Category: bruce schneier
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The Age of Integrity
The Age of Integrity We need to talk about data integrity. Narrowly, the term refers to ensuring that data isn’t tampered with, either in transit or in storage. Manipulating account balances in bank databases, removing entries from criminal records, and murder by removing notations about allergies from medical records are all integrity attacks. More broadly,…
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Friday Squid Blogging: What to Do When You Find a Squid “Egg Mop”
Friday Squid Blogging: What to Do When You Find a Squid “Egg Mop” Tips on what to do if you find a mop of squid eggs. 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. Bruce Schneier Go to…
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What LLMs Know About Their Users
What LLMs Know About Their Users Simon Willison talks about ChatGPT’s new memory dossier feature. In his explanation, he illustrates how much the LLM—and the company—knows about its users. It’s a big quote, but I want you to read it all. Here’s a prompt you can use to give you a solid idea of what’s…
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Here’s a Subliminal Channel You Haven’t Considered Before
Here’s a Subliminal Channel You Haven’t Considered Before Scientists can manipulate air bubbles trapped in ice to encode messages. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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Largest DDoS Attack to Date
Largest DDoS Attack to Date It was a recently unimaginable 7.3 Tbps: The vast majority of the attack was delivered in the form of User Datagram Protocol packets. Legitimate UDP-based transmissions are used in especially time-sensitive communications, such as those for video playback, gaming applications, and DNS lookups. It speeds up communications by not formally…
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Surveillance in the US
Surveillance in the US Good article from 404 Media on the cozy surveillance relationship between local Oregon police and ICE: In the email thread, crime analysts from several local police departments and the FBI introduced themselves to each other and made lists of surveillance tools and tactics they have access to and felt comfortable using,…
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Friday Squid Blogging: Gonate Squid Video
Friday Squid Blogging: Gonate Squid Video This is the first ever video of the Antarctic Gonate Squid. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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Self-Driving Car Video Footage
Self-Driving Car Video Footage Two articles crossed my path recently. First, a discussion of all the video Waymo has from outside its cars: in this case related to the LA protests. Second, a discussion of all the video Tesla has from inside its cars. Lots of things are collecting lots of video of lots of…
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Ghostwriting Scam
Ghostwriting Scam The variations seem to be endless. Here’s a fake ghostwriting scam that seems to be making boatloads of money. This is a big story about scams being run from Texas and Pakistan estimated to run into tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars, viciously defrauding Americans with false hopes of publishing bestseller…
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Where AI Provides Value
Where AI Provides Value If you’ve worried that AI might take your job, deprive you of your livelihood, or maybe even replace your role in society, it probably feels good to see the latest AI tools fail spectacularly. If AI recommends glue as a pizza topping, then you’re safe for another day. But the fact…
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Upcoming Speaking Engagements
Upcoming Speaking Engagements This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at the International Conference on Digital Trust, AI and the Future in Edinburgh, Scotland on Tuesday, June 24 at 4:00 PM. The list is maintained on this page. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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Friday Squid Blogging: Stubby Squid
Friday Squid Blogging: Stubby Squid Video of the stubby squid (Rossia pacifica) from offshore Vancouver Island. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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Paragon Spyware Used to Spy on European Journalists
Paragon Spyware Used to Spy on European Journalists Paragon is an Israeli spyware company, increasingly in the news (now that NSO Group seems to be waning). “Graphite” is the name of its product. Citizen Lab caught it spying on multiple European journalists with a zero-click iOS exploit: On April 29, 2025, a select group of…
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Airlines Secretly Selling Passenger Data to the Government
Airlines Secretly Selling Passenger Data to the Government This is news: A data broker owned by the country’s major airlines, including Delta, American Airlines, and United, collected U.S. travellers’ domestic flight records, sold access to them to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and then as part of the contract told CBP to not reveal where…
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New Way to Track Covertly Android Users
