As India concluded the world’s largest election on June 5, 2024, with over 640 million votes counted, observers could assess how the various parties and factions used artificial intelligence technologies—and what lessons that holds for the rest of the world.…
Category: Schneier on Security
Using AI for Political Polling
Public polling is a critical function of modern political campaigns and movements, but it isn’t what it once was. Recent US election cycles have produced copious postmortems explaining both the successes and the flaws of public polling. There are two…
Security and Human Behavior (SHB) 2024
This week, I hosted the seventeenth Workshop on Security and Human Behavior at the Harvard Kennedy School. This is the first workshop since our co-founder, Ross Anderson, died unexpectedly. SHB is a small, annual, invitational workshop of people studying various…
The Justice Department Took Down the 911 S5 Botnet
The US Justice Department has dismantled an enormous botnet: According to an indictment unsealed on May 24, from 2014 through July 2022, Wang and others are alleged to have created and disseminated malware to compromise and amass a network of…
Espionage with a Drone
The US is using a World War II law that bans aircraft photography of military installations to charge someone with doing the same thing with a drone. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article:…
Online Privacy and Overfishing
Microsoft recently caught state-backed hackers using its generative AI tools to help with their attacks. In the security community, the immediate questions weren’t about how hackers were using the tools (that was utterly predictable), but about how Microsoft figured it…
Breaking a Password Manager
Interesting story of breaking the security of the RoboForm password manager in order to recover a cryptocurrency wallet password. Grand and Bruno spent months reverse engineering the version of the RoboForm program that they thought Michael had used in 2013…
Friday Squid Blogging: Baby Colossal Squid
This video might be a juvenile colossal squid. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here. This article has been…
How AI Will Change Democracy
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to predict that artificial intelligence will affect every aspect of our society. Not by doing new things. But mostly by doing things that are already being done by humans, perfectly competently. Replacing humans with…
Supply Chain Attack against Courtroom Software
No word on how this backdoor was installed: A software maker serving more than 10,000 courtrooms throughout the world hosted an application update containing a hidden backdoor that maintained persistent communication with a malicious website, researchers reported Thursday, in the…
Privacy Implications of Tracking Wireless Access Points
Brian Krebs reports on research into geolocating routers: Apple and the satellite-based broadband service Starlink each recently took steps to address new research into the potential security and privacy implications of how their services geolocate devices. Researchers from the University…
On the Zero-Day Market
New paper: “Zero Progress on Zero Days: How the Last Ten Years Created the Modern Spyware Market“: Abstract: Spyware makes surveillance simple. The last ten years have seen a global market emerge for ready-made software that lets governments surveil their…
Personal AI Assistants and Privacy
Microsoft is trying to create a personal digital assistant: At a Build conference event on Monday, Microsoft revealed a new AI-powered feature called “Recall” for Copilot+ PCs that will allow Windows 11 users to search and retrieve their past activities…
Unredacting Pixelated Text
Experiments in unredacting text that has been pixelated. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Unredacting Pixelated Text
Detecting Malicious Trackers
From Slashdot: Apple and Google have launched a new industry standard called “Detecting Unwanted Location Trackers” to combat the misuse of Bluetooth trackers for stalking. Starting Monday, iPhone and Android users will receive alerts when an unknown Bluetooth device is…
IBM Sells Cybersecurity Group
IBM is selling its QRadar product suite to Palo Alto Networks, for an undisclosed—but probably surprisingly small—sum. I have a personal connection to this. In 2016, IBM bought Resilient Systems, the startup I was a part of. It became part…
FBI Seizes BreachForums Website
The FBI has seized the BreachForums website, used by ransomware criminals to leak stolen corporate data. If law enforcement has gained access to the hacking forum’s backend data, as they claim, they would have email addresses, IP addresses, and private…
Zero-Trust DNS
Microsoft is working on a promising-looking protocol to lock down DNS. ZTDNS aims to solve this decades-old problem by integrating the Windows DNS engine with the Windows Filtering Platform—the core component of the Windows Firewall—directly into client devices. Jake Williams,…
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m giving a webinar via Zoom on Wednesday, May 22, at 11:00 AM ET. The topic is “Should the USG Establish a Publicly Funded AI Option?“…
Another Chrome Vulnerability
Google has patched another Chrome zero-day: On Thursday, Google said an anonymous source notified it of the vulnerability. The vulnerability carries a severity rating of 8.8 out of 10. In response, Google said, it would be releasing versions 124.0.6367.201/.202 for…