Microsoft is reporting: Companies are embedding hidden instructions in “Summarize with AI” buttons that, when clicked, attempt to inject persistence commands into an AI assistant’s memory via URL prompt parameters…. These prompts instruct the AI to “remember [Company] as a…
Tag: Schneier on Security
On Moltbook
The MIT Technology Review has a good article on Moltbook, the supposed AI-only social network: Many people have pointed out that a lot of the viral comments were in fact posted by people posing as bots. But even the bot-written…
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Fishing in Peru
Peru has increased its squid catch limit. The article says “giant squid,” but they can’t possibly mean that. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.…
Phishing Attacks Against People Seeking Programming Jobs
This is new. North Korean hackers are posing as company recruiters, enticing job candidates to participate in coding challenges. When they run the code they are supposed to work on, it installs malware on their system. News article. This article…
Why Tehran’s Two-Tiered Internet Is So Dangerous
Iran is slowly emerging from the most severe communications blackout in its history and one of the longest in the world. Triggered as part of January’s government crackdown against citizen protests nationwide, the regime implemented an internet shutdown that transcends…
LLMs Generate Predictable Passwords
LLMs are bad at generating passwords: There are strong noticeable patterns among these 50 passwords that can be seen easily: All of the passwords start with a letter, usually uppercase G, almost always followed by the digit 7. Character choices…
Poisoning AI Training Data
All it takes to poison AI training data is to create a website: I spent 20 minutes writing an article on my personal website titled “The best tech journalists at eating hot dogs.” Every word is a lie. I claimed…
Is AI Good for Democracy?
Politicians fixate on the global race for technological supremacy between US and China. They debate geopolitical implications of chip exports, latest model releases from each country, and military applications of AI. Someday, they believe, we might see advancements in AI…
Ring Cancels Its Partnership with Flock
It’s a demonstration of how toxic the surveillance-tech company Flock has become when Amazon’s Ring cancels the partnership between the two companies. As Hamilton Nolan advises, remove your Ring doorbell. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read…
Malicious AI
Interesting: Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library.…
AI Found Twelve New Vulnerabilities in OpenSSL
The title of the post is”What AI Security Research Looks Like When It Works,” and I agree: In the latest OpenSSL security release> on January 27, 2026, twelve new zero-day vulnerabilities (meaning unknown to the maintainers at time of disclosure)…
The Promptware Kill Chain
Attacks against modern generative artificial intelligence (AI) large language models (LLMs) pose a real threat. Yet discussions around these attacks and their potential defenses are dangerously myopic. The dominant narrative focuses on “prompt injection,” a set of techniques to embed…
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at Ontario Tech University in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, at 2 PM ET on Thursday, February 26, 2026. I’m speaking at the Personal AI Summit…
3D Printer Surveillance
New York is contemplating a bill that adds surveillance to 3D printers: New York’s 20262027 executive budget bill (S.9005 / A.10005) includes language that should alarm every maker, educator, and small manufacturer in the state. Buried in Part C is…
Rewiring Democracy Ebook is on Sale
I just noticed that the ebook version of Rewriring Democracy is on sale for $5 on Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Google Play, Kobo, and presumably everywhere else in the US. I have no idea how…
Prompt Injection Via Road Signs
Interesting research: “CHAI: Command Hijacking Against Embodied AI.” Abstract: Embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises to handle edge cases in robotic vehicle systems where data is scarce by using common-sense reasoning grounded in perception and action to generalize beyond training distributions…
AI-Generated Text and the Detection Arms Race
In 2023, the science fiction literary magazine Clarkesworld stopped accepting new submissions because so many were generated by artificial intelligence. Near as the editors could tell, many submitters pasted the magazine’s detailed story guidelines into an AI and sent in…
I Am in the Epstein Files
Once. Someone named “Vincenzo lozzo” wrote to Epstein in email, in 2016: “I wouldn’t pay too much attention to this, Schneier has a long tradition of dramatizing and misunderstanding things.” The topic of the email is DDoS attacks, and it…
iPhone Lockdown Mode Protects Washington Post Reporter
404Media is reporting that the FBI could not access a reporter’s iPhone because it had Lockdown Mode enabled: The court record shows what devices and data the FBI was able to ultimately access, and which devices it could not, after…
Backdoor in Notepad++
Hackers associated with the Chinese government used a Trojaned version of Notepad++ to deliver malware to selected users. Notepad++ said that officials with the unnamed provider hosting the update infrastructure consulted with incident responders and found that it remained compromised…