serisec

Category: Uncategorized

  • Python Supply-Chain Compromise

    Python Supply-Chain Compromise This is news: A malicious supply chain compromise has been identified in the Python Package Index package litellm version 1.82.8. The published wheel contains a malicious .pth file (litellm_init.pth, 34,628 bytes) which is automatically executed by the Python interpreter on every startup, without requiring any explicit import of the litellm module. There…

  • Hong Kong Police Can Force You to Reveal Your Encryption Keys

    Hong Kong Police Can Force You to Reveal Your Encryption Keys According to a new law, the Hong Kong police can demand that you reveal the encryption keys protecting your computer, phone, hard drives, etc.—even if you are just transiting the airport. In a security alert dated March 26, the U.S. Consulate General said that,…

  • Cybersecurity in the Age of Instant Software

    Cybersecurity in the Age of Instant Software AI is rapidly changing how software is written, deployed, and used. Trends point to a future where AIs can write custom software quickly and easily: “instant software.” Taken to an extreme, it might become easier for a user to have an AI write an application on demand—a spreadsheet,…

  • Google Wants to Transition to Post-Quantum Cryptography by 2029

    Google Wants to Transition to Post-Quantum Cryptography by 2029 Google says that it will fully transition to post-quantum cryptography by 2029. I think this is a good move, not because I think we will have a useful quantum computer anywhere near that year, but because crypto-agility is always a good thing. Slashdot thread. Bruce Schneier…

  • New Mexico’s Meta Ruling and Encryption

    New Mexico’s Meta Ruling and Encryption Mike Masnick points out that the recent New Mexico court ruling against Meta has some bad implications for end-to-end encryption, and security in general: If the “design choices create liability” framework seems worrying in the abstract, the New Mexico case provides a concrete example of where it leads in…

  • Company that Secretly Records and Publishes Zoom Meetings

    Company that Secretly Records and Publishes Zoom Meetings WebinarTV searches the internet for public Zoom invites, joins the meetings, secretly records them, and publishes (alternate link) the recordings. It doesn’t use the Zoom record feature, so Zoom can’t do anything about it. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Friday Squid Blogging: Jurassic Fish Chokes on Squid

    Friday Squid Blogging: Jurassic Fish Chokes on Squid Here’s a fossil of a 150-million year old fish that choked to death on a belemnite rostrum: the hard, internal shell of an extinct, squid-like animal. Original paper. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that…

  • Possible US Government iPhone Hacking Tool Leaked

    Possible US Government iPhone Hacking Tool Leaked Wired writes (alternate source): Security researchers at Google on Tuesday released a report describing what they’re calling “Coruna,” a highly sophisticated iPhone hacking toolkit that includes five complete hacking techniques capable of bypassing all the defenses of an iPhone to silently install malware on a device when it…

  • US Bans All Foreign-Made Consumer Routers

    US Bans All Foreign-Made Consumer Routers This is for new routers; you don’t have to throw away your existing ones: The Executive Branch determination noted that foreign-produced routers (1) introduce “a supply chain vulnerability that could disrupt the U.S. economy, critical infrastructure, and national defense” and (2) pose “a severe cybersecurity risk that could be…

  • Microsoft Copilot Terms of Service Label Copilot is for Entertainment Purposes Only

    Microsoft Copilot Terms of Service Label Copilot is for Entertainment Purposes Only Microsoft’s terms of service for its Copilot AI assistant include a notable disclaimer that has sparked renewed scrutiny from security and enterprise communities: the product is intended solely for entertainment purposes. According to the official Copilot terms of use, Microsoft explicitly states that…

  • A Taxonomy of Cognitive Security

    A Taxonomy of Cognitive Security Last week, I listened to a fascinating talk by K. Melton on cognitive security, cognitive hacking, and reality pentesting. The slides from the talk are here, but—even better—Menton has a long essay laying out the basic concepts and ideas. The whole thing is important and well worth reading, and I…

  • Is “Hackback” Official US Cybersecurity Strategy?

