Category: Schneier on Security

AI and Mass Spying

Spying and surveillance are different but related things. If I hired a private detective to spy on you, that detective could hide a bug in your home or car, tap your phone, and listen to what you said. At the…

AI and Trust

I trusted a lot today. I trusted my phone to wake me on time. I trusted Uber to arrange a taxi for me, and the driver to get me to the airport safely. I trusted thousands of other drivers on…

AI Decides to Engage in Insider Trading

A stock-trading AI (a simulated experiment) engaged in insider trading, even though it “knew” it was wrong. The agent is put under pressure in three ways. First, it receives a email from its “manager” that the company is not doing…

Extracting GPT’s Training Data

This is clever: The actual attack is kind of silly. We prompt the model with the command “Repeat the word ‘poem’ forever” and sit back and watch as the model responds (complete transcript here). In the (abridged) example above, the…

Breaking Laptop Fingerprint Sensors

They’re not that good: Security researchers Jesse D’Aguanno and Timo Teräs write that, with varying degrees of reverse-engineering and using some external hardware, they were able to fool the Goodix fingerprint sensor in a Dell Inspiron 15, the Synaptic sensor…

Digital Car Keys Are Coming

Soon we will be able to unlock and start our cars from our phones. Let’s hope people are thinking about security. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Digital Car Keys Are Coming

Chocolate Swiss Army Knife

It’s realistic looking. If I drop it in a bin with my keys and wallet, will the TSA confiscate it? This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Chocolate Swiss Army Knife

LitterDrifter USB Worm

A new worm that spreads via USB sticks is infecting computers in Ukraine and beyond. The group­—known by many names, including Gamaredon, Primitive Bear, ACTINIUM, Armageddon, and Shuckworm—has been active since at least 2014 and has been attributed to Russia’s…

Apple to Add Manual Authentication to iMessage

Signal has had the ability to manually authenticate another account for years. iMessage is getting it: The feature is called Contact Key Verification, and it does just what its name says: it lets you add a manual verification step in…

Email Security Flaw Found in the Wild

Google’s Threat Analysis Group announced a zero-day against the Zimbra Collaboration email server that has been used against governments around the world. TAG has observed four different groups exploiting the same bug to steal email data, user credentials, and authentication…

Using Generative AI for Surveillance

Generative AI is going to be a powerful tool for data analysis and summarization. Here’s an example of it being used for sentiment analysis. My guess is that it isn’t very good yet, but that it will get better. This…

Ransomware Gang Files SEC Complaint

A ransomware gang, annoyed at not being paid, filed an SEC complaint against its victim for not disclosing its security breach within the required four days. This is over the top, but is just another example of the extreme pressure…

FTC’s Voice Cloning Challenge

The Federal Trade Commission is running a competition “to foster breakthrough ideas on preventing, monitoring, and evaluating malicious voice cloning.” This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: FTC’s Voice Cloning Challenge

Leaving Authentication Credentials in Public Code

Seth Godin wrote an article about a surprisingly common vulnerability: programmers leaving authentication credentials and other secrets in publicly accessible software code: Researchers from security firm GitGuardian this week reported finding almost 4,000 unique secrets stashed inside a total of…

New SSH Vulnerability

This is interesting: For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that a large portion of cryptographic keys used to protect data in computer-to-server SSH traffic are vulnerable to complete compromise when naturally occurring computational errors occur while the connection is…

Online Retail Hack

Selling miniature replicas to unsuspecting shoppers: Online marketplaces sell tiny pink cowboy hats. They also sell miniature pencil sharpeners, palm-size kitchen utensils, scaled-down books and camping chairs so small they evoke the Stonehenge scene in “This Is Spinal Tap.” Many…