Category: Schneier on Security

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…

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…

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. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Palo Alto Crosswalk Signals Had Default Passwords