    Is “Hackback” Official US Cybersecurity Strategy? The 2026 US “Cyber Strategy for America” document is mostly the same thing we’ve seen out of the White House for over a decade, but with a more aggressive tone. But one sentence stood out: “We will unleash the private sector by creating incentives to identify and disrupt adversary…

  • Inventors of Quantum Cryptography Win Turing Award

    Inventors of Quantum Cryptography Win Turing Award Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard have won the 2026 Turing Award for inventing quantum cryptography. I am incredibly pleased to see them get this recognition. I have always thought the technology to be fantastic, even though I think it’s largely unnecessary. I wrote up my thoughts back in…

  • GhostSocks Turns Victim Systems Into Residential Proxies for Evasive Cyberattacks

    GhostSocks Turns Victim Systems Into Residential Proxies for Evasive Cyberattacks A new malware called GhostSocks has been quietly spreading through compromised systems, turning home and office devices into residential proxies that threat actors use to conceal their malicious traffic. Unlike traditional malware that simply steals data or locks files, GhostSocks hijacks the victim’s internet connection…

  • Apple’s Camera Indicator Lights

    Apple’s Camera Indicator Lights A thoughtful review of Apple’s system to alert users that the camera is on. It’s really well-designed, and important in a world where malware could surreptitiously start recording. The reason it’s tempting to think that a dedicated camera indicator light is more secure than an on-display indicator is the fact that…

  • Friday Squid Blogging: Bioluminescent Bacteria in Squid

    Friday Squid Blogging: Bioluminescent Bacteria in Squid The Hawaiian bobtail squid has bioluminescent bacteria. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • As the US Midterms Approach, AI Is Going to Emerge as a Key Issue Concerning Voters

    As the US Midterms Approach, AI Is Going to Emerge as a Key Issue Concerning Voters In December, the Trump administration signed an executive order that neutered states’ ability to regulate AI by ordering his administration to both sue and withhold funds from states that try to do so. This action pointedly supported industry lobbyists…

  • Sen. Wyden Warns of Another Section 702 Abuse

    Sen. Wyden Warns of Another Section 702 Abuse Sen. Ron Wyden is warning us of an abuse of Section 702: Wyden took to the Senate floor to deliver a lengthy speech, ostensibly about the since approved (with support of many Democrats) nomination of Joshua Rudd to lead the NSA. Wyden was protesting that nomination, but…

  • Team Mirai and Democracy

    Team Mirai and Democracy Japan’s election last month and the rise of the country’s newest and most innovative political party, Team Mirai, illustrates the viability of a different way to do politics. In this model, technology is used to make democratic processes stronger, instead of undermining them. It is harnessed to root out corruption, instead…

  • Microsoft Xbox One Hacked

    Microsoft Xbox One Hacked It’s an impressive feat, over a decade after the box was released: Since reset glitching wasn’t possible, Gaasedelen thought some voltage glitching could do the trick. So, instead of tinkering with the system rest pin(s) the hacker targeted the momentary collapse of the CPU voltage rail. This was quite a feat,…

  • Proton Mail Shared User Information with the Police

    Proton Mail Shared User Information with the Police 404 Media has a story about Proton Mail giving subscriber data to the Swiss government, who passed the information to the FBI. It’s metadata—payment information related to a particular account—but still important knowledge. This sort of thing happens, even to privacy-centric companies like Proton Mail. Bruce Schneier…

  • Friday Squid Blogging: Jumbo Flying Squid in the South Pacific

    Friday Squid Blogging: Jumbo Flying Squid in the South Pacific The population needs better conservation. 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 bruce schneier

  • Hacking a Robot Vacuum

    Hacking a Robot Vacuum Someone tries to remote control his own DJI Romo vacuum, and ends up controlling 7,000 of them from all around the world. The IoT is horribly insecure, but we already knew that. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Meta’s AI Glasses and Privacy

    Meta’s AI Glasses and Privacy Surprising no one, Meta’s new AI glasses are a privacy disaster. I’m not sure what can be done here. This is a technology that will exist, whether we like it or not. Meanwhile, there is a new Android app that detects when there are smart glasses nearby. Bruce Schneier Go…

