As AI coding assistants invent nonexistent software libraries to download and use, enterprising attackers create and upload libraries with those names—laced with malware, of course. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Slopsquatting
Category: Schneier on Security
China Sort of Admits to Being Behind Volt Typhoon
The Wall Street Journal has the story: Chinese officials acknowledged in a secret December meeting that Beijing was behind a widespread series of alarming cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure, according to people familiar with the matter, underscoring how hostilities between the…
Reimagining Democracy
Imagine that all of us—all of society—have landed on some alien planet and need to form a government: clean slate. We do not have any legacy systems from the United States or any other country. We do not have any…
How to Leak to a Journalist
Neiman Lab has some good advice on how to leak a story to a journalist. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: How to Leak to a Journalist
Arguing Against CALEA
At a Congressional hearing earlier this week, Matt Blaze made the point that CALEA, the 1994 law that forces telecoms to make phone calls wiretappable, is outdated in today’s threat environment and should be rethought: In other words, while the…
DIRNSA Fired
In “Secrets and Lies” (2000), I wrote: It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state. It’s something a bunch of us were saying at the time, in reference to the vast NSA’s surveillance…
Friday Squid Blogging: Two-Man Giant Squid
The Brooklyn indie art-punk group, Two-Man Giant Squid, just released a new album. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. This article has been indexed…
Troy Hunt Gets Phished
In case you need proof that anyone, even people who do cybersecurity for a living, Troy Hunt has a long, iterative story on his webpage about how he got phished. Worth reading. This article has been indexed from Schneier on…
Web 3.0 Requires Data Integrity
If you’ve ever taken a computer security class, you’ve probably learned about the three legs of computer security—confidentiality, integrity, and availability—known as the CIA triad. When we talk about a system being secure, that’s what we’re referring to. All are important, but…
Rational Astrologies and Security
John Kelsey and I wrote a short paper for the Rossfest Festschrift: “Rational Astrologies and Security“: There is another non-security way that designers can spend their security budget: on making their own lives easier. Many of these fall into the…
Cell Phone OPSEC for Border Crossings
I have heard stories of more aggressive interrogation of electronic devices at US border crossings. I know a lot about securing computers, but very little about securing phones. Are there easy ways to delete data—files, photos, etc.—on phones so it…
The Signal Chat Leak and the NSA
US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who started the now-infamous group chat coordinating a US attack against the Yemen-based Houthis on March 15, is seemingly now suggesting that the secure messaging service Signal has security vulnerabilities. “I didn’t see this…
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Werewolf Hacking Group
In another rare squid/cybersecurity intersection, APT37 is also known as “Squid Werewolf.” As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. This article has been indexed from…
AIs as Trusted Third Parties
This is a truly fascinating paper: “Trusted Machine Learning Models Unlock Private Inference for Problems Currently Infeasible with Cryptography.” The basic idea is that AIs can act as trusted third parties: Abstract: We often interact with untrusted parties. Prioritization of…
A Taxonomy of Adversarial Machine Learning Attacks and Mitigations
NIST just released a comprehensive taxonomy of adversarial machine learning attacks and countermeasures. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: A Taxonomy of Adversarial Machine Learning Attacks and Mitigations
AI Data Poisoning
Cloudflare has a new feature—available to free users as well—that uses AI to generate random pages to feed to AI web crawlers: Instead of simply blocking bots, Cloudflare’s new system lures them into a “maze” of realistic-looking but irrelevant pages,…
Report on Paragon Spyware
Citizen Lab has a new report on Paragon’s spyware: Key Findings: Introducing Paragon Solutions. Paragon Solutions was founded in Israel in 2019 and sells spyware called Graphite. The company differentiates itself by claiming it has safeguards to prevent the kinds…
More Countries are Demanding Backdoors to Encrypted Apps
Last month, I wrote about the UK forcing Apple to break its Advanced Data Protection encryption in iCloud. More recently, both Sweden and France are contemplating mandating backdoors. Both initiatives are attempting to scare people into supporting backdoors, which are—of…
Friday Squid Blogging: A New Explanation of Squid Camouflage
New research: An associate professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Northeastern University, Deravi’s recently published paper in the Journal of Materials Chemistry C sheds new light on how squid use organs that essentially function as organic solar cells to…
My Writings Are in the LibGen AI Training Corpus
The Atlantic has a search tool that allows you to search for specific works in the “LibGen” database of copyrighted works that Meta used to train its AI models. (The rest of the article is behind a paywall, but not…