New Way to Track Covertly Android Users Researchers have discovered a new way to covertly track Android users. Both Meta and Yandex were using it, but have suddenly stopped now that they have been caught. The details are interesting, and worth reading in detail: >Tracking code that Meta and Russia-based Yandex embed into millions of…
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Report on the Malicious Uses of AI
Report on the Malicious Uses of AI OpenAI just published its annual report on malicious uses of AI. By using AI as a force multiplier for our expert investigative teams, in the three months since our last report we’ve been able to detect, disrupt and expose abusive activity including social engineering, cyber espionage, deceptive employment…
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Hearing on the Federal Government and AI
Hearing on the Federal Government and AI On Thursday I testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform at a hearing titled “The Federal Government in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.” The other speakers mostly talked about how cool AI was—and sometimes about how cool their own company was—but I was asked by…
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Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Run in Southern New England
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Run in Southern New England Southern New England is having the best squid run in years. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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The Ramifications of Ukraine’s Drone Attack
The Ramifications of Ukraine’s Drone Attack You can read the details of Operation Spiderweb elsewhere. What interests me are the implications for future warfare: If the Ukrainians could sneak drones so close to major air bases in a police state such as Russia, what is to prevent the Chinese from doing the same with U.S.…
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New Linux Vulnerabilities
New Linux Vulnerabilities They’re interesting: Tracked as CVE-2025-5054 and CVE-2025-4598, both vulnerabilities are race condition bugs that could enable a local attacker to obtain access to access sensitive information. Tools like Apport and systemd-coredump are designed to handle crash reporting and core dumps in Linux systems. […] “This means that if a local attacker manages…
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Australia Requires Ransomware Victims to Declare Payments
Australia Requires Ransomware Victims to Declare Payments A new Australian law requires larger companies to declare any ransomware payments they have made. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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Why Take9 Won’t Improve Cybersecurity
Why Take9 Won’t Improve Cybersecurity There’s a new cybersecurity awareness campaign: Take9. The idea is that people—you, me, everyone—should just pause for nine seconds and think more about the link they are planning to click on, the file they are planning to download, or whatever it is they are planning to share. There’s a website—of…
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Surveillance Via Smart Toothbrush
Surveillance Via Smart Toothbrush The only links are from The Daily Mail and The Mirror, but a marital affair was discovered because the cheater was recorded using his smart toothbrush at home when he was supposed to be at work. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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Friday Squid Blogging: NGC 1068 Is the “Squid Galaxy”
Friday Squid Blogging: NGC 1068 Is the “Squid Galaxy” I hadn’t known that the NGC 1068 galaxy is nicknamed the “Squid Galaxy.” It is, and it’s spewing neutrinos without the usual accompanying gamma rays. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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Location Tracking App for Foreigners in Moscow
Location Tracking App for Foreigners in Moscow Russia is proposing a rule that all foreigners in Moscow install a tracking app on their phones. Using a mobile application that all foreigners will have to install on their smartphones, the Russian state will receive the following information: Residence location Fingerprint Face photograph Real-time geo-location monitoring This…
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Chinese-Owned VPNs
Chinese-Owned VPNs One one my biggest worries about VPNs is the amount of trust users need to place in them, and how opaque most of them are about who owns them and what sorts of data they retain. A new study found that many commercials VPNS are (often surreptitiously) owned by Chinese companies. It would…
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Signal Blocks Windows Recall
Signal Blocks Windows Recall This article gives a good rundown of the security risks of Windows Recall, and the repurposed copyright protection took that Signal used to block the AI feature from scraping Signal data. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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Friday Squid Blogging: US Naval Ship Attacked by Squid in 1978
