serisec

Tag: bruce schneier

  • AIs Exploiting Smart Contracts

    AIs Exploiting Smart Contracts I have long maintained that smart contracts are a dumb idea: that a human process is actually a security feature. Here’s some interesting research on training AIs to automatically exploit smart contracts: AI models are increasingly good at cyber tasks, as we’ve written about before. But what is the economic impact…

  • FBI Warns of Fake Video Scams

    FBI Warns of Fake Video Scams The FBI is warning of AI-assisted fake kidnapping scams: Criminal actors typically will contact their victims through text message claiming they have kidnapped their loved one and demand a ransom be paid for their release. Oftentimes, the criminal actor will express significant claims of violence towards the loved one…

  • AI vs. Human Drivers

    AI vs. Human Drivers Two competing arguments are making the rounds. The first is by a neurosurgeon in the New York Times. In an op-ed that honestly sounds like it was paid for by Waymo, the author calls driverless cars a “public health breakthrough”: In medical research, there’s a practice of ending a study early…

  • Substitution Cipher Based on The Voynich Manuscript

    Substitution Cipher Based on The Voynich Manuscript Here’s a fun paper: “The Naibbe cipher: a substitution cipher that encrypts Latin and Italian as Voynich Manuscript-like ciphertext“: Abstract: In this article, I investigate the hypothesis that the Voynich Manuscript (MS 408, Yale University Beinecke Library) is compatible with being a ciphertext by attempting to develop a…

  • New Anonymous Phone Service

    New Anonymous Phone Service A new anonymous phone service allows you to sign up with just a zip code. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Friday Squid Blogging: Vampire Squid Genome

    Friday Squid Blogging: Vampire Squid Genome The vampire squid (Vampyroteuthis infernalis) has the largest cephalopod genome ever sequenced: more than 11 billion base pairs. That’s more than twice as large as the biggest squid genomes. It’s technically not a squid: “The vampire squid is a fascinating twig tenaciously hanging onto the cephalopod family tree. It’s…

  • Like Social Media, AI Requires Difficult Choices

    Like Social Media, AI Requires Difficult Choices In his 2020 book, “Future Politics,” British barrister Jamie Susskind wrote that the dominant question of the 20th century was “How much of our collective life should be determined by the state, and what should be left to the market and civil society?” But in the early decades…

  • Banning VPNs

    Banning VPNs This is crazy. Lawmakers in several US states are contemplating banning VPNs, because…think of the children! As of this writing, Wisconsin lawmakers are escalating their war on privacy by targeting VPNs in the name of “protecting children” in A.B. 105/S.B. 130. It’s an age verification bill that requires all websites distributing material that…

  • Prompt Injection Through Poetry

    Prompt Injection Through Poetry In a new paper, “Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models,” researchers found that turning LLM prompts into poetry resulted in jailbreaking the models: Abstract: We present evidence that adversarial poetry functions as a universal single-turn jailbreak technique for Large Language Models (LLMs). Across 25 frontier…

  • Friday Squid Blogging: Flying Neon Squid Found on Israeli Beach

    Friday Squid Blogging: Flying Neon Squid Found on Israeli Beach A meter-long flying neon squid (Ommastrephes bartramii) was found dead on an Israeli beach. The species is rare in the Mediterranean. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Huawei and Chinese Surveillance

    Huawei and Chinese Surveillance This quote is from House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company. “Long before anyone had heard of Ren Zhengfei or Huawei, Wan Runnan had been China’s star entrepreneur in the 1980s, with his company, the Stone Group, touted as “China’s IBM.” Wan had believed that economic change…

  • Four Ways AI Is Being Used to Strengthen Democracies Worldwide

    Four Ways AI Is Being Used to Strengthen Democracies Worldwide Democracy is colliding with the technologies of artificial intelligence. Judging from the audience reaction at the recent World Forum on Democracy in Strasbourg, the general expectation is that democracy will be the worse for it. We have another narrative. Yes, there are risks to democracy…

