In September, hackers from a group called ShinyHunters announced that they stole a trove of FBI data about its own agents. It was an intelligence disaster. Last week, the FBI arrested (alternate link) someone associated with that crime.
On Wednesday I spent a day fishing, on a small boat out of Gloucester, MA. We caught many cod (none of which we could keep), and a bunch of hake and mackerel (all of which we could keep). And…I caught a squid!
This essay was written with Seva Gunitsky, and originally appeared in Foreign Affairs. Two weeks after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in March 2022, the Russian TV Channel One editor Marina Ovsyannikova burst onto the set of the evening newscast. She held up a hand-drawn sign behind the…
Apple just released a system called “Reference Image.” It can verify the image is exactly as taken by an iPhone—new models only—without tying it to a specific iPhone or photographer. It can also verify that multiple images came from the same iPhone.
404Media is reporting (alternate link) that a cyber-weapons arms manufacturer is exploiting a vulnerability in iOS to bypass its automatic reboot security feature. This is the feature that automatically puts an iPhone into a more secure state if it hasn’t been used for 72 hours. The new technology…
This one is from 1809, written by Napoleon’s nephew.
The EU is recommending import controls to combat unregulated squid fishing in the Southwest Atlantic. I’m not optimistic. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Blog moderation policy.
St. Lucie County in Florida discovered (alt link) a dozen Flock cameras whose ownership it can’t identify, and that the county government had not permitted. I am reminded of the decade-old story of StingRay cell phone surveillance devices in Washington, DC, whose operators were also unknown. My…
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Guardian. New campaign finance disclosure data shines a light on which US political campaigns are using AI tools and how much they are spending on them. Candidates’, parties’ and committees’ spending reveals that AI is…
Researchers at Northeastern University, in collaboration with Consumer Reports, evaluated how much modern cars spy in their drivers: The new Northeastern study shows, for the first time, data flowing among the vehicles, the vehicle apps you download when you buy your car, and third-party companies…
AI systems are regularly completing tasks in ways that their prompters don’t want or intend. Some of them are disturbing, and some of them are dangerous. This is something I’ve been calling “genie behavior,” because I think that really gets at the core of what’s happening. I wish the popular press…
Modern messaging apps allow users to link their phone accounts to their computer desktop. Eavesdroppers are taking advantage of this capability: Apps such as WhatsApp Web and Signal Desktop allow people to use their accounts on other devices, such as laptops or desktop computers. Germany’s Customs…
ArsTechnica is reporting on a “new” attack against RSA, one that bypasses factoring. First, this attack isn’t new. The original research is from 2007. What is new is the implementation. Second, it is a forgery attack. It allows an attacker to forge digital signatures.
I feel like someone who reads this blog will want to go to this: Families are invited to dive into the fascinating world of marine biology during an exciting, hands-on Family Squid Dissection at the Hands-On Science Center.
Earlier this month, Anthropic published a long report detailing all of the Claude misuses it detected. Daniel Meissler usefully summarized the report into 117 findings.
This is an impressive piece of malware. Its sophistication says nation-state to me, but there is no direct evidence and certainly no attribution.
New paper: “Self-Jailbreaking: Language Models Can Reason Themselves Out of Safety Alignment After Benign Reasoning Training.” Abstract: We discover a novel and surprising phenomenon of unintentional misalignment in reasoning language models (RLMs), which we call self-jailbreaking.
This is pretty amazing: However, the most astonishing thing about this break is that the GPT6 Astra did it entirely on its own. Carter Leffer only directed GPT6 Astra to see if it could break any of the unbroken Enigma messages published on the Crypto Cellar Research web page.
Hackers captured a Flock camera and got a look (alternate link) at the software: While much of the automatic license plate reader’s (ALPR) most sensitive storage remained encrypted and inaccessible, the joint analysis of the recovered data shows that software running on the device explicitly…
Short essay about squid egg sacs. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Blog moderation policy.
Anthropic’s recent security-incident document contains a bit about how CAPTCHAs are still frustrating Claude.
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Guardian. There are plenty of signs that AI will make all of our experiences of the US midterm elections worse. Voters have anxiety about AI’s impacts on the country. Politicos are using AI deepfakes to spread lies.
New variant of an old scam: Use the framing of a CAPTCHA to get an unsuspecting user to download and run a malicious program.
This essay was written with Cindy Cohn, and originally appeared in Lawfare. One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept.
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