Not a lot of details: Apple has issued a new round of threat notifications to iPhone users across 98 countries, warning them of potential mercenary spyware attacks. It’s the second such alert campaign from the company this year, following a…
Category: Schneier on Security
RADIUS Vulnerability
New attack against the RADIUS authentication protocol: The Blast-RADIUS attack allows a man-in-the-middle attacker between the RADIUS client and server to forge a valid protocol accept message in response to a failed authentication request. This forgery could give the attacker…
Reverse-Engineering Ticketmaster’s Barcode System
Interesting: By reverse-engineering how Ticketmaster and AXS actually make their electronic tickets, scalpers have essentially figured out how to regenerate specific, genuine tickets that they have legally purchased from scratch onto infrastructure that they control. In doing so, they are…
On the CSRB’s Non-Investigation of the SolarWinds Attack
ProPublica has a long investigative article on how the Cyber Safety Review Board failed to investigate the SolarWinds attack, and specifically Microsoft’s culpability, even though they were directed by President Biden to do so. This article has been indexed from…
Friday Squid Blogging: Newly Discovered Vampire Squid
A new vampire squid species was discovered in the South China Sea. Blog moderation policy. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Friday Squid Blogging: Newly Discovered Vampire Squid
New Open SSH Vulnerability
It’s a serious one: The vulnerability, which is a signal handler race condition in OpenSSH’s server (sshd), allows unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) as root on glibc-based Linux systems; that presents a significant security risk. This race condition affects sshd…
Public Surveillance of Bars
This article about an app that lets people remotely view bars to see if they’re crowded or not is filled with commentary—on both sides—about privacy and openness. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article:…
Upcoming Book on AI and Democracy
If you’ve been reading my blog, you’ve noticed that I have written a lot about AI and democracy, mostly with my co-author Nathan Sanders. I am pleased to announce that we’re writing a book on the topic. This isn’t a…
Friday Squid Blogging: New Squid Species
A new squid species—of the Gonatidae family—was discovered. The video shows her holding a brood of very large eggs. Research paper. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Friday Squid Blogging: New Squid Species
James Bamford on Section 702 Extension
Longtime NSA-watcher James Bamford has a long article on the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: James Bamford on Section 702 Extension
Security Analysis of the EU’s Digital Wallet
A group of cryptographers have analyzed the eiDAS 2.0 regulation (electronic identification and trust services) that defines the new EU Digital Identity Wallet. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Security Analysis of the…
The US Is Banning Kaspersky
This move has been coming for a long time. The Biden administration on Thursday said it’s banning the company from selling its products to new US-based customers starting on July 20, with the company only allowed to provide software updates…
Breaking the M-209
Interesting paper about a German cryptanalysis machine that helped break the US M-209 mechanical ciphering machine. The paper contains a good description of how the M-209 works. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article:…
Paul Nakasone Joins OpenAI’s Board of Directors
Former NSA Director Paul Nakasone has joined the board of OpenAI. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Paul Nakasone Joins OpenAI’s Board of Directors
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Nebula
Beautiful astronomical photo. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Nebula
Ross Anderson’s Memorial Service
The memorial service for Ross Anderson will be held on Saturday, at 2:00 PM BST. People can attend remotely on Zoom. (The passcode is “L3954FrrEF”.) This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Ross Anderson’s…
Recovering Public Keys from Signatures
Interesting summary of various ways to derive the public key from digitally signed files. Normally, with a signature scheme, you have the public key and want to know whether a given signature is valid. But what if we instead have…
New Blog Moderation Policy
There has been a lot of toxicity in the comments section of this blog. Recently, we’re having to delete more and more comments. Not just spam and off-topic comments, but also sniping and personal attacks. It’s gotten so bad that…
The Hacking of Culture and the Creation of Socio-Technical Debt
Culture is increasingly mediated through algorithms. These algorithms have splintered the organization of culture, a result of states and tech companies vying for influence over mass audiences. One byproduct of this splintering is a shift from imperfect but broad cultural…
Rethinking Democracy for the Age of AI
There is a lot written about technology’s threats to democracy. Polarization. Artificial intelligence. The concentration of wealth and power. I have a more general story: The political and economic systems of governance that were created in the mid-18th century are…
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Cartoon
Squid humor. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read…
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m appearing on a panel on Society and Democracy at ACM Collective Intelligence in Boston, Massachusetts. The conference runs from June 26 through 29, 2024, and…
AI and the Indian Election
As India concluded the world’s largest election on June 5, 2024, with over 640 million votes counted, observers could assess how the various parties and factions used artificial intelligence technologies—and what lessons that holds for the rest of the world.…
