serisec

Category: psychology of security

  • GPT-4o-mini Falls for Psychological Manipulation

    GPT-4o-mini Falls for Psychological Manipulation Interesting experiment: To design their experiment, the University of Pennsylvania researchers tested 2024’s GPT-4o-mini model on two requests that it should ideally refuse: calling the user a jerk and giving directions for how to synthesize lidocaine. The researchers created experimental prompts for both requests using each of seven different persuasion…

  • 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…

  • 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…