  • IACR Nullifies Election Because of Lost Decryption Key

    IACR Nullifies Election Because of Lost Decryption Key The International Association of Cryptologic Research—the academic cryptography association that’s been putting conferences like Crypto (back when “crypto” meant “cryptography”) and Eurocrypt since the 1980s—had to nullify an online election when trustee Moti Yung lost his decryption key. For this election and in accordance with the bylaws…

  • More on Rewiring Democracy

    More on Rewiring Democracy It’s been a month since Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship was published. From what we know, sales are good. Some of the book’s forty-three chapters are available online: chapters 2, 12, 28, 34, 38, and 41. We need more reviews—six on Amazon is not enough,…

  • Friday Squid Blogging: New “Squid” Sneaker

    Friday Squid Blogging: New “Squid” Sneaker I did not know Adidas sold a sneaker called “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. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • AI as Cyberattacker

    AI as Cyberattacker From Anthropic: In mid-September 2025, we detected suspicious activity that later investigation determined to be a highly sophisticated espionage campaign. The attackers used AI’s “agentic” capabilities to an unprecedented degree­—using AI not just as an advisor, but to execute the cyberattacks themselves. The threat actor—­whom we assess with high confidence was a…

  • Scam USPS and E-Z Pass Texts and Websites

    Scam USPS and E-Z Pass Texts and Websites Google has filed a complaint in court that details the scam: In a complaint filed Wednesday, the tech giant accused “a cybercriminal group in China” of selling “phishing for dummies” kits. The kits help unsavvy fraudsters easily “execute a large-scale phishing campaign,” tricking hordes of unsuspecting people…

  • Legal Restrictions on Vulnerability Disclosure

    Legal Restrictions on Vulnerability Disclosure Kendra Albert gave an excellent talk at USENIX Security this year, pointing out that the legal agreements surrounding vulnerability disclosure muzzle researchers while allowing companies to not fix the vulnerabilities—exactly the opposite of what the responsible disclosure movement of the early 2000s was supposed to prevent. This is the talk.…

  • AI and Voter Engagement

    AI and Voter Engagement Social media has been a familiar, even mundane, part of life for nearly two decades. It can be easy to forget it was not always that way. In 2008, social media was just emerging into the mainstream. Facebook reached 100 million users that summer. And a singular candidate was integrating social…

  • More Prompt||GTFO

    More Prompt||GTFO The next three in this series on online events highlighting interesting uses of AI in cybersecurity are online: #4, #5, and #6. Well worth watching. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Friday Squid Blogging: Pilot Whales Eat a Lot of Squid

    Friday Squid Blogging: Pilot Whales Eat a Lot of Squid Short-finned pilot wales (Globicephala macrorhynchus) eat at lot of squid: To figure out a short-finned pilot whale’s caloric intake, Gough says, the team had to combine data from a variety of sources, including movement data from short-lasting tags, daily feeding rates from satellite tags, body…

  • The Role of Humans in an AI-Powered World

    The Role of Humans in an AI-Powered World As AI capabilities grow, we must delineate the roles that should remain exclusively human. The line seems to be between fact-based decisions and judgment-based decisions. For example, in a medical context, if an AI was demonstrably better at reading a test result and diagnosing cancer than a…

  • Upcoming Speaking Engagements

    Upcoming Speaking Engagements This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: My coauthor Nathan E. Sanders and I are speaking at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC at noon ET on November 17, 2025. The event is hosted by the POPVOX Foundation and the topic is “AI…

  • Book Review: The Business of Secrets

    Book Review: The Business of Secrets The Business of Secrets: Adventures in Selling Encryption Around the World by Fred Kinch (May 24, 2004) From the vantage point of today, it’s surreal reading about the commercial cryptography business in the 1970s. Nobody knew anything. The manufacturers didn’t know whether the cryptography they sold was any good.…