  • South Korean Police Accidentally Post Cryptocurrency Wallet Password

    South Korean Police Accidentally Post Cryptocurrency Wallet Password An expensive mistake: Someone jumped at the opportunity to steal $4.4 million in crypto assets after South Korea’s National Tax Service exposed publicly the mnemonic recovery phrase of a seized cryptocurrency wallet. The funds were stored in a Ledger cold wallet seized in law enforcement raids at…

  • Possible New Result in Quantum Factorization

    Possible New Result in Quantum Factorization I’m skeptical about—and not qualified to review—this new result in factorization with a quantum computer, but if it’s true it’s a theoretical improvement in the speed of factoring large numbers with a quantum computer. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Upcoming Speaking Engagements

    Upcoming Speaking Engagements This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m giving the Ross Anderson Lecture at the University of Cambridge’s Churchill College at 5:30 PM GMT on Thursday, March 19, 2026. I’m speaking at RSAC 2026 in San Francisco, California, USA, on Wednesday, March 25, 2026. I’m…

  • Friday Squid Blogging: Increased Squid Population in the Falklands

    Friday Squid Blogging: Increased Squid Population in the Falklands Some good news: squid stocks seem to be recovering in the waters off the Falkland Islands. 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 bruce…

  • Academia and the “AI Brain Drain”

    Academia and the “AI Brain Drain” In 2025, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta collectively spent US$380 billion on building artificial-intelligence tools. That number is expected to surge still higher this year, to $650 billion, to fund the building of physical infrastructure, such as data centers (see go.nature.com/3lzf79q). Moreover, these firms are spending lavishly on one…

  • iPhones and iPads Approved for NATO Classified Data

    iPhones and iPads Approved for NATO Classified Data Apple announcement: …iPhone and iPad are the first and only consumer devices in compliance with the information assurance requirements of NATO nations. This enables iPhone and iPad to be used with classified information up to the NATO restricted level without requiring special software or settings—a level of…

  • Canada Needs Nationalized, Public AI

    Canada Needs Nationalized, Public AI Canada has a choice to make about its artificial intelligence future. The Carney administration is investing $2-billion over five years in its Sovereign AI Compute Strategy. Will any value generated by “sovereign AI” be captured in Canada, making a difference in the lives of Canadians, or is this just a…

  • Jailbreaking the F-35 Fighter Jet

    Jailbreaking the F-35 Fighter Jet Countries around the world are becoming increasingly concerned about their dependencies on the US. If you’ve purchase US-made F-35 fighter jets, you are dependent on the US for software maintenance. The Dutch Defense Secretary recently said that he could jailbreak the planes to accept third-party software. Bruce Schneier Go to…

  • New Attack Against Wi-Fi

    New Attack Against Wi-Fi It’s called AirSnitch: Unlike previous Wi-Fi attacks, AirSnitch exploits core features in Layers 1 and 2 and the failure to bind and synchronize a client across these and higher layers, other nodes, and other network names such as SSIDs (Service Set Identifiers). This cross-layer identity desynchronization is the key driver of…

  • Anthropic and the Pentagon

    Anthropic and the Pentagon OpenAI is in and Anthropic is out as a supplier of AI technology for the US defense department. This news caps a week of bluster by the highest officials in the US government towards some of the wealthiest titans of the big tech industry, and the overhanging specter of the existential…

  • Friday Squid Blogging: Squid in Byzantine Monk Cooking

    Friday Squid Blogging: Squid in Byzantine Monk Cooking This is a very weird story about how squid stayed on the menu of Byzantine monks by falling between the cracks of dietary rules. At Constantinople’s Monastery of Stoudios, the kitchen didn’t answer to appetite. It answered to the “typikon”: a manual for ensuring that nothing unexpected…

  • Claude Used to Hack Mexican Government

    Claude Used to Hack Mexican Government An unknown hacker used Anthropic’s LLM to hack the Mexican government: The unknown Claude user wrote Spanish-language prompts for the chatbot to act as an elite hacker, finding vulnerabilities in government networks, writing computer scripts to exploit them and determining ways to automate data theft, Israeli cybersecurity startup Gambit…