Friday Squid Blogging: US Naval Ship Attacked by Squid in 1978 Interesting story: USS Stein was underway when her anti-submarine sonar gear suddenly stopped working. On returning to port and putting the ship in a drydock, engineers observed many deep scratches in the sonar dome’s rubber “NOFOUL” coating. In some areas, the coating was described…
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The Voter Experience
The Voter Experience Technology and innovation have transformed every part of society, including our electoral experiences. Campaigns are spending and doing more than at any other time in history. Ever-growing war chests fuel billions of voter contacts every cycle. Campaigns now have better ways of scaling outreach methods and offer volunteers and donors more efficient…
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More AIs Are Taking Polls and Surveys
More AIs Are Taking Polls and Surveys I already knew about the declining response rate for polls and surveys. The percentage of AI bots that respond to surveys is also increasing. Solutions are hard: 1. Make surveys less boring. We need to move past bland, grid-filled surveys and start designing experiences people actually want to…
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DoorDash Hack
DoorDash Hack A DoorDash driver stole over $2.5 million over several months: The driver, Sayee Chaitainya Reddy Devagiri, placed expensive orders from a fraudulent customer account in the DoorDash app. Then, using DoorDash employee credentials, he manually assigned the orders to driver accounts he and the others involved had created. Devagiri would then mark the…
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The NSA’s “Fifty Years of Mathematical Cryptanalysis (1937–1987)”
The NSA’s “Fifty Years of Mathematical Cryptanalysis (1937–1987)” In response to a FOIA request, the NSA released “Fifty Years of Mathematical Cryptanalysis (1937-1987),” by Glenn F. Stahly, with a lot of redactions. Weirdly, this is the second time the NSA has declassified the document. John Young got a copy in 2019. This one has a…
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Communications Backdoor in Chinese Power Inverters
Communications Backdoor in Chinese Power Inverters This is a weird story: U.S. energy officials are reassessing the risk posed by Chinese-made devices that play a critical role in renewable energy infrastructure after unexplained communication equipment was found inside some of them, two people familiar with the matter said. […] Over the past nine months, undocumented…
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Friday Squid Blogging: Pet Squid Simulation
Friday Squid Blogging: Pet Squid Simulation From Hackaday.com, this is a neural network simulation of a pet squid. Autonomous Behavior: The squid moves autonomously, making decisions based on his current state (hunger, sleepiness, etc.). Implements a vision cone for food detection, simulating realistic foraging behavior. Neural network can make decisions and form associations. Weights are…
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AI-Generated Law
AI-Generated Law On April 14, Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, announced that the United Arab Emirates would begin using artificial intelligence to help write its laws. A new Regulatory Intelligence Office would use the technology to “regularly suggest updates” to the law and “accelerate the issuance of legislation by up to 70%.” AI would create a…
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Google’s Advanced Protection Now on Android
Google’s Advanced Protection Now on Android Google has extended its Advanced Protection features to Android devices. It’s not for everybody, but something to be considered by high-risk users. Wired article, behind a paywall. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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Upcoming Speaking Engagements
Upcoming Speaking Engagements This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking (remotely) at the Sektor 3.0 Festival in Warsaw, Poland, May 21-22, 2025. The list is maintained on this page. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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Court Rules Against NSO Group
Court Rules Against NSO Group The case is over: A jury has awarded WhatsApp $167 million in punitive damages in a case the company brought against Israel-based NSO Group for exploiting a software vulnerability that hijacked the phones of thousands of users. I’m sure it’ll be appealed. Everything always is. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce…
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Florida Backdoor Bill Fails
Florida Backdoor Bill Fails A Florida bill requiring encryption backdoors failed to pass. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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Friday Squid Blogging: Japanese Divers Video Giant Squid
Friday Squid Blogging: Japanese Divers Video Giant Squid The video is really amazing. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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Chinese AI Submersible
Chinese AI Submersible A Chinese company has developed an AI-piloted submersible that can reach speeds “similar to a destroyer or a US Navy torpedo,” dive “up to 60 metres underwater,” and “remain static for more than a month, like the stealth capabilities of a nuclear submarine.” In case you’re worried about the military applications of…