Using AI for Political Polling
Public polling is a critical function of modern political campaigns and movements, but it isn’t what it once was. Recent US election cycles have produced copious postmortems explaining both the successes and the flaws of public polling. There are two…
Security and Human Behavior (SHB) 2024
This week, I hosted the seventeenth Workshop on Security and Human Behavior at the Harvard Kennedy School. This is the first workshop since our co-founder, Ross Anderson, died unexpectedly. SHB is a small, annual, invitational workshop of people studying various…
The Justice Department Took Down the 911 S5 Botnet
The US Justice Department has dismantled an enormous botnet: According to an indictment unsealed on May 24, from 2014 through July 2022, Wang and others are alleged to have created and disseminated malware to compromise and amass a network of…
Espionage with a Drone
The US is using a World War II law that bans aircraft photography of military installations to charge someone with doing the same thing with a drone. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article:…
Online Privacy and Overfishing
Microsoft recently caught state-backed hackers using its generative AI tools to help with their attacks. In the security community, the immediate questions weren’t about how hackers were using the tools (that was utterly predictable), but about how Microsoft figured it…
Breaking a Password Manager
Interesting story of breaking the security of the RoboForm password manager in order to recover a cryptocurrency wallet password. Grand and Bruno spent months reverse engineering the version of the RoboForm program that they thought Michael had used in 2013…
Friday Squid Blogging: Baby Colossal Squid
This video might be a juvenile colossal squid. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here. This article has been…
How AI Will Change Democracy
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to predict that artificial intelligence will affect every aspect of our society. Not by doing new things. But mostly by doing things that are already being done by humans, perfectly competently. Replacing humans with…
Supply Chain Attack against Courtroom Software
No word on how this backdoor was installed: A software maker serving more than 10,000 courtrooms throughout the world hosted an application update containing a hidden backdoor that maintained persistent communication with a malicious website, researchers reported Thursday, in the…
Privacy Implications of Tracking Wireless Access Points
Brian Krebs reports on research into geolocating routers: Apple and the satellite-based broadband service Starlink each recently took steps to address new research into the potential security and privacy implications of how their services geolocate devices. Researchers from the University…
On the Zero-Day Market
New paper: “Zero Progress on Zero Days: How the Last Ten Years Created the Modern Spyware Market“: Abstract: Spyware makes surveillance simple. The last ten years have seen a global market emerge for ready-made software that lets governments surveil their…
Personal AI Assistants and Privacy
Microsoft is trying to create a personal digital assistant: At a Build conference event on Monday, Microsoft revealed a new AI-powered feature called “Recall” for Copilot+ PCs that will allow Windows 11 users to search and retrieve their past activities…
Unredacting Pixelated Text
Experiments in unredacting text that has been pixelated. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Unredacting Pixelated Text
Detecting Malicious Trackers
From Slashdot: Apple and Google have launched a new industry standard called “Detecting Unwanted Location Trackers” to combat the misuse of Bluetooth trackers for stalking. Starting Monday, iPhone and Android users will receive alerts when an unknown Bluetooth device is…
IBM Sells Cybersecurity Group
IBM is selling its QRadar product suite to Palo Alto Networks, for an undisclosed—but probably surprisingly small—sum. I have a personal connection to this. In 2016, IBM bought Resilient Systems, the startup I was a part of. It became part…
FBI Seizes BreachForums Website
The FBI has seized the BreachForums website, used by ransomware criminals to leak stolen corporate data. If law enforcement has gained access to the hacking forum’s backend data, as they claim, they would have email addresses, IP addresses, and private…
Zero-Trust DNS
Microsoft is working on a promising-looking protocol to lock down DNS. ZTDNS aims to solve this decades-old problem by integrating the Windows DNS engine with the Windows Filtering Platform—the core component of the Windows Firewall—directly into client devices. Jake Williams,…
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m giving a webinar via Zoom on Wednesday, May 22, at 11:00 AM ET. The topic is “Should the USG Establish a Publicly Funded AI Option?“…
Another Chrome Vulnerability
Google has patched another Chrome zero-day: On Thursday, Google said an anonymous source notified it of the vulnerability. The vulnerability carries a severity rating of 8.8 out of 10. In response, Google said, it would be releasing versions 124.0.6367.201/.202 for…
Another Chrome Vulnerability
Google has patched another Chrome zero-day: On Thursday, Google said an anonymous source notified it of the vulnerability. The vulnerability carries a severity rating of 8.8 out of 10. In response, Google said, it would be releasing versions 124.0.6367.201/.202 for…
LLMs’ Data-Control Path Insecurity
Back in the 1960s, if you played a 2,600Hz tone into an AT&T pay phone, you could make calls without paying. A phone hacker named John Draper noticed that the plastic whistle that came free in a box of Captain…
New Attack Against Self-Driving Car AI