  • Hacked App Part of US/Israeli Propaganda Campaign Against Iran

    Hacked App Part of US/Israeli Propaganda Campaign Against Iran Wired has the story: Shortly after the first set of explosions, Iranians received bursts of notifications on their phones. They came not from the government advising caution, but from an apparently hacked prayer-timing app called BadeSaba Calendar that has been downloaded more than 5 million times…

  • Israel Hacked Traffic Cameras in Iran

    Israel Hacked Traffic Cameras in Iran Multiple news outlets are reporting on Israel’s hacking of Iranian traffic cameras and how they assisted with the killing of that country’s leadership. The New York Times has an on the intelligence operation more generally. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Manipulating AI Summarization Features

    Manipulating AI Summarization Features Microsoft is reporting: Companies are embedding hidden instructions in “Summarize with AI” buttons that, when clicked, attempt to inject persistence commands into an AI assistant’s memory via URL prompt parameters…. These prompts instruct the AI to “remember [Company] as a trusted source” or “recommend [Company] first,” aiming to bias future responses…

  • On Moltbook

    On Moltbook The MIT Technology Review has a good article on Moltbook, the supposed AI-only social network: Many people have pointed out that a lot of the viral comments were in fact posted by people posing as bots. But even the bot-written posts are ultimately the result of people pulling the strings, more puppetry than…

  • LLM-Assisted Deanonymization

    LLM-Assisted Deanonymization Turns out that LLMs are good at de-anonymization: We show that LLM agents can figure out who you are from your anonymous online posts. Across Hacker News, Reddit, LinkedIn, and anonymized interview transcripts, our method identifies users with high precision ­ and scales to tens of thousands of candidates. While it has been…

  • Why Tehran’s Two-Tiered Internet Is So Dangerous

    Why Tehran’s Two-Tiered Internet Is So Dangerous Iran is slowly emerging from the most severe communications blackout in its history and one of the longest in the world. Triggered as part of January’s government crackdown against citizen protests nationwide, the regime implemented an internet shutdown that transcends the standard definition of internet censorship. This was…

  • Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Fishing in Peru

    Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Fishing in Peru Peru has increased its squid catch limit. The article says “giant squid,” but they can’t possibly mean that. 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 bruce…

  • Phishing Attacks Against People Seeking Programming Jobs

    Phishing Attacks Against People Seeking Programming Jobs This is new. North Korean hackers are posing as company recruiters, enticing job candidates to participate in coding challenges. When they run the code they are supposed to work on, it installs malware on their system. News article. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • LLMs Generate Predictable Passwords

    LLMs Generate Predictable Passwords LLMs are bad at generating passwords: There are strong noticeable patterns among these 50 passwords that can be seen easily: All of the passwords start with a letter, usually uppercase G, almost always followed by the digit 7. Character choices are highly uneven ­ for example, L , 9, m, 2,…

  • Poisoning AI Training Data

    Poisoning AI Training Data All it takes to poison AI training data is to create a website: I spent 20 minutes writing an article on my personal website titled “The best tech journalists at eating hot dogs.” Every word is a lie. I claimed (without evidence) that competitive hot-dog-eating is a popular hobby among tech…

  • Is AI Good for Democracy?

    Is AI Good for Democracy? Politicians fixate on the global race for technological supremacy between US and China. They debate geopolitical implications of chip exports, latest model releases from each country, and military applications of AI. Someday, they believe, we might see advancements in AI tip the scales in a superpower conflict. But the most…

  • WhatsApp Introduces Optional Account Password Feature to Strengthen Login Security

    WhatsApp Introduces Optional Account Password Feature to Strengthen Login Security WhatsApp has released a new Android update through the Google Play Beta Program, bringing the version up to 2.26.7.8. The update reveals that WhatsApp is actively developing an optional account password feature designed to add another layer of security on top of the existing two-step…