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Fake Student Fraud in Community Colleges
Fake Student Fraud in Community Colleges Reporting on the rise of fake students enrolling in community college courses: The bots’ goal is to bilk state and federal financial aid money by enrolling in classes, and remaining enrolled in them, long enough for aid disbursements to go out. They often accomplish this by submitting AI-generated work.…
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Another Move in the Deepfake Creation/Detection Arms Race
Another Move in the Deepfake Creation/Detection Arms Race Deepfakes are now mimicking heartbeats In a nutshell Recent research reveals that high-quality deepfakes unintentionally retain the heartbeat patterns from their source videos, undermining traditional detection methods that relied on detecting subtle skin color changes linked to heartbeats. The assumption that deepfakes lack physiological signals, such as…
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NCSC Guidance on “Advanced Cryptography”
NCSC Guidance on “Advanced Cryptography” The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre just released its white paper on “Advanced Cryptography,” which it defines as “cryptographic techniques for processing encrypted data, providing enhanced functionality over and above that provided by traditional cryptography.” It includes things like homomorphic encryption, attribute-based encryption, zero-knowledge proofs, and secure multiparty computation. It’s…
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Privacy for Agentic AI
Privacy for Agentic AI Sooner or later, it’s going to happen. AI systems will start acting as agents, doing things on our behalf with some degree of autonomy. I think it’s worth thinking about the security of that now, while its still a nascent idea. In 2019, I joined Inrupt, a company that is commercializing…
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Friday Squid Blogging: Pyjama Squid
Friday Squid Blogging: Pyjama Squid The small pyjama squid (Sepioloidea lineolata) produces toxic slime, “a rare example of a poisonous predatory mollusc.” As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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US as a Surveillance State
US as a Surveillance State Two essays were just published on DOGE’s data collection and aggregation, and how it ends with a modern surveillance state. It’s good to see this finally being talked about. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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Applying Security Engineering to Prompt Injection Security
Applying Security Engineering to Prompt Injection Security This seems like an important advance in LLM security against prompt injection: Google DeepMind has unveiled CaMeL (CApabilities for MachinE Learning), a new approach to stopping prompt-injection attacks that abandons the failed strategy of having AI models police themselves. Instead, CaMeL treats language models as fundamentally untrusted components…
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Windscribe Acquitted on Charges of Not Collecting Users’ Data
Windscribe Acquitted on Charges of Not Collecting Users’ Data The company doesn’t keep logs, so couldn’t turn over data: Windscribe, a globally used privacy-first VPN service, announced today that its founder, Yegor Sak, has been fully acquitted by a court in Athens, Greece, following a two-year legal battle in which Sak was personally charged in…
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Cryptocurrency Thefts Get Physical
Cryptocurrency Thefts Get Physical Long story of a $250 million cryptocurrency theft that, in a complicated chain events, resulted in a pretty brutal kidnapping. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Facts on Your Phone
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Facts on Your Phone Text “SQUID” to 1-833-SCI-TEXT for daily squid facts. The website has merch. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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New Linux Rootkit
New Linux Rootkit Interesting: The company has released a working rootkit called “Curing” that uses io_uring, a feature built into the Linux kernel, to stealthily perform malicious activities without being caught by many of the detection solutions currently on the market. At the heart of the issue is the heavy reliance on monitoring system calls,…
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Regulating AI Behavior with a Hypervisor
Regulating AI Behavior with a Hypervisor Interesting research: “Guillotine: Hypervisors for Isolating Malicious AIs.” Abstract:As AI models become more embedded in critical sectors like finance, healthcare, and the military, their inscrutable behavior poses ever-greater risks to society. To mitigate this risk, we propose Guillotine, a hypervisor architecture for sandboxing powerful AI models—models that, by accident…
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Android Improves Its Security
Android Improves Its Security Android phones will soon reboot themselves after sitting idle for three days. iPhones have had this feature for a while; it’s nice to see Google add it to their phones. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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Friday Squid Blogging: Live Colossal Squid Filmed