This is another attack that convinces the AI to ignore road signs: Due to the way CMOS cameras operate, rapidly changing light from fast flashing diodes can be used to vary the color. For example, the shade of red on…
How Criminals Are Using Generative AI
There’s a new report on how criminals are using generative AI tools: Key Takeaways: Adoption rates of AI technologies among criminals lag behind the rates of their industry counterparts because of the evolving nature of cybercrime. Compared to last year,…
New Attack on VPNs
This attack has been feasible for over two decades: Researchers have devised an attack against nearly all virtual private network applications that forces them to send and receive some or all traffic outside of the encrypted tunnel designed to protect…
New Lawsuit Attempting to Make Adversarial Interoperability Legal
Lots of complicated details here: too many for me to summarize well. It involves an obscure Section 230 provision—and an even more obscure typo. Read this. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: New…
My TED Talks
I have spoken at several TED conferences over the years. TEDxPSU 2010: “Reconceptualizing Security” TEDxCambridge 2013: “The Battle for Power on the Internet” TEDMed 2016: “Who Controls Your Medical Data?” I’m putting this here because I want all three links…
Rare Interviews with Enigma Cryptanalyst Marian Rejewski
The Polish Embassy has posted a series of short interview segments with Marian Rejewski, the first person to crack the Enigma. Details from his biography. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Rare Interviews…
The UK Bans Default Passwords
The UK is the first country to ban default passwords on IoT devices. On Monday, the United Kingdom became the first country in the world to ban default guessable usernames and passwords from these IoT devices. Unique passwords installed by…
AI Voice Scam
Scammers tricked a company into believing they were dealing with a BBC presenter. They faked her voice, and accepted money intended for her. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: AI Voice Scam
WhatsApp in India
Meta has threatened to pull WhatsApp out of India if the courts try to force it to break its end-to-end encryption. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: WhatsApp in India
Whale Song Code
During the Cold War, the US Navy tried to make a secret code out of whale song. The basic plan was to develop coded messages from recordings of whales, dolphins, sea lions, and seals. The submarine would broadcast the noises…
Long Article on GM Spying on Its Cars’ Drivers
Kashmir Hill has a really good article on how GM tricked its drivers into letting it spy on them—and then sold that data to insurance companies. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Long…
The Rise of Large-Language-Model Optimization
The web has become so interwoven with everyday life that it is easy to forget what an extraordinary accomplishment and treasure it is. In just a few decades, much of human knowledge has been collectively written up and made available…
Dan Solove on Privacy Regulation
Law professor Dan Solove has a new article on privacy regulation. In his email to me, he writes: “I’ve been pondering privacy consent for more than a decade, and I think I finally made a breakthrough with this article.” His…
Microsoft and Security Incentives
Former senior White House cyber policy director A. J. Grotto talks about the economic incentives for companies to improve their security—in particular, Microsoft: Grotto told us Microsoft had to be “dragged kicking and screaming” to provide logging capabilities to the…
Using Legitimate GitHub URLs for Malware
Interesting social-engineering attack vector: McAfee released a report on a new LUA malware loader distributed through what appeared to be a legitimate Microsoft GitHub repository for the “C++ Library Manager for Windows, Linux, and MacOS,” known as vcpkg. The attacker…
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Trackers
A new bioadhesive makes it easier to attach trackers to squid. Note: the article does not discuss squid privacy rights. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I…
Other Attempts to Take Over Open Source Projects
After the XZ Utils discovery, people have been examining other open-source projects. Surprising no one, the incident is not unique: The OpenJS Foundation Cross Project Council received a suspicious series of emails with similar messages, bearing different names and overlapping…
X.com Automatically Changing Link Text but Not URLs
Brian Krebs reported that X (formerly known as Twitter) started automatically changing twitter.com links to x.com links. The problem is: (1) it changed any domain name that ended with “twitter.com,” and (2) it only changed the link’s appearance (anchortext), not…
New Lattice Cryptanalytic Technique
A new paper presents a polynomial-time quantum algorithm for solving certain hard lattice problems. This could be a big deal for post-quantum cryptographic algorithms, since many of them base their security on hard lattice problems. A few things to note.…
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking twice at RSA Conference 2024 in San Francisco. I’ll be on a panel on software liability on May 6, 2024 at 8:30 AM, and…
Smuggling Gold by Disguising it as Machine Parts
Someone got caught trying to smuggle 322 pounds of gold (that’s about 1/4 of a cubic foot) out of Hong Kong. It was disguised as machine parts: On March 27, customs officials x-rayed two air compressors and discovered that they…
Backdoor in XZ Utils That Almost Happened
Last week, the internet dodged a major nation-state attack that would have had catastrophic cybersecurity repercussions worldwide. It’s a catastrophe that didn’t happen, so it won’t get much attention—but it should. There’s an important moral to the story of the…
History of RSA Conference. Bruce Schneier. The First ‘Exhibitor’ in 1994.
