AI Genie in the Wild
When I give talks about AI genies, I use this sort of example as a hypothetical. It’s happened. The story is from Australia. Someone named Andrew tasked OpenClaw to book gym classe…
Security & Lifecycle News
Aggregated from vendor advisories, security research, and industry publications.
AI for Military Support
Interesting empirical research: “Black Box Warfare: Human Judgment and Military Decision-Making in the Age of AI.” Abstract: How is AI transforming decision-making in modern confli…
Python Now Has a Post-Quantum Encryption Library
This is good: Post-quantum cryptography is now one pip-install away for the entire Python ecosystem. With funding from the Sovereign Tech Agency, we implemented support for ML-KEM,…
Friday Squid Blogging: Arctic Bobtail Squid Video
Nice video of the Arctic bobtail squid. 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.
ICE Is Buying Access to Credit Card Records
Through data brokers, ICE is buying the information you provided to open a credit card.
Canadian Man Pleads Guilty in Snowflake Extortions
A 26-year-old Canadian man once described as one of the most consequential cybercrime threat actors of 2024 has pleaded guilty to computer fraud and conspiracy to hack and extort m…
Adversarial Clothing Designed to Fool Facial Recognition Systems
There are many companies manufacturing adversarial clothing designed to confuse facial recognition systems. It’s a cool idea, but I worry that it’s mostly security theater: “Our p…
Vulnerabilities in Car Anti-Theft Device
This is disturbing: …a team of security researchers at UC San Diego, who found that a model of aftermarket car alarm known as the KARR Security System, installed in more than 2 mil…
Iran Cyberattacks Against Minnesota Water Systems
Attribution is preliminary, and so far it seems no real damage. And it seems like this is a campaign that has targeted at least seven states. And, because this is where the US is r…
Some Claude Chats Are Searchable on Google
And it’s personal information (alternate link): The exposed data includes an AI-powered therapy app