Friday Squid Blogging: Live Colossal Squid Filmed A live colossal squid was filmed for the first time in the ocean. It’s only a juvenile: a foot long. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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CVE Program Almost Unfunded
CVE Program Almost Unfunded Mitre’s CVE’s program—which provides common naming and other informational resources about cybersecurity vulnerabilities—was about to be cancelled, as the US Department of Homeland Security failed to renew the contact. It was funded for eleven more months at the last minute. This is a big deal. The CVE program is one of…
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Slopsquatting
Slopsquatting As AI coding assistants invent nonexistent software libraries to download and use, enterprising attackers create and upload libraries with those names—laced with malware, of course. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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China Sort of Admits to Being Behind Volt Typhoon
China Sort of Admits to Being Behind Volt Typhoon The Wall Street Journal has the story: Chinese officials acknowledged in a secret December meeting that Beijing was behind a widespread series of alarming cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure, according to people familiar with the matter, underscoring how hostilities between the two superpowers are continuing to escalate.…
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Upcoming Speaking Engagements
Upcoming Speaking Engagements This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m giving an online talk on AI and trust for the Weizenbaum Institute on April 24, 2025 at 2:00 PM CEST (8:00 AM ET). The list is maintained on this page. B. Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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AI Vulnerability Finding
AI Vulnerability Finding Microsoft is reporting that its AI systems are able to find new vulnerabilities in source code: Microsoft discovered eleven vulnerabilities in GRUB2, including integer and buffer overflows in filesystem parsers, command flaws, and a side-channel in cryptographic comparison. Additionally, 9 buffer overflows in parsing SquashFS, EXT4, CramFS, JFFS2, and symlinks were discovered…
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Friday Squid Blogging: Squid and Efficient Solar Tech
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid and Efficient Solar Tech Researchers are trying to use squid color-changing biochemistry for solar tech. This appears to be new and related research to a 2019 squid post. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Bruce…
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Reimagining Democracy
Reimagining Democracy Imagine that all of us—all of society—have landed on some alien planet and need to form a government: clean slate. We do not have any legacy systems from the United States or any other country. We do not have any special or unique interests to perturb our thinking. How would we govern ourselves?…
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How to Leak to a Journalist
How to Leak to a Journalist Neiman Lab has some good advice on how to leak a story to a journalist. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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Arguing Against CALEA
Arguing Against CALEA At a Congressional hearing earlier this week, Matt Blaze made the point that CALEA, the 1994 law that forces telecoms to make phone calls wiretappable, is outdated in today’s threat environment and should be rethought: In other words, while the legally-mandated CALEA capability requirements have changed little over the last three decades,…
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DIRNSA Fired
DIRNSA Fired In “Secrets and Lies” (2000), I wrote: It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state. It’s something a bunch of us were saying at the time, in reference to the vast NSA’s surveillance capabilities. I have been thinking of that quote a lot as I read…
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Friday Squid Blogging: Two-Man Giant Squid
Friday Squid Blogging: Two-Man Giant Squid The Brooklyn indie art-punk group, Two-Man Giant Squid, just released a new album. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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Web 3.0 Requires Data Integrity
Web 3.0 Requires Data Integrity If you’ve ever taken a computer security class, you’ve probably learned about the three legs of computer security—confidentiality, integrity, and availability—known as the CIA triad. When we talk about a system being secure, that’s what we’re referring to. All are important, but to different degrees in different contexts. In a world populated…
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Rational Astrologies and Security
Rational Astrologies and Security John Kelsey and I wrote a short paper for the Rossfest Festschrift: “Rational Astrologies and Security“: There is another non-security way that designers can spend their security budget: on making their own lives easier. Many of these fall into the category of what has been called rational astrology. First identified by…