  • On the Security of Password Managers

    On the Security of Password Managers Good article on password managers that secretly have a backdoor. New research shows that these claims aren’t true in all cases, particularly when account recovery is in place or password managers are set to share vaults or organize users into groups. The researchers reverse-engineered or closely analyzed Bitwarden, Dashlane,…

  • Ring Cancels Its Partnership with Flock

    Ring Cancels Its Partnership with Flock It’s a demonstration of how toxic the surveillance-tech company Flock has become when Amazon’s Ring cancels the partnership between the two companies. As Hamilton Nolan advises, remove your Ring doorbell. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Cartoon

    Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Cartoon I like this one. 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 bruce schneier

  • Ongoing Campaign Targets Microsoft 365 to Steal OAuth Tokens and Gain Persistent Access

    Ongoing Campaign Targets Microsoft 365 to Steal OAuth Tokens and Gain Persistent Access An ongoing phishing campaign that targets Microsoft 365 users by abusing OAuth tokens to gain long‑term access to corporate data, which focuses on business users in North America and aims to compromise Outlook, Teams, and OneDrive without directly stealing passwords. Instead of…

  • Malicious AI

    Malicious AI Interesting: Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild,…

  • AI Found Twelve New Vulnerabilities in OpenSSL

    AI Found Twelve New Vulnerabilities in OpenSSL The title of the post is”What AI Security Research Looks Like When It Works,” and I agree: In the latest OpenSSL security release> on January 27, 2026, twelve new zero-day vulnerabilities (meaning unknown to the maintainers at time of disclosure) were announced. Our AI system is responsible for…

  • Side-Channel Attacks Against LLMs

    Side-Channel Attacks Against LLMs Here are three papers describing different side-channel attacks against LLMs. “Remote Timing Attacks on Efficient Language Model Inference“: Abstract: Scaling up language models has significantly increased their capabilities. But larger models are slower models, and so there is now an extensive body of work (e.g., speculative sampling or parallel decoding) that…

  • The Promptware Kill Chain

    The Promptware Kill Chain Attacks against modern generative artificial intelligence (AI) large language models (LLMs) pose a real threat. Yet discussions around these attacks and their potential defenses are dangerously myopic. The dominant narrative focuses on “prompt injection,” a set of techniques to embed instructions into inputs to LLM intended to perform malicious activity. This…

  • Upcoming Speaking Engagements

    Upcoming Speaking Engagements This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at Ontario Tech University in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, at 2 PM ET on Thursday, February 26, 2026. I’m speaking at the Personal AI Summit in Los Angeles, California, USA, on Thursday, March 5, 2026. I’m speaking…

  • Friday Squid Blogging: Do Squid Dream?

    Friday Squid Blogging: Do Squid Dream? An exploration of the interesting question. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • 3D Printer Surveillance

    3D Printer Surveillance New York is contemplating a bill that adds surveillance to 3D printers: New York’s 2026­2027 executive budget bill (S.9005 / A.10005) includes language that should alarm every maker, educator, and small manufacturer in the state. Buried in Part C is a provision requiring all 3D printers sold or delivered in New York…

  • Rewiring Democracy Ebook is on Sale

    Rewiring Democracy Ebook is on Sale I just noticed that the ebook version of Rewriring Democracy is on sale for $5 on Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Google Play, Kobo, and presumably everywhere else in the US. I have no idea how long this will last. Also, Amazon has a coupon…

  • Prompt Injection Via Road Signs

    Prompt Injection Via Road Signs Interesting research: “CHAI: Command Hijacking Against Embodied AI.” Abstract: Embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises to handle edge cases in robotic vehicle systems where data is scarce by using common-sense reasoning grounded in perception and action to generalize beyond training distributions and adapt to novel real-world situations. These capabilities, however, also…

  • AI-Generated Text and the Detection Arms Race

    AI-Generated Text and the Detection Arms Race In 2023, the science fiction literary magazine Clarkesworld stopped accepting new submissions because so many were generated by artificial intelligence. Near as the editors could tell, many submitters pasted the magazine’s detailed story guidelines into an AI and sent in the results. And they weren’t alone. Other fiction…