Listen to the Audio on SoundCloud.com Bruce Schneier was at the first ever RSA Conference in 1991, and he was the first ‘exhibitor’ in 1994 when he asked Jim Bidzos, Creator of the RSA Conference, if he could sell copies…
In Memoriam: Ross Anderson, 1956-2024
Last week I posted a short memorial of Ross Anderson. The Communications of the ACM asked me to expand it. Here’s the longer version. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: In Memoriam: Ross…
US Cyber Safety Review Board on the 2023 Microsoft Exchange Hack
US Cyber Safety Review Board released a report on the summer 2023 hack of Microsoft Exchange by China. It was a serious attack that From the executive summary: The Board finds that this intrusion was preventable and should never have…
Friday Squid Blogging: SqUID Bots
They’re AI warehouse robots. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here. This article has been indexed from Schneier on…
Maybe the Phone System Surveillance Vulnerabilities Will Be Fixed
It seems that the FCC might be fixing the vulnerabilities in SS7 and the Diameter protocol: On March 27 the commission asked telecommunications providers to weigh in and detail what they are doing to prevent SS7 and Diameter vulnerabilities from…
Surveillance by the New Microsoft Outlook App
The ProtonMail people are accusing Microsoft’s new Outlook for Windows app of conducting extensive surveillance on its users. It shares data with advertisers, a lot of data: The window informs users that Microsoft and those 801 third parties use their…
Class-Action Lawsuit against Google’s Incognito Mode
The lawsuit has been settled: Google has agreed to delete “billions of data records” the company collected while users browsed the web using Incognito mode, according to documents filed in federal court in San Francisco on Monday. The agreement, part…
xz Utils Backdoor
The cybersecurity world got really lucky last week. An intentionally placed backdoor in xz Utils, an open-source compression utility, was pretty much accidentally discovered by a Microsoft engineer—weeks before it would have been incorporated into both Debian and Red Hat…
Declassified NSA Newsletters
Through a 2010 FOIA request (yes, it took that long), we have copies of the NSA’s KRYPTOS Society Newsletter, “Tales of the Krypt,” from 1994 to 2003. There are many interesting things in the 800 pages of newsletter. There are…
Magic Security Dust
Adam Shostack is selling magic security dust. It’s about time someone is commercializing this essential technology. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Magic Security Dust
Ross Anderson
Ross Anderson unexpectedly passed away Thursday night in, I believe, his home in Cambridge. I can’t remember when I first met Ross. Of course it was before 2008, when we created the Security and Human Behavior workshop. It was well…
Friday Squid Blogging: The Geopolitics of Eating Squid
New York Times op-ed on the Chinese dominance of the squid industry: China’s domination in seafood has raised deep concerns among American fishermen, policymakers and human rights activists. They warn that China is expanding its maritime reach in ways that…
Lessons from a Ransomware Attack against the British Library
You might think that libraries are kind of boring, but this self-analysis of a 2023 ransomware and extortion attack against the British Library is anything but. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Lessons…
Hardware Vulnerability in Apple’s M-Series Chips
It’s yet another hardware side-channel attack: The threat resides in the chips’ data memory-dependent prefetcher, a hardware optimization that predicts the memory addresses of data that running code is likely to access in the near future. By loading the contents…
Security Vulnerability in Saflok’s RFID-Based Keycard Locks
It’s pretty devastating: Today, Ian Carroll, Lennert Wouters, and a team of other security researchers are revealing a hotel keycard hacking technique they call Unsaflok. The technique is a collection of security vulnerabilities that would allow a hacker to almost…
Google Pays $10M in Bug Bounties in 2023
BleepingComputer has the details. It’s $2M less than in 2022, but it’s still a lot. The highest reward for a vulnerability report in 2023 was $113,337, while the total tally since the program’s launch in 2010 has reached $59 million.…
Friday Squid Blogging: Operation Squid
Operation Squid found 1.3 tons of cocaine hidden in frozen fish. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here. This…
Improving C++
C++ guru Herb Sutter writes about how we can improve the programming language for better security. The immediate problem “is” that it’s Too Easy By Default™ to write security and safety vulnerabilities in C++ that would have been caught by…