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Cell Phone OPSEC for Border Crossings
Cell Phone OPSEC for Border Crossings I have heard stories of more aggressive interrogation of electronic devices at US border crossings. I know a lot about securing computers, but very little about securing phones. Are there easy ways to delete data—files, photos, etc.—on phones so it can’t be recovered? Does resetting a phone to factory…
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The Signal Chat Leak and the NSA
The Signal Chat Leak and the NSA US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who started the now-infamous group chat coordinating a US attack against the Yemen-based Houthis on March 15, is seemingly now suggesting that the secure messaging service Signal has security vulnerabilities. “I didn’t see this loser in the group,” Waltz told Fox News about Atlantic editor in…
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AIs as Trusted Third Parties
AIs as Trusted Third Parties This is a truly fascinating paper: “Trusted Machine Learning Models Unlock Private Inference for Problems Currently Infeasible with Cryptography.” The basic idea is that AIs can act as trusted third parties: Abstract: We often interact with untrusted parties. Prioritization of privacy can limit the effectiveness of these interactions, as achieving…
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Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Werewolf Hacking Group
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Werewolf Hacking Group In another rare squid/cybersecurity intersection, APT37 is also known as “Squid Werewolf.” As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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A Taxonomy of Adversarial Machine Learning Attacks and Mitigations
A Taxonomy of Adversarial Machine Learning Attacks and Mitigations NIST just released a comprehensive taxonomy of adversarial machine learning attacks and countermeasures. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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AI Data Poisoning
AI Data Poisoning Cloudflare has a new feature—available to free users as well—that uses AI to generate random pages to feed to AI web crawlers: Instead of simply blocking bots, Cloudflare’s new system lures them into a “maze” of realistic-looking but irrelevant pages, wasting the crawler’s computing resources. The approach is a notable shift from…
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Report on Paragon Spyware
Report on Paragon Spyware Citizen Lab has a new report on Paragon’s spyware: Key Findings: Introducing Paragon Solutions. Paragon Solutions was founded in Israel in 2019 and sells spyware called Graphite. The company differentiates itself by claiming it has safeguards to prevent the kinds of spyware abuses that NSO Group and other vendors are notorious…
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More Countries are Demanding Backdoors to Encrypted Apps
More Countries are Demanding Backdoors to Encrypted Apps Last month, I wrote about the UK forcing Apple to break its Advanced Data Protection encryption in iCloud. More recently, both Sweden and France are contemplating mandating backdoors. Both initiatives are attempting to scare people into supporting backdoors, which are—of course—are terrible idea. Also: “A Feminist Argument…
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NCSC Releases Post-Quantum Cryptography Timeline
NCSC Releases Post-Quantum Cryptography Timeline The UK’s National Computer Security Center (part of GCHQ) released a timeline—also see their blog post—for migration to quantum-computer-resistant cryptography. It even made The Guardian. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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My Writings Are in the LibGen AI Training Corpus
My Writings Are in the LibGen AI Training Corpus The Atlantic has a search tool that allows you to search for specific works in the “LibGen” database of copyrighted works that Meta used to train its AI models. (The rest of the article is behind a paywall, but not the search tool.) It’s impossible to…
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Friday Squid Blogging: A New Explanation of Squid Camouflage
Friday Squid Blogging: A New Explanation of Squid Camouflage New research: An associate professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Northeastern University, Deravi’s recently published paper in the Journal of Materials Chemistry C sheds new light on how squid use organs that essentially function as organic solar cells to help power their camouflage abilities. As…
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Critical GitHub Attack
Critical GitHub Attack This is serious: A sophisticated cascading supply chain attack has compromised multiple GitHub Actions, exposing critical CI/CD secrets across tens of thousands of repositories. The attack, which originally targeted the widely used “tj-actions/changed-files” utility, is now believed to have originated from an earlier breach of the “reviewdog/action-setup@v1” GitHub Action, according to a…
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Is Security Human Factors Research Skewed Towards Western Ideas and Habits?