  • On Hacking Back

    On Hacking Back Former DoJ attorney John Carlin writes about hackback, which he defines thus: “A hack back is a type of cyber response that incorporates a counterattack designed to proactively engage with, disable, or collect evidence about an attacker. Although hack backs can take on various forms, they are—­by definition­—not passive defensive measures.” His…

  • Prompt Injection in AI Browsers

    Prompt Injection in AI Browsers This is why AIs are not ready to be personal assistants: A new attack called ‘CometJacking’ exploits URL parameters to pass to Perplexity’s Comet AI browser hidden instructions that allow access to sensitive data from connected services, like email and calendar. In a realistic scenario, no credentials or user interaction…

  • New Attacks Against Secure Enclaves

    New Attacks Against Secure Enclaves Encryption can protect data at rest and data in transit, but does nothing for data in use. What we have are secure enclaves. I’ve written about this before: Almost all cloud services have to perform some computation on our data. Even the simplest storage provider has code to copy bytes…

  • Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Game: The Challenge, Season Two

    Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Game: The Challenge, Season Two The second season of the Netflix reality competition show Squid Game: The Challenge has dropped. (Too many links to pick a few—search for it.) As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.…

  • Faking Receipts with AI

    Faking Receipts with AI Over the past few decades, it’s become easier and easier to create fake receipts. Decades ago, it required special paper and printers—I remember a company in the UK advertising its services to people trying to cover up their affairs. Then, receipts became computerized, and faking them required some artistic skills to…

  • Rigged Poker Games

    Rigged Poker Games The Department of Justice has indicted thirty-one people over the high-tech rigging of high-stakes poker games. In a typical legitimate poker game, a dealer uses a shuffling machine to shuffle the cards randomly before dealing them to all the players in a particular order. As set forth in the indictment, the rigged…

  • Scientists Need a Positive Vision for AI

    Scientists Need a Positive Vision for AI For many in the research community, it’s gotten harder to be optimistic about the impacts of artificial intelligence. As authoritarianism is rising around the world, AI-generated “slop” is overwhelming legitimate media, while AI-generated deepfakes are spreading misinformation and parroting extremist messages. AI is making warfare more precise and…

  • Cybercriminals Targeting Payroll Sites

    Cybercriminals Targeting Payroll Sites Microsoft is warning of a scam involving online payroll systems. Criminals use social engineering to steal people’s credentials, and then divert direct deposits into accounts that they control. Sometimes they do other things to make it harder for the victim to realize what is happening. I feel like this kind of…

  • AI Summarization Optimization

    AI Summarization Optimization These days, the most important meeting attendee isn’t a person: It’s the AI notetaker. This system assigns action items and determines the importance of what is said. If it becomes necessary to revisit the facts of the meeting, its summary is treated as impartial evidence. But clever meeting attendees can manipulate this…

  • Will AI Strengthen or Undermine Democracy?

    Will AI Strengthen or Undermine Democracy? Listen to the Audio on NextBigIdeaClub.com Below, co-authors Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders share five key insights from their new book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship. What’s the big idea? AI can be used both for and against the public interest within…

  • Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid at the Smithsonian

    Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid at the Smithsonian I can’t believe that I haven’t yet posted this picture of a giant squid at the Smithsonian. 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…

  • The AI-Designed Bioweapon Arms Race

    The AI-Designed Bioweapon Arms Race Interesting article about the arms race between AI systems that invent/design new biological pathogens, and AI systems that detect them before they’re created: The team started with a basic test: use AI tools to design variants of the toxin ricin, then test them against the software that is used to…

  • Signal’s Post-Quantum Cryptographic Implementation

    Signal’s Post-Quantum Cryptographic Implementation Signal has just rolled out its quantum-safe cryptographic implementation. Ars Technica has a really good article with details: Ultimately, the architects settled on a creative solution. Rather than bolt KEM onto the existing double ratchet, they allowed it to remain more or less the same as it had been. Then they…