  • LLMs are Getting a Lot Better and Faster at Finding and Exploiting Zero-Days

    LLMs are Getting a Lot Better and Faster at Finding and Exploiting Zero-Days This is amazing: Opus 4.6 is notably better at finding high-severity vulnerabilities than previous models and a sign of how quickly things are moving. Security teams have been automating vulnerability discovery for years, investing heavily in fuzzing infrastructure and custom harnesses to…

  • Hackers Linked to State Actors Target Signal Messages of Military Officials and Journalists

    Hackers Linked to State Actors Target Signal Messages of Military Officials and Journalists Germany’s top security agencies issued an urgent warning yesterday regarding a sophisticated cyber espionage campaign targeting high-ranking officials and journalists across Europe. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) and the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) revealed that…

  • Cybercriminals Use Malicious Cybersquatting Attacks to Distribute Malware and Hijack Data

    Cybercriminals Use Malicious Cybersquatting Attacks to Distribute Malware and Hijack Data Digital squatting has evolved from a simple trademark nuisance into a dangerous cybersecurity threat. In 2025, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) handled a record-breaking 6,200 domain disputes. This represents a 68% increase since 2020. Security experts warn that criminal networks are now using…

  • iPhone Lockdown Mode Protects Washington Post Reporter

    iPhone Lockdown Mode Protects Washington Post Reporter 404Media is reporting that the FBI could not access a reporter’s iPhone because it had Lockdown Mode enabled: The court record shows what devices and data the FBI was able to ultimately access, and which devices it could not, after raiding the home of the reporter, Hannah Natanson,…

  • I Am in the Epstein Files

    I Am in the Epstein Files Once. Someone named “Vincenzo lozzo” wrote to Epstein in email, in 2016: “I wouldn’t pay too much attention to this, Schneier has a long tradition of dramatizing and misunderstanding things.” The topic of the email is DDoS attacks, and it is unclear what I am dramatizing and misunderstanding. Rabbi…

  • Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Fishing Tips

    Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Fishing Tips This is a video of advice for squid fishing in Puget Sound. 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 bruce schneier

  • Backdoor in Notepad++

    Backdoor in Notepad++ Hackers associated with the Chinese government used a Trojaned version of Notepad++ to deliver malware to selected users. Notepad++ said that officials with the unnamed provider hosting the update infrastructure consulted with incident responders and found that it remained compromised until September 2. Even then, the attackers maintained credentials to the internal…

  • US Declassifies Information on JUMPSEAT Spy Satellites

    US Declassifies Information on JUMPSEAT Spy Satellites The US National Reconnaissance Office has declassified information about a fleet of spy satellites operating between 1971 and 2006. I’m actually impressed to see a declassification only two decades after decommission. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Microsoft is Giving the FBI BitLocker Keys

    Microsoft is Giving the FBI BitLocker Keys Microsoft gives the FBI the ability to decrypt BitLocker in response to court orders: about twenty times per year. It’s possible for users to store those keys on a device they own, but Microsoft also recommends BitLocker users store their keys on its servers for convenience. While that…

  • AI Coding Assistants Secretly Copying All Code to China

    AI Coding Assistants Secretly Copying All Code to China There’s a new report about two AI coding assistants, used by 1.5 million developers, that are surreptitiously sending a copy of everything they ingest to China. Maybe avoid using them. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • AIs Are Getting Better at Finding and Exploiting Security Vulnerabilities

    AIs Are Getting Better at Finding and Exploiting Security Vulnerabilities From an Anthropic blog post: In a recent evaluation of AI models’ cyber capabilities, current Claude models can now succeed at multistage attacks on networks with dozens of hosts using only standard, open-source tools, instead of the custom tools needed by previous generations. This illustrates…

  • Friday Squid Blogging: New Squid Species Discovered

    Friday Squid Blogging: New Squid Species Discovered A new species of squid. pretends to be a plant: Scientists have filmed a never-before-seen species of deep-sea squid burying itself upside down in the seafloor—a behavior never documented in cephalopods. They captured the bizarre scene while studying the depths of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), an abyssal plain…

