This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at a joint meeting of the Boston Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM, in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, at 7:00 PM ET on…
Tag: Schneier on Security
Ultralytics Supply-Chain Attack
Last week, we saw a supply-chain attack against the Ultralytics AI library on GitHub. A quick summary: On December 4, a malicious version 8.3.41 of the popular AI library ultralytics —which has almost 60 million downloads—was published to the Python…
Jailbreaking LLM-Controlled Robots
Surprising no one, it’s easy to trick an LLM-controlled robot into ignoring its safety instructions. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Jailbreaking LLM-Controlled Robots
Full-Face Masks to Frustrate Identification
This is going to be interesting. It’s a video of someone trying on a variety of printed full-face masks. They won’t fool anyone for long, but will survive casual scrutiny. And they’re cheap and easy to swap. This article has…
Trust Issues in AI
For a technology that seems startling in its modernity, AI sure has a long history. Google Translate, OpenAI chatbots, and Meta AI image generators are built on decades of advancements in linguistics, signal processing, statistics, and other fields going back…
Friday Squid Blogging: Safe Quick Undercarriage Immobilization Device
Fifteen years ago I blogged about a different SQUID. Here’s an update: Fleeing drivers are a common problem for law enforcement. They just won’t stop unless persuaded—persuaded by bullets, barriers, spikes, or snares. Each option is risky business. Shooting up…
Detecting Pegasus Infections
This tool seems to do a pretty good job. The company’s Mobile Threat Hunting feature uses a combination of malware signature-based detection, heuristics, and machine learning to look for anomalies in iOS and Android device activity or telltale signs of…
AI and the 2024 Elections
It’s been the biggest year for elections in human history: 2024 is a “super-cycle” year in which 3.7 billion eligible voters in 72 countries had the chance to go the polls. These are also the first AI elections, where many…
Good Essay on the History of Bad Password Policies
Stuart Schechter makes some good points on the history of bad password policies: Morris and Thompson’s work brought much-needed data to highlight a problem that lots of people suspected was bad, but that had not been studied scientifically. Their work…
New iOS Security Feature Makes It Harder for Police to Unlock Seized Phones
Everybody is reporting about a new security iPhone security feature with iOS 18: if the phone hasn’t been used for a few days, it automatically goes into its “Before First Unlock” state and has to be rebooted. This is a…
Mapping License Plate Scanners in the US
DeFlock is a crowd-sourced project to map license plate scanners. It only records the fixed scanners, of course. The mobile scanners on cars are not mapped. The post Mapping License Plate Scanners in the US appeared first on Schneier on…
Criminals Exploiting FBI Emergency Data Requests
I’ve been writing about the problem with lawful-access backdoors in encryption for decades now: that as soon as you create a mechanism for law enforcement to bypass encryption, the bad guys will use it too. Turns out the same thing…
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid-A-Rama in Des Moines
Squid-A-Rama will be in Des Moines at the end of the month. Visitors will be able to dissect squid, explore fascinating facts about the species, and witness a live squid release conducted by local divers. How are they doing a…
AI Industry is Trying to Subvert the Definition of “Open Source AI”
The Open Source Initiative has published (news article here) its definition of “open source AI,” and it’s terrible. It allows for secret training data and mechanisms. It allows for development to be done in secret. Since for a neural network,…
Prompt Injection Defenses Against LLM Cyberattacks
Interesting research: “Hacking Back the AI-Hacker: Prompt Injection as a Defense Against LLM-driven Cyberattacks“: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being harnessed to automate cyberattacks, making sophisticated exploits more accessible and scalable. In response, we propose a new defense strategy…
Subverting LLM Coders
Really interesting research: “An LLM-Assisted Easy-to-Trigger Backdoor Attack on Code Completion Models: Injecting Disguised Vulnerabilities against Strong Detection“: Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed code com- pletion tasks, providing context-based suggestions to boost developer productivity in software engineering. As…
IoT Devices in Password-Spraying Botnet
Microsoft is warning Azure cloud users that a Chinese controlled botnet is engaging in “highly evasive” password spraying. Not sure about the “highly evasive” part; the techniques seem basically what you get in a distributed password-guessing attack: “Any threat actor…
AIs Discovering Vulnerabilities
I’ve been writing about the possibility of AIs automatically discovering code vulnerabilities since at least 2018. This is an ongoing area of research: AIs doing source code scanning, AIs finding zero-days in the wild, and everything in between. The AIs…
Sophos Versus the Chinese Hackers
Really interesting story of Sophos’s five-year war against Chinese hackers. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Sophos Versus the Chinese Hackers
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Sculpture in Massachusetts Building
Great blow-up sculpture. Blog moderation policy. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Sculpture in Massachusetts Building