  • Social Engineering People’s Credit Card Details

    Social Engineering People’s Credit Card Details Good Wall Street Journal article on criminal gangs that scam people out of their credit card information: Your highway toll payment is now past due, one text warns. You have U.S. Postal Service fees to pay, another threatens. You owe the New York City Department of Finance for unpaid…

  • First Wap: A Surveillance Computer You’ve Never Heard Of

    First Wap: A Surveillance Computer You’ve Never Heard Of Mother Jones has a long article on surveillance arms manufacturers, their wares, and how they avoid export control laws: Operating from their base in Jakarta, where permissive export laws have allowed their surveillance business to flourish, First Wap’s European founders and executives have quietly built a…

  • Louvre Jewel Heist

    Louvre Jewel Heist I assume I don’t have to explain last week’s Louvre jewel heist. I love a good caper, and have (like many others) eagerly followed the details. An electric ladder to a second-floor window, an angle grinder to get into the room and the display cases, security guards there more to protect patrons…

  • Friday Squid Blogging: “El Pulpo The Squid”

    Friday Squid Blogging: “El Pulpo The Squid” There is a new cigar named “El Pulpo The Squid.” Yes, that means “The Octopus The 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. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Part Four of The Kryptos Sculpture

    Part Four of The Kryptos Sculpture Two people found the solution. They used the power of research, not cryptanalysis, finding clues amongst the Sanborn papers at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. This comes as an awkward time, as Sanborn is auctioning off the solution. There were legal threats—I don’t understand their basis—and the solvers…

  • Serious F5 Breach

    Serious F5 Breach This is bad: F5, a Seattle-based maker of networking software, disclosed the breach on Wednesday. F5 said a “sophisticated” threat group working for an undisclosed nation-state government had surreptitiously and persistently dwelled in its network over a “long-term.” Security researchers who have responded to similar intrusions in the past took the language…

  • Failures in Face Recognition

    Failures in Face Recognition Interesting article on people with nonstandard faces and how facial recognition systems fail for them. Some of those living with facial differences tell WIRED they have undergone multiple surgeries and experienced stigma for their entire lives, which is now being echoed by the technology they are forced to interact with. They…

  • A Cybersecurity Merit Badge

    A Cybersecurity Merit Badge Scouting America (formerly known as Boy Scouts) has a new badge in cybersecurity. There’s an image in the article; it looks good. I want one. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Agentic AI’s OODA Loop Problem

    Agentic AI’s OODA Loop Problem The OODA loop—for observe, orient, decide, act—is a framework to understand decision-making in adversarial situations. We apply the same framework to artificial intelligence agents, who have to make their decisions with untrustworthy observations and orientation. To solve this problem, we need new systems of input, processing, and output integrity. Many…

  • A Surprising Amount of Satellite Traffic Is Unencrypted

    A Surprising Amount of Satellite Traffic Is Unencrypted Here’s the summary: We pointed a commercial-off-the-shelf satellite dish at the sky and carried out the most comprehensive public study to date of geostationary satellite communication. A shockingly large amount of sensitive traffic is being broadcast unencrypted, including critical infrastructure, internal corporate and government communications, private citizens’…

  • Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Inks Philippines Fisherman

    Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Inks Philippines Fisherman Good video. 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

  • Cryptocurrency ATMs

    Cryptocurrency ATMs CNN has a great piece about how cryptocurrency ATMs are used to scam people out of their money. The fees are usurious, and they’re a common place for scammers to send victims to buy cryptocurrency for them. The companies behind the ATMs, at best, do not care about the harm they cause; the…

  • Apple’s Bug Bounty Program

    Apple’s Bug Bounty Program Apple is now offering a $2M bounty for a zero-click exploit. According to the Apple website: Today we’re announcing the next major chapter for Apple Security Bounty, featuring the industry’s highest rewards, expanded research categories, and a flag system for researchers to objectively demonstrate vulnerabilities and obtain accelerated awards. We’re doubling…

