We don’t have many details: President Donald Trump suggested Saturday that the U.S. used cyberattacks or other technical capabilities to cut power off in Caracas during strikes on the Venezuelan capital that led to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás…
Tag: Schneier on Security
Flock Exposes Its AI-Enabled Surveillance Cameras
404 Media has the story: Unlike many of Flock’s cameras, which are designed to capture license plates as people drive by, Flock’s Condor cameras are pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras designed to record and track people, not vehicles. Condor cameras can be…
LinkedIn Job Scams
Interesting article on the variety of LinkedIn job scams around the world: In India, tech jobs are used as bait because the industry employs millions of people and offers high-paying roles. In Kenya, the recruitment industry is largely unorganized, so…
Using AI-Generated Images to Get Refunds
Scammers are generating images of broken merchandise in order to apply for refunds. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Using AI-Generated Images to Get Refunds
IoT Hack
Someone hacked an Italian ferry. It looks like the malware was installed by someone on the ferry, and not remotely. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: IoT Hack
Urban VPN Proxy Surreptitiously Intercepts AI Chats
This is pretty scary: Urban VPN Proxy targets conversations across ten AI platforms: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Grok (xAI), Meta AI. For each platform, the extension includes a dedicated “executor” script designed to intercept and capture conversations.…
Denmark Accuses Russia of Conducting Two Cyberattacks
News: The Danish Defence Intelligence Service (DDIS) announced on Thursday that Moscow was behind a cyber-attack on a Danish water utility in 2024 and a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on Danish websites in the lead-up to the municipal…
Microsoft Is Finally Killing RC4
After twenty-six years, Microsoft is finally upgrading the last remaining instance of the encryption algorithm RC4 in Windows. of the most visible holdouts in supporting RC4 has been Microsoft. Eventually, Microsoft upgraded Active Directory to support the much more secure…
AI Advertising Company Hacked
At least some of this is coming to light: Doublespeed, a startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) that uses a phone farm to manage at least hundreds of AI-generated social media accounts and promote products has been hacked. The hack…
Someone Boarded a Plane at Heathrow Without a Ticket or Passport
I’m sure there’s a story here: Sources say the man had tailgated his way through to security screening and passed security, meaning he was not detected carrying any banned items. The man deceived the BA check-in agent by posing as…
Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
For two days in September, Afghanistan had no internet. No satellite failed; no cable was cut. This was a deliberate outage, mandated by the Taliban government. It followed a more localized shutdown two weeks prior, reportedly instituted “to prevent immoral…
Against the Federal Moratorium on State-Level Regulation of AI
Cast your mind back to May of this year: Congress was in the throes of debate over the massive budget bill. Amidst the many seismic provisions, Senator Ted Cruz dropped a ticking time bomb of tech policy: a ten-year moratorium…
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking and signing books at the Chicago Public Library in Chicago, Illinois, USA, at 6:00 PM CT on February 5, 2026. Details to come. I’m…
Building Trustworthy AI Agents
The promise of personal AI assistants rests on a dangerous assumption: that we can trust systems we haven’t made trustworthy. We can’t. And today’s versions are failing us in predictable ways: pushing us to do things against our own best…
AIs Exploiting Smart Contracts
I have long maintained that smart contracts are a dumb idea: that a human process is actually a security feature. Here’s some interesting research on training AIs to automatically exploit smart contracts: AI models are increasingly good at cyber tasks,…
FBI Warns of Fake Video Scams
The FBI is warning of AI-assisted fake kidnapping scams: Criminal actors typically will contact their victims through text message claiming they have kidnapped their loved one and demand a ransom be paid for their release. Oftentimes, the criminal actor will…
AI vs. Human Drivers
Two competing arguments are making the rounds. The first is by a neurosurgeon in the New York Times. In an op-ed that honestly sounds like it was paid for by Waymo, the author calls driverless cars a “public health breakthrough”:…
Substitution Cipher Based on The Voynich Manuscript
Here’s a fun paper: “The Naibbe cipher: a substitution cipher that encrypts Latin and Italian as Voynich Manuscript-like ciphertext“: Abstract: In this article, I investigate the hypothesis that the Voynich Manuscript (MS 408, Yale University Beinecke Library) is compatible with…
Friday Squid Blogging: Vampire Squid Genome
The vampire squid (Vampyroteuthis infernalis) has the largest cephalopod genome ever sequenced: more than 11 billion base pairs. That’s more than twice as large as the biggest squid genomes. It’s technically not a squid: “The vampire squid is a fascinating…
New Anonymous Phone Service
A new anonymous phone service allows you to sign up with just a zip code. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: New Anonymous Phone Service