It’s been the biggest year for elections in human history: 2024 is a “super-cycle” year in which 3.7 billion eligible voters in 72 countries had the chance to go the polls. These are also the first AI elections, where many…
Category: Schneier on Security
Good Essay on the History of Bad Password Policies
Stuart Schechter makes some good points on the history of bad password policies: Morris and Thompson’s work brought much-needed data to highlight a problem that lots of people suspected was bad, but that had not been studied scientifically. Their work…
New iOS Security Feature Makes It Harder for Police to Unlock Seized Phones
Everybody is reporting about a new security iPhone security feature with iOS 18: if the phone hasn’t been used for a few days, it automatically goes into its “Before First Unlock” state and has to be rebooted. This is a…
Mapping License Plate Scanners in the US
DeFlock is a crowd-sourced project to map license plate scanners. It only records the fixed scanners, of course. The mobile scanners on cars are not mapped. The post Mapping License Plate Scanners in the US appeared first on Schneier on…
Criminals Exploiting FBI Emergency Data Requests
I’ve been writing about the problem with lawful-access backdoors in encryption for decades now: that as soon as you create a mechanism for law enforcement to bypass encryption, the bad guys will use it too. Turns out the same thing…
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid-A-Rama in Des Moines
Squid-A-Rama will be in Des Moines at the end of the month. Visitors will be able to dissect squid, explore fascinating facts about the species, and witness a live squid release conducted by local divers. How are they doing a…
AI Industry is Trying to Subvert the Definition of “Open Source AI”
The Open Source Initiative has published (news article here) its definition of “open source AI,” and it’s terrible. It allows for secret training data and mechanisms. It allows for development to be done in secret. Since for a neural network,…
Prompt Injection Defenses Against LLM Cyberattacks
Interesting research: “Hacking Back the AI-Hacker: Prompt Injection as a Defense Against LLM-driven Cyberattacks“: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being harnessed to automate cyberattacks, making sophisticated exploits more accessible and scalable. In response, we propose a new defense strategy…
Subverting LLM Coders
Really interesting research: “An LLM-Assisted Easy-to-Trigger Backdoor Attack on Code Completion Models: Injecting Disguised Vulnerabilities against Strong Detection“: Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed code com- pletion tasks, providing context-based suggestions to boost developer productivity in software engineering. As…
IoT Devices in Password-Spraying Botnet
Microsoft is warning Azure cloud users that a Chinese controlled botnet is engaging in “highly evasive” password spraying. Not sure about the “highly evasive” part; the techniques seem basically what you get in a distributed password-guessing attack: “Any threat actor…
AIs Discovering Vulnerabilities
I’ve been writing about the possibility of AIs automatically discovering code vulnerabilities since at least 2018. This is an ongoing area of research: AIs doing source code scanning, AIs finding zero-days in the wild, and everything in between. The AIs…
Sophos Versus the Chinese Hackers
Really interesting story of Sophos’s five-year war against Chinese hackers. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Sophos Versus the Chinese Hackers
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Sculpture in Massachusetts Building
Great blow-up sculpture. Blog moderation policy. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Sculpture in Massachusetts Building
Roger Grimes on Prioritizing Cybersecurity Advice
This is a good point: Part of the problem is that we are constantly handed lists…list of required controls…list of things we are being asked to fix or improve…lists of new projects…lists of threats, and so on, that are not…
Tracking World Leaders Using Strava
Way back in 2018, people noticed that you could find secret military bases using data published by the Strava fitness app. Soldiers and other military personal were using them to track their runs, and you could look at the public…
Simson Garfinkel on Spooky Cryptographic Action at a Distance
Excellent read. One example: Consider the case of basic public key cryptography, in which a person’s public and private key are created together in a single operation. These two keys are entangled, not with quantum physics, but with math. When…
Simpson Garfinkel on Spooky Cryptographic Action at a Distance
Excellent read. One example: Consider the case of basic public key cryptography, in which a person’s public and private key are created together in a single operation. These two keys are entangled, not with quantum physics, but with math. When…
Law Enforcement Deanonymizes Tor Users
The German police have successfully deanonymized at least four Tor users. It appears they watch known Tor relays and known suspects, and use timing analysis to figure out who is using what relay. Tor has written about this. Hacker News…
Criminals Are Blowing up ATMs in Germany
It’s low tech, but effective. Why Germany? It has more ATMs than other European countries, and—if I read the article right—they have more money in them. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Criminals…
Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid Found on Spanish Beach
A giant squid has washed up on a beach in Northern Spain. Blog moderation policy. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid Found on Spanish Beach