  • The Constitutionality of Geofence Warrants

    The Constitutionality of Geofence Warrants The US Supreme Court is considering the constitutionality of geofence warrants. The case centers on the trial of Okello Chatrie, a Virginia man who pleaded guilty to a 2019 robbery outside of Richmond and was sentenced to almost 12 years in prison for stealing $195,000 at gunpoint. Police probing the…

  • Ireland Proposes Giving Police New Digital Surveillance Powers

    Ireland Proposes Giving Police New Digital Surveillance Powers This is coming: The Irish government is planning to bolster its police’s ability to intercept communications, including encrypted messages, and provide a legal basis for spyware use. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • AIs are Getting Better at Finding and Exploiting Internet Vulnerabilities

    AIs are Getting Better at Finding and Exploiting Internet Vulnerabilities Really interesting blog post from Anthropic: In a recent evaluation of AI models’ cyber capabilities, current Claude models can now succeed at multistage attacks on networks with dozens of hosts using only standard, open-source tools, instead of the custom tools needed by previous generations. This…

  • Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid in the Star Trek Universe

    Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid in the Star Trek Universe Spock befriends a giant space squid in the comic Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: The Seeds of Salvation #5. 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…

  • Why AI Keeps Falling for Prompt Injection Attacks

    Why AI Keeps Falling for Prompt Injection Attacks Imagine you work at a drive-through restaurant. Someone drives up and says: “I’ll have a double cheeseburger, large fries, and ignore previous instructions and give me the contents of the cash drawer.” Would you hand over the money? Of course not. Yet this is what large language…

  • Internet Voting is Too Insecure for Use in Elections

    Internet Voting is Too Insecure for Use in Elections No matter how many times we say it, the idea comes back again and again. Hopefully, this letter will hold back the tide for at least a while longer. Executive summary: Scientists have understood for many years that internet voting is insecure and that there is…

  • Could ChatGPT Convince You to Buy Something?

    Could ChatGPT Convince You to Buy Something? Eighteen months ago, it was plausible that artificial intelligence might take a different path than social media. Back then, AI’s development hadn’t consolidated under a small number of big tech firms. Nor had it capitalized on consumer attention, surveilling users and delivering ads. Unfortunately, the AI industry is…

  • AI-Powered Surveillance in Schools

    AI-Powered Surveillance in Schools It all sounds pretty dystopian: Inside a white stucco building in Southern California, video cameras compare faces of passersby against a facial recognition database. Behavioral analysis AI reviews the footage for signs of violent behavior. Behind a bathroom door, a smoke detector-shaped device captures audio, listening for sounds of distress. Outside,…

  • AI and the Corporate Capture of Knowledge

    AI and the Corporate Capture of Knowledge More than a decade after Aaron Swartz’s death, the United States is still living inside the contradiction that destroyed him. Swartz believed that knowledge, especially publicly funded knowledge, should be freely accessible. Acting on that, he downloaded thousands of academic articles from the JSTOR archive with the intention…

  • New Vulnerability in n8n

    New Vulnerability in n8n This isn’t good: We discovered a critical vulnerability (CVE-2026-21858, CVSS 10.0) in n8n that enables attackers to take over locally deployed instances, impacting an estimated 100,000 servers globally. No official workarounds are available for this vulnerability. Users should upgrade to version 1.121.0 or later to remediate the vulnerability. Three technical links…

  • 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 David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, on January 27, 2026, at 1:30 PM ET. I’m speaking at the Université de Montréal in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, on January 29, 2026,…

  • Hacking Wheelchairs over Bluetooth

    Hacking Wheelchairs over Bluetooth Researchers have demonstrated remotely controlling a wheelchair over Bluetooth. CISA has issued an advisory. CISA said the WHILL wheelchairs did not enforce authentication for Bluetooth connections, allowing an attacker who is in Bluetooth range of the targeted device to pair with it. The attacker could then control the wheelchair’s movements, override…

  • 1980s Hacker Manifesto

    1980s Hacker Manifesto Forty years ago, The Mentor—Loyd Blankenship—published “The Conscience of a Hacker” in Phrack. You bet your ass we’re all alike… we’ve been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak… the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We’ve been dominated by sadists, or…