Is Security Human Factors Research Skewed Towards Western Ideas and Habits? Really interesting research: “How WEIRD is Usable Privacy and Security Research?” by Ayako A. Hasegawa Daisuke Inoue, and Mitsuaki Akiyama: Abstract: In human factor fields such as human-computer interaction (HCI) and psychology, researchers have been concerned that participants mostly come from WEIRD (Western, Educated,…
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Improvements in Brute Force Attacks
Improvements in Brute Force Attacks New paper: “GPU Assisted Brute Force Cryptanalysis of GPRS, GSM, RFID, and TETRA: Brute Force Cryptanalysis of KASUMI, SPECK, and TEA3.” Abstract: Key lengths in symmetric cryptography are determined with respect to the brute force attacks with current technology. While nowadays at least 128-bit keys are recommended, there are many…
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TP-Link Router Botnet
TP-Link Router Botnet There is a new botnet that is infecting TP-Link routers: The botnet can lead to command injection which then makes remote code execution (RCE) possible so that the malware can spread itself across the internet automatically. This high severity security flaw (tracked as CVE-2023-1389) has also been used to spread other malware…
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Upcoming Speaking Engagements
Upcoming Speaking Engagements This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at the Rossfest Symposium in Cambridge, UK, on March 25, 2025. I’m speaking at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management in Toronto, Canada, on April 3, 2025. The list is maintained on this page.…
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Friday Squid Blogging: SQUID Band
Friday Squid Blogging: SQUID Band A bagpipe and drum band: SQUID transforms traditional Bagpipe and Drum Band entertainment into a multi-sensory rush of excitement, featuring high energy bagpipes, pop music influences and visually stunning percussion! As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I…
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RIP Mark Klein
RIP Mark Klein 2006 AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein has died. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea Intelligence Sharing
China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea Intelligence Sharing Former CISA Director Jen Easterly writes about a new international intelligence sharing co-op: Historically, China, Russia, Iran & North Korea have cooperated to some extent on military and intelligence matters, but differences in language, culture, politics & technological sophistication have hindered deeper collaboration, including in cyber. Shifting…
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Silk Typhoon Hackers Indicted
Silk Typhoon Hackers Indicted Lots of interesting details in the story: The US Department of Justice on Wednesday announced the indictment of 12 Chinese individuals accused of more than a decade of hacker intrusions around the world, including eight staffers for the contractor i-Soon, two officials at China’s Ministry of Public Security who allegedly worked…
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Thousands of WordPress Websites Infected with Malware
Thousands of WordPress Websites Infected with Malware The malware includes four separate backdoors: Creating four backdoors facilitates the attackers having multiple points of re-entry should one be detected and removed. A unique case we haven’t seen before. Which introduces another type of attack made possibly by abusing websites that don’t monitor 3rd party dependencies in…
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Rayhunter: Device to Detect Cellular Surveillance
Rayhunter: Device to Detect Cellular Surveillance The EFF has created an open-source hardware tool to detect IMSI catchers: fake cell phone towers that are used for mass surveillance of an area. It runs on a $20 mobile hotspot. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Loyalty Cards
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Loyalty Cards Squid is a loyalty card platform in Ireland. Blog moderation policy. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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The Combined Cipher Machine
The Combined Cipher Machine Interesting article—with photos!—of the US/UK “Combined Cipher Machine” from WWII. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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CISA Identifies Five New Vulnerabilities Currently Being Exploited
CISA Identifies Five New Vulnerabilities Currently Being Exploited Of the five, one is a Windows vulnerability, another is a Cisco vulnerability. We don’t have any details about who is exploiting them, or how. News article. Slashdot thread. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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Trojaned AI Tool Leads to Disney Hack
Trojaned AI Tool Leads to Disney Hack This is a sad story of someone who downloaded a Trojaned AI tool that resulted in hackers taking over his computer and, ultimately, costing him his job. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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Friday Squid Blogging: Eating Bioluminescent Squid
Friday Squid Blogging: Eating Bioluminescent Squid Firefly squid is now a delicacy in New York. Blog moderation policy. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier
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“Emergent Misalignment” in LLMs
“Emergent Misalignment” in LLMs Interesting research: “Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs“: Abstract: We present a surprising result regarding LLMs and alignment. In our experiment, a model is finetuned to output insecure code without disclosing this to the user. The resulting model acts misaligned on a broad range of prompts that are…