Automakers Are Sharing Driver Data with Insurers without Consent
Kasmir Hill has the story: Modern cars are internet-enabled, allowing access to services like navigation, roadside assistance and car apps that drivers can connect to their vehicles to locate them or unlock them remotely. In recent years, automakers, including G.M.,…
Burglars Using Wi-Fi Jammers to Disable Security Cameras
The arms race continues, as burglars are learning how to use jammers to disable Wi-Fi security cameras. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Burglars Using Wi-Fi Jammers to Disable Security Cameras
Jailbreaking LLMs with ASCII Art
Researchers have demonstrated that putting words in ASCII art can cause LLMs—GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Gemini, Claude, and Llama2—to ignore their safety instructions. Research paper. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Jailbreaking LLMs with ASCII…
Using LLMs to Unredact Text
Initial results in using LLMs to unredact text based on the size of the individual-word redaction rectangles. This feels like something that a specialized ML system could be trained on. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read…
Friday Squid Blogging: New Plant Looks Like a Squid
Newly discovered plant looks like a squid. And it’s super weird: The plant, which grows to 3 centimetres tall and 2 centimetres wide, emerges to the surface for as little as a week each year. It belongs to a group…
Essays from the Second IWORD
The Ash Center has posted a series of twelve essays stemming from the Second Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy (IWORD 2023). Aviv Ovadya, Democracy as Approximation: A Primer for “AI for Democracy” Innovators Kathryn Peters, Permission and Participation Claudia Chwalisz,…
A Taxonomy of Prompt Injection Attacks
Researchers ran a global prompt hacking competition, and have documented the results in a paper that both gives a lot of good examples and tries to organize a taxonomy of effective prompt injection strategies. It seems as if the most…
How Public AI Can Strengthen Democracy
With the world’s focus turning to misinformation, manipulation, and outright propaganda ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, we know that democracy has an AI problem. But we’re learning that AI has a democracy problem, too. Both challenges must be…
Surveillance through Push Notifications
The Washington Post is reporting on the FBI’s increasing use of push notification data—”push tokens”—to identify people. The police can request this data from companies like Apple and Google without a warrant. The investigative technique goes back years. Court orders…
The Insecurity of Video Doorbells
Consumer Reports has analyzed a bunch of popular Internet-connected video doorbells. Their security is terrible. First, these doorbells expose your home IP address and WiFi network name to the internet without encryption, potentially opening your home network to online criminals.…
Friday Squid Blogging: New Extinct Species of Vampire Squid Discovered
Paleontologists have discovered a 183-million-year-old species of vampire squid. Prior research suggests that the vampyromorph lived in the shallows off an island that once existed in what is now the heart of the European mainland. The research team believes that…
NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0
NIST has released version 2.0 of the Cybersecurity Framework: The CSF 2.0, which supports implementation of the National Cybersecurity Strategy, has an expanded scope that goes beyond protecting critical infrastructure, such as hospitals and power plants, to all organizations in…
How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration will drive the next era of growth, wealth, and human flourishing. It’s a scary metaphor. Throughout American history, the drive for expansion…
A Cyber Insurance Backstop
In the first week of January, the pharmaceutical giant Merck quietly settled its years-long lawsuit over whether or not its property and casualty insurers would cover a $700 million claim filed after the devastating NotPetya cyberattack in 2017. The malware…
China Surveillance Company Hacked
Last week, someone posted something like 570 files, images and chat logs from a Chinese company called I-Soon. I-Soon sells hacking and espionage services to Chinese national and local government. Lots of details in the news articles. These aren’t details…
AIs Hacking Websites
New research: LLM Agents can Autonomously Hack Websites Abstract: In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly capable and can now interact with tools (i.e., call functions), read documents, and recursively call themselves. As a result, these LLMs…