C++ guru Herb Sutter writes about how we can improve the programming language for better security. The immediate problem “is” that it’s Too Easy By Default™ to write security and safety vulnerabilities in C++ that would have been caught by…
Category: Schneier on Security
Automakers Are Sharing Driver Data with Insurers without Consent
Kasmir Hill has the story: Modern cars are internet-enabled, allowing access to services like navigation, roadside assistance and car apps that drivers can connect to their vehicles to locate them or unlock them remotely. In recent years, automakers, including G.M.,…
Burglars Using Wi-Fi Jammers to Disable Security Cameras
The arms race continues, as burglars are learning how to use jammers to disable Wi-Fi security cameras. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Burglars Using Wi-Fi Jammers to Disable Security Cameras
Jailbreaking LLMs with ASCII Art
Researchers have demonstrated that putting words in ASCII art can cause LLMs—GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Gemini, Claude, and Llama2—to ignore their safety instructions. Research paper. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Jailbreaking LLMs with ASCII…
Using LLMs to Unredact Text
Initial results in using LLMs to unredact text based on the size of the individual-word redaction rectangles. This feels like something that a specialized ML system could be trained on. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read…
Friday Squid Blogging: New Plant Looks Like a Squid
Newly discovered plant looks like a squid. And it’s super weird: The plant, which grows to 3 centimetres tall and 2 centimetres wide, emerges to the surface for as little as a week each year. It belongs to a group…
Essays from the Second IWORD
The Ash Center has posted a series of twelve essays stemming from the Second Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy (IWORD 2023). Aviv Ovadya, Democracy as Approximation: A Primer for “AI for Democracy” Innovators Kathryn Peters, Permission and Participation Claudia Chwalisz,…
A Taxonomy of Prompt Injection Attacks
Researchers ran a global prompt hacking competition, and have documented the results in a paper that both gives a lot of good examples and tries to organize a taxonomy of effective prompt injection strategies. It seems as if the most…
How Public AI Can Strengthen Democracy
With the world’s focus turning to misinformation, manipulation, and outright propaganda ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, we know that democracy has an AI problem. But we’re learning that AI has a democracy problem, too. Both challenges must be…
Surveillance through Push Notifications
The Washington Post is reporting on the FBI’s increasing use of push notification data—”push tokens”—to identify people. The police can request this data from companies like Apple and Google without a warrant. The investigative technique goes back years. Court orders…
The Insecurity of Video Doorbells
Consumer Reports has analyzed a bunch of popular Internet-connected video doorbells. Their security is terrible. First, these doorbells expose your home IP address and WiFi network name to the internet without encryption, potentially opening your home network to online criminals.…
Friday Squid Blogging: New Extinct Species of Vampire Squid Discovered
Paleontologists have discovered a 183-million-year-old species of vampire squid. Prior research suggests that the vampyromorph lived in the shallows off an island that once existed in what is now the heart of the European mainland. The research team believes that…
NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0
NIST has released version 2.0 of the Cybersecurity Framework: The CSF 2.0, which supports implementation of the National Cybersecurity Strategy, has an expanded scope that goes beyond protecting critical infrastructure, such as hospitals and power plants, to all organizations in…
How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration will drive the next era of growth, wealth, and human flourishing. It’s a scary metaphor. Throughout American history, the drive for expansion…
A Cyber Insurance Backstop
In the first week of January, the pharmaceutical giant Merck quietly settled its years-long lawsuit over whether or not its property and casualty insurers would cover a $700 million claim filed after the devastating NotPetya cyberattack in 2017. The malware…
China Surveillance Company Hacked
Last week, someone posted something like 570 files, images and chat logs from a Chinese company called I-Soon. I-Soon sells hacking and espionage services to Chinese national and local government. Lots of details in the news articles. These aren’t details…
AIs Hacking Websites
New research: LLM Agents can Autonomously Hack Websites Abstract: In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly capable and can now interact with tools (i.e., call functions), read documents, and recursively call themselves. As a result, these LLMs…
New Image/Video Prompt Injection Attacks
Simon Willison has been playing with the video processing capabilities of the new Gemini Pro 1.5 model from Google, and it’s really impressive. Which means a lot of scary new video prompt injection attacks. And remember, given the current state…
Details of a Phone Scam
First-person account of someone who fell for a scam, that started as a fake Amazon service rep and ended with a fake CIA agent, and lost $50,000 cash. And this is not a naive or stupid person. The details are…
Microsoft Is Spying on Users of Its AI Tools
Microsoft announced that it caught Chinese, Russian, and Iranian hackers using its AI tools—presumably coding tools—to improve their hacking abilities. From their report: In collaboration with OpenAI, we are sharing threat intelligence showing detected state affiliated adversaries—tracked as Forest Blizzard,…