  • The Trump Administration’s Increased Use of Social Media Surveillance

    The Trump Administration’s Increased Use of Social Media Surveillance This chilling paragraph is in a comprehensive Brookings report about the use of tech to deport people from the US: The administration has also adapted its methods of social media surveillance. Though agencies like the State Department have gathered millions of handles and monitored political discussions…

  • Upcoming Speaking Engagements

    Upcoming Speaking Engagements This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: Nathan E. Sanders and I will be giving a book talk on Rewiring Democracy at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, on October 22, 2025, at noon ET. Nathan E. Sanders and I will be…

  • AI and the Future of American Politics

    AI and the Future of American Politics Two years ago, Americans anxious about the forthcoming 2024 presidential election were considering the malevolent force of an election influencer: artificial intelligence. Over the past several years, we have seen plenty of warning signs from elections worldwide demonstrating how AI can be used to propagate misinformation and alter…

  • Rewiring Democracy is Coming Soon

    Rewiring Democracy is Coming Soon My latest book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship, will be published in just over a week. No reviews yet, but can read chapters 12 and 34 (of 43 chapters total). You can order the book pretty much everywhere, and a copy signed by me…

  • Autonomous AI Hacking and the Future of Cybersecurity

    Autonomous AI Hacking and the Future of Cybersecurity AI agents are now hacking computers. They’re getting better at all phases of cyberattacks, faster than most of us expected. They can chain together different aspects of a cyber operation, and hack autonomously, at computer speeds and scale. This is going to change everything. Over the summer,…

  • Friday Squid Blogging: Sperm Whale Eating a Giant Squid

    Friday Squid Blogging: Sperm Whale Eating a Giant Squid Video. 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

  • Flok License Plate Surveillance

    Flok License Plate Surveillance The company Flok is surveilling us as we drive: A retired veteran named Lee Schmidt wanted to know how often Norfolk, Virginia’s 176 Flock Safety automated license-plate-reader cameras were tracking him. The answer, according to a U.S. District Court lawsuit filed in September, was more than four times a day, or…

  • AI-Enabled Influence Operation Against Iran

    AI-Enabled Influence Operation Against Iran Citizen Lab has uncovered a coordinated AI-enabled influence operation against the Iranian government, probably conducted by Israel. Key Findings A coordinated network of more than 50 inauthentic X profiles is conducting an AI-enabled influence operation. The network, which we refer to as “PRISONBREAK,” is spreading narratives inciting Iranian audiences to…

  • AI in the 2026 Midterm Elections

    AI in the 2026 Midterm Elections We are nearly one year out from the 2026 midterm elections, and it’s far too early to predict the outcomes. But it’s a safe bet that artificial intelligence technologies will once again be a major storyline. The widespread fear that AI would be used to manipulate the 2024 U.S.…

  • Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Overfishing in the Southwest Atlantic

    Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Overfishing in the Southwest Atlantic Article. Report. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Daniel Miessler on the AI Attack/Defense Balance

    Daniel Miessler on the AI Attack/Defense Balance His conclusion: Context wins Basically whoever can see the most about the target, and can hold that picture in their mind the best, will be best at finding the vulnerabilities the fastest and taking advantage of them. Or, as the defender, applying patches or mitigations the fastest. And…

  • Use of Generative AI in Scams

    Use of Generative AI in Scams New report: “Scam GPT: GenAI and the Automation of Fraud.” This primer maps what we currently know about generative AI’s role in scams, the communities most at risk, and the broader economic and cultural shifts that are making people more willing to take risks, more vulnerable to deception, and…

  • Details of a Scam

    Details of a Scam Longtime Crypto-Gram readers know that I collect personal experiences of people being scammed. Here’s an almost: Then he added, “Here at Chase, we’ll never ask for your personal information or passwords.” On the contrary, he gave me more information—two “cancellation codes” and a long case number with four letters and 10…