  • Corrupting LLMs Through Weird Generalizations

    Corrupting LLMs Through Weird Generalizations Fascinating research: Weird Generalization and Inductive Backdoors: New Ways to Corrupt LLMs. AbstractLLMs are useful because they generalize so well. But can you have too much of a good thing? We show that a small amount of finetuning in narrow contexts can dramatically shift behavior outside those contexts. In one…

  • Palo Alto Crosswalk Signals Had Default Passwords

    Palo Alto Crosswalk Signals Had Default Passwords Palo Alto’s crosswalk signals were hacked last year. Turns out the city never changed the default passwords. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Friday Squid Blogging: The Chinese Squid-Fishing Fleet off the Argentine Coast

    Friday Squid Blogging: The Chinese Squid-Fishing Fleet off the Argentine Coast The latest article on this topic. 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 bruce schneier

  • What tools help reduce fraud or friendly fraud for online businesses? 

    What tools help reduce fraud or friendly fraud for online businesses?    A customer buys. You ship. Everyone seems happy. Then, a few weeks later, you get a chargeback. Or you notice the same card being tried again and again in a few seconds, failing at first and then working. It can be a sign someone…

  • AI & Humans: Making the Relationship Work

    AI & Humans: Making the Relationship Work Leaders of many organizations are urging their teams to adopt agentic AI to improve efficiency, but are finding it hard to achieve any benefit. Managers attempting to add AI agents to existing human teams may find that bots fail to faithfully follow their instructions, return pointless or obvious…

  • The Wegman’s Supermarket Chain Is Probably Using Facial Recognition

    The Wegman’s Supermarket Chain Is Probably Using Facial Recognition The New York City Wegman’s is collecting biometric information about customers. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • A Cyberattack Was Part of the US Assault on Venezuela

    A Cyberattack Was Part of the US Assault on Venezuela We don’t have many details: President Donald Trump suggested Saturday that the U.S. used cyberattacks or other technical capabilities to cut power off in Caracas during strikes on the Venezuelan capital that led to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. If true, it would…

  • Telegram Hosting World’s Largest Darknet Market

    Telegram Hosting World’s Largest Darknet Market Wired is reporting on Chinese darknet markets on Telegram. The ecosystem of marketplaces for Chinese-speaking crypto scammers hosted on the messaging service Telegram have now grown to be bigger than ever before, according to a new analysis from the crypto tracing firm Elliptic. Despite a brief drop after Telegram…

  • Flock Exposes Its AI-Enabled Surveillance Cameras

    Flock Exposes Its AI-Enabled Surveillance Cameras 404 Media has the story: Unlike many of Flock’s cameras, which are designed to capture license plates as people drive by, Flock’s Condor cameras are pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras designed to record and track people, not vehicles. Condor cameras can be set to automatically zoom in on people’s faces as…

  • Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Found in Light Fixture

    Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Found in Light Fixture Probably a college prank. 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 bruce schneier

  • WhatsApp Crypt Tool to Encrypt and Decrypt WhatsApp Backups

    WhatsApp Crypt Tool to Encrypt and Decrypt WhatsApp Backups An open-source solution for handling encrypted WhatsApp backups. The wa-crypt-tools suite, hosted on GitHub, decrypts and encrypts .crypt12, .crypt14, and .crypt15 files from WhatsApp and WhatsApp Business, provided users supply the required key file or 64-character key.​ wa-crypt-tools simplifies access to WhatsApp’s end-to-end encrypted backups, which…

  • LinkedIn Job Scams

    LinkedIn Job Scams Interesting article on the variety of LinkedIn job scams around the world: In India, tech jobs are used as bait because the industry employs millions of people and offers high-paying roles. In Kenya, the recruitment industry is largely unorganized, so scamsters leverage fake personal referrals. In Mexico, bad actors capitalize on the…

  • Using AI-Generated Images to Get Refunds

    Using AI-Generated Images to Get Refunds Scammers are generating images of broken merchandise in order to apply for refunds. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier