Friday Squid Blogging: Another Squid
Someone named “Squid” seems to be a “ West Country legend.” 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. [...]
Someone named “Squid” seems to be a “ West Country legend.” 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. [...]
Younger Americans have soured on the second Donald Trump presidency, but they are not protesting it. Despite an unpopular Iran war and an even more unpopular Trump administration, college campus protests nationwide have gone silent. And at many schools, student activism is virtually nonexistent. This silence comes in the …
The 2025 Internet Crime Report was published a few weeks ago, but I only just saw it. Lots of interesting statistics. Press release. News articles. [...]
Not identifying people based on their use of Wi-Fi routers, but identifying people using Wi-Fi signals. This is accomplished through what is known as WiFi sensing, or the use of WiFi signals to infer information about a physical environment. When radio signals like WiFi travel through a space, they …
The South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organization (SPRFMO) needs to regulate squid fishing in the South Pacific. 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. [...]
Crazy story : Until this past weekend, a contractor for the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) maintained a public GitHub repository that exposed credentials to several highly privileged AWS GovCloud accounts and a large number of internal CISA systems. Security experts said the public archive included files detailing how CISA …
A group used Anthropic’s Mythos AI model to help find a kernel memory corruption vulnerability and exploit on Apple’s M5. News article. [...]
Good report : Executive Summary: Let’s say you wanted to make sure that your AI is secure. Can you just maximize the security and privacy benchmark and call it a day? Nope, because benchmarks don’t actually work for measuring AI capabilities (even when they are NOT emergent systemic …
Not by name, but Laurie Anderson quotes me in one of the tracks of her new album: My favorite quote is from a cryptologist who said “If you think technology will solve your problems, you don’t understand technology and you don’t understand your problems.” Also in interviews …
It’s nasty, but it requires physical access to the computer: The exploit, named YellowKey, was published earlier this week by a researcher who goes by the alias Nightmare-Eclipse. It reliably bypasses default Windows 11 deployments of BitLocker, the full-volume encryption protection Microsoft provides to make disk contents off-limits …
Article about the bigfin squid. 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. [...]
Some AI-based video age-verification checks can be fooled with a fake mustache. [...]
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m giving a virtual talk on “The Security of Trust in the Age of AI,” hosted by the Financial Women’s Association of New York, at 6:00 PM ET on May 21, 2026 …
Last month, Anthropic made a remarkable announcement about its new model, Claude Mythos Preview: it was so good at finding security vulnerabilities in software that the company would not release it to the general public. Instead, it would only be available to a select group of companies to scan …
The UK’s AI Security Institute evaluated GPT-5.5’s ability to find security vulnerabilities, and found that it is comparable to Claude Mythos. Note that the OpenAI model is generally available. Here is the Institute’s evaluation of Mythos. And here is an analysis of a smaller, cheaper …
This is the worst Linux vulnerability in years. TL;DR copy.fail is a Linux kernel local privilege escalation, not a browser or clipboard attack. Disclosed by Theori on 29 April 2026 with a working PoC. It abuses the kernel crypto API (AF_ALG sockets) plus splice() to write four …
Turns out that LLMs are really good at hiding text messages in other text messages. [...]
Evidence of them has been found by analyzing DNA in the seawater. 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. [...]
Insider trading is rife on Polymarket: Analysis by the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, a non-profit research and advocacy group, found that long-shot bets—defined as wagers of $2,500 or more at odds of 35 percent or less—on the platform had an average win rate of around 52 percent …
ICE is developing its own version of smart glasses, with facial recognition tied to various databases. [...]
A new rowhammer attack gives complete control of NVIDIA CPUs. On Thursday, two research teams, working independently of each other, demonstrated attacks against two cards from Nvidia’s Ampere generation that take GPU rowhammering into new—and potentially much more consequential—territory: GDDR bitflips that give adversaries full control …
DarkSword is a sophisticated piece of malware —probably government designed—that targets iOS. Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) has identified a new iOS full-chain exploit that leveraged multiple zero-day vulnerabilities to fully compromise devices. Based on toolmarks in recovered payloads, we believe the exploit chain to be called DarkSword …
Polymarket is a platform where people can bet on real-world events, political and otherwise. Leaving the ethical considerations of this aside (for one, it facilitates assassination ), one of the issues with making this work is the verification of these real-world events. Polymarket gamblers have threatened a journalist because his …
Someone pleaded guilty to secretly working for a ransomware gang as he negotiated ransomware payments for clients. [...]
Researchers have reverse-engineered a piece of malware named Fast16. It’s almost certainly state-sponsored, probably US in origin, and was deployed against Iran years before Stuxnet: “...the Fast16 malware was designed to carry out the most subtle form of sabotage ever seen in an in-the-wild malware tool: By automatically …