  • Abusing Notion’s AI Agent for Data Theft

    Abusing Notion’s AI Agent for Data Theft Notion just released version 3.0, complete with AI agents. Because the system contains Simon Willson’s lethal trifecta, it’s vulnerable to data theft though prompt injection. First, the trifecta: The lethal trifecta of capabilities is: Access to your private data—one of the most common purposes of tools in the…

  • Digital Threat Modeling Under Authoritarianism

    Digital Threat Modeling Under Authoritarianism Today’s world requires us to make complex and nuanced decisions about our digital security. Evaluating when to use a secure messaging app like Signal or WhatsApp, which passwords to store on your smartphone, or what to share on social media requires us to assess risks and make judgments accordingly. Arriving…

  • Friday Squid Blogging: Jigging for Squid

    Friday Squid Blogging: Jigging for Squid A nice story. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Malicious-Looking URL Creation Service

    Malicious-Looking URL Creation Service This site turns your URL into something sketchy-looking. For example, www.schneier.com becomes https://cheap-bitcoin.online/firewall-snatcher/cipher-injector/phishing_sniffer_tool.html?form=inject&host=spoof&id=bb1bc121&parameter=inject&payload=%28function%28%29%7B+return+%27+hi+%27.trim%28%29%3B+%7D%29%28%29%3B&port=spoof. Found on Boing Boing. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • US Disrupts Massive Cell Phone Array in New York

    US Disrupts Massive Cell Phone Array in New York This is a weird story: The US Secret Service disrupted a network of telecommunications devices that could have shut down cellular systems as leaders gather for the United Nations General Assembly in New York City. The agency said on Tuesday that last month it found more…

  • Apple’s New Memory Integrity Enforcement

    Apple’s New Memory Integrity Enforcement Apple has introduced a new hardware/software security feature in the iPhone 17: “Memory Integrity Enforcement,” targeting the memory safety vulnerabilities that spyware products like Pegasus tend to use to get unauthorized system access. From Wired: In recent years, a movement has been steadily growing across the global tech industry to…

  • Details About Chinese Surveillance and Propaganda Companies

    Details About Chinese Surveillance and Propaganda Companies Details from leaked documents: While people often look at China’s Great Firewall as a single, all-powerful government system unique to China, the actual process of developing and maintaining it works the same way as surveillance technology in the West. Geedge collaborates with academic institutions on research and development,…

  • Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid vs. Blue Whale

    Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid vs. Blue Whale A comparison aimed at kids. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Surveying the Global Spyware Market

    Surveying the Global Spyware Market The Atlantic Council has published its second annual report: “Mythical Beasts: Diving into the depths of the global spyware market.” Too much good detail to summarize, but here are two items: First, the authors found that the number of US-based investors in spyware has notably increased in the past year,…

  • Time-of-Check Time-of-Use Attacks Against LLMs

    Time-of-Check Time-of-Use Attacks Against LLMs This is a nice piece of research: “Mind the Gap: Time-of-Check to Time-of-Use Vulnerabilities in LLM-Enabled Agents“.: Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM)-enabled agents are rapidly emerging across a wide range of applications, but their deployment introduces vulnerabilities with security implications. While prior work has examined prompt-based attacks (e.g., prompt injection)…

  • Hacking Electronic Safes

    Hacking Electronic Safes Vulnerabilities in electronic safes that use Securam Prologic locks: While both their techniques represent glaring security vulnerabilities, Omo says it’s the one that exploits a feature intended as a legitimate unlock method for locksmiths that’s the more widespread and dangerous. “This attack is something where, if you had a safe with this…

  • Microsoft Still Uses RC4

    Microsoft Still Uses RC4 Senator Ron Wyden has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Microsoft over its continued use of the RC4 encryption algorithm. The letter talks about a hacker technique called Kerberoasting, that exploits the Kerberos authentication system. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Lawsuit About WhatsApp Security

