of global CO 2 emissions. That may not sound like a lot, but it’s more than the emissions of Switzerland, Croatia, and Norway combined. As many cryptocurrencies crash and the FTX bankruptcy moves into the litigation stage, regulators …
A group of Chinese researchers have just published a paper claiming that they can—although they have not yet done so—break 2048-bit RSA. This is something to take seriously. It might not be correct, but it’s not obviously wrong. We have long known from Shor’s algorithm …
Rough seas are hampering efforts to salvage the boat : The Speranza Marie, carrying 16,000 pounds of squid and some 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel, hit the shoreline near Chinese Harbor at about 2 a.m. on Dec. 15. Six crew members were on board, and all were …
Yet another smartphone side-channel attack: “ EarSpy: Spying Caller Speech and Identity through Tiny Vibrations of Smartphone Ear Speakers “: Abstract: Eavesdropping from the user’s smartphone is a well-known threat to the user’s safety and privacy. Existing studies show that loudspeaker reverberation can inject speech into motion sensor readings …
An enterprising individual made fake parking tickets with a QR code for easy payment. [...]
This is one way of ensuring that IT keeps up with patches : Albanian prosecutors on Wednesday asked for the house arrest of five public employees they blame for not protecting the country from a cyberattack by alleged Iranian hackers. Prosecutors said the five IT officials of the public administration …
Last August, LastPass reported a security breach, saying that no customer information—or passwords—were compromised. Turns out the full story is worse : While no customer data was accessed during the August 2022 incident, some source code and technical information were stolen from our development environment and used to …
Here’s a video —I don’t know where it’s from—of an injured juvenile male giant squid grabbing on to a paddleboard. 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 …
Two men have been convicted of hacking the taxi dispatch system at the JFK airport. This enabled them to reorder the taxis on the list; they charged taxi drivers $10 to cut the line. [...]
A critical code-execution vulnerability in Microsoft Windows was patched in September. It seems that researchers just realized how serious it was (and is): Like EternalBlue, CVE-2022-37958, as the latest vulnerability is tracked, allows attackers to execute malicious code with no authentication required. Also, like EternalBlue, it’s wormable, meaning …
They’re using commercial phones, which go through the Ukrainian telecom network : “You still have a lot of soldiers bringing cellphones to the frontline who want to talk to their families and they are either being intercepted as they go through a Ukrainian telecommunications provider or intercepted over the …
Enlarge / Fawley Oil Refinery on a bright day. (credit: Getty Images) One of the Kremlin’s most active hacking groups targeting Ukraine recently tried to hack a large petroleum refining company located in a NATO country. The attack is a sign that the group is expanding its intelligence gathering …
Mandiant is reporting on a trojaned Windows installer that targets Ukrainian users. The installer was left on various torrent sites, presumably ensnaring people downloading pirated copies of the operating system: Mandiant uncovered a socially engineered supply chain operation focused on Ukrainian government entities that leveraged trojanized ISO files masquerading …
The Ukrainian army has released an instructional video explaining how Russian soldiers should surrender to a drone: “Seeing the drone in the field of view, make eye contact with it,” the video instructs. Soldiers should then raise their arms and signal they’re ready to follow. After that the …
Squid is performing a concert in London in February. If you don’t know what their music is like, try this or this or this. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read …
There are these. [...]
The most recent iPhone update—to version 16.1.2—patches a zero-day vulnerability that “may have been actively exploited against versions of iOS released before iOS 15.1.” News : Apple said security researchers at Google’s Threat Analysis Group, which investigates nation state-backed spyware, hacking and cyberattacks, discovered …
Security researchers found a software bug in the KmsdBot cryptomining botnet: With no error-checking built in, sending KmsdBot a malformed command—like its controllers did one day while Akamai was watching—created a panic crash with an “index out of range” error. Because there’s no persistence, the bot …