    Lawsuit About WhatsApp Security Attaullah Baig, WhatsApp’s former head of security, has filed a whistleblower lawsuit alleging that Facebook deliberately failed to fix a bunch of security flaws, in violation of its 2019 settlement agreement with the Federal Trade Commission. The lawsuit, alleging violations of the whistleblower protection provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act passed in…

  • Upcoming Speaking Engagements

    Upcoming Speaking Engagements This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking and signing books at the Cambridge Public Library on October 22, 2025 at 6 PM ET. The event is sponsored by Harvard Bookstore. I’m giving a virtual talk about my book Rewiring Democracy at 1 PM…

  • A Cyberattack Victim Notification Framework

    A Cyberattack Victim Notification Framework Interesting analysis: When cyber incidents occur, victims should be notified in a timely manner so they have the opportunity to assess and remediate any harm. However, providing notifications has proven a challenge across industry. When making notifications, companies often do not know the true identity of victims and may only…

  • Assessing the Quality of Dried Squid

    Assessing the Quality of Dried Squid Research: Nondestructive detection of multiple dried squid qualities by hyperspectral imaging combined with 1D-KAN-CNN Abstract: Given that dried squid is a highly regarded marine product in Oriental countries, the global food industry requires a swift and noninvasive quality assessment of this product. The current study therefore uses visible­near-infrared (VIS-NIR)…

  • New Cryptanalysis of the Fiat-Shamir Protocol

    New Cryptanalysis of the Fiat-Shamir Protocol A couple of months ago, a new paper demonstrated some new attacks against the Fiat-Shamir transformation. Quanta published a good article that explains the results. This is a pretty exciting paper from a theoretical perspective, but I don’t see it leading to any practical real-world cryptanalysis. The fact that…

  • AI in Government

    AI in Government Just a few months after Elon Musk’s retreat from his unofficial role leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), we have a clearer picture of his vision of government powered by artificial intelligence, and it has a lot more to do with consolidating power than benefitting the public. Even so, we must…

  • Signed Copies of Rewiring Democracy

    Signed Copies of Rewiring Democracy When I announced my latest book last week, I forgot to mention that you can pre-order a signed copy here. I will ship the books the week of 10/20, when it is published. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • 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…

  • My Latest Book: Rewiring Democracy

    My Latest Book: Rewiring Democracy I am pleased to announce the imminent publication of my latest book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI will Transform our Politics, Government, and Citizenship: coauthored with Nathan Sanders, and published by MIT Press on October 21. Rewiring Democracy looks beyond common tropes like deepfakes to examine how AI technologies will affect…

  • Friday Squid Blogging: The Origin and Propagation of Squid

    Friday Squid Blogging: The Origin and Propagation of Squid New research (paywalled): Editor’s summary: Cephalopods are one of the most successful marine invertebrates in modern oceans, and they have a 500-million-year-old history. However, we know very little about their evolution because soft-bodied animals rarely fossilize. Ikegami et al. developed an approach to reveal squid fossils,…

  • Generative AI as a Cybercrime Assistant

    Generative AI as a Cybercrime Assistant Anthropic reports on a Claude user: We recently disrupted a sophisticated cybercriminal that used Claude Code to commit large-scale theft and extortion of personal data. The actor targeted at least 17 distinct organizations, including in healthcare, the emergency services, and government and religious institutions. Rather than encrypt the stolen…

  • Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks Against LLM Assistants

    Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks Against LLM Assistants Really good research on practical attacks against LLM agents. “Invitation Is All You Need! Promptware Attacks Against LLM-Powered Assistants in Production Are Practical and Dangerous” Abstract: The growing integration of LLMs into applications has introduced new security risks, notably known as Promptware­—maliciously engineered prompts designed to manipulate LLMs…

  • 1965 Cryptanalysis Training Workbook Released by the NSA

    1965 Cryptanalysis Training Workbook Released by the NSA In the early 1960s, National Security Agency cryptanalyst and cryptanalysis instructor Lambros D. Callimahos coined the term “Stethoscope” to describe a diagnostic computer program used to unravel the internal structure of pre-computer ciphertexts. The term appears in the newly declassified September 1965 document Cryptanalytic Diagnosis with the…

  • Baggage Tag Scam

    Baggage Tag Scam I just heard about this: There’s a travel scam warning going around the internet right now: You should keep your baggage tags on your bags until you get home, then shred them, because scammers are using luggage tags to file fraudulent claims for missing baggage with the airline. First, the scam is…

  • Friday Squid Blogging: Catching Humboldt Squid

    Friday Squid Blogging: Catching Humboldt Squid First-person account of someone accidentally catching several Humboldt squid on a fishing line. No photos, though. 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

  • The UK May Be Dropping Its Backdoor Mandate

    The UK May Be Dropping Its Backdoor Mandate The US Director of National Intelligence is reporting that the UK government is dropping its backdoor mandate against the Apple iPhone. For now, at least, assuming that Tulsi Gabbard is reporting this accurately. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • We Are Still Unable to Secure LLMs from Malicious Inputs

    We Are Still Unable to Secure LLMs from Malicious Inputs Nice indirect prompt injection attack: Bargury’s attack starts with a poisoned document, which is shared to a potential victim’s Google Drive. (Bargury says a victim could have also uploaded a compromised file to their own account.) It looks like an official document on company meeting…

  • Encryption Backdoor in Military/Police Radios

    Encryption Backdoor in Military/Police Radios I wrote about this in 2023. Here’s the story: Three Dutch security analysts discovered the vulnerabilities­—five in total—­in a European radio standard called TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio), which is used in radios made by Motorola, Damm, Hytera, and others. The standard has been used in radios since the ’90s, but…

  • Poor Password Choices

    Poor Password Choices Look at this: McDonald’s chose the password “123456” for a major corporate system. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • AI Agents Need Data Integrity

    AI Agents Need Data Integrity Think of the Web as a digital territory with its own social contract. In 2014, Tim Berners-Lee called for a “Magna Carta for the Web” to restore the balance of power between individuals and institutions. This mirrors the original charter’s purpose: ensuring that those who occupy a territory have a…

  • I’m Spending the Year at the Munk School

    I’m Spending the Year at the Munk School This academic year, I am taking a sabbatical from the Kennedy School and Harvard University. (It’s not a real sabbatical—I’m just an adjunct—but it’s the same idea.) I will be spending the Fall 2025 and Spring 2026 semesters at the Munk School at the University of Toronto.…

  • Friday Squid Blogging: Bobtail Squid

    Friday Squid Blogging: Bobtail Squid Nice short article on the bobtail 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. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Jim Sanborn Is Auctioning Off the Solution to Part Four of the Kryptos Sculpture

    Jim Sanborn Is Auctioning Off the Solution to Part Four of the Kryptos Sculpture Well, this is interesting: The auction, which will include other items related to cryptology, will be held Nov. 20. RR Auction, the company arranging the sale, estimates a winning bid between $300,000 and $500,000. Along with the original handwritten plain text…

  • Subverting AIOps Systems Through Poisoned Input Data

    Subverting AIOps Systems Through Poisoned Input Data In this input integrity attack against an AI system, researchers were able to fool AIOps tools: AIOps refers to the use of LLM-based agents to gather and analyze application telemetry, including system logs, performance metrics, traces, and alerts, to detect problems and then suggest or carry out corrective…

  • Zero-Day Exploit in WinRAR File

    Zero-Day Exploit in WinRAR File A zero-day vulnerability in WinRAR is being exploited by at least two Russian criminal groups: The vulnerability seemed to have super Windows powers. It abused alternate data streams, a Windows feature that allows different ways of representing the same file path. The exploit abused that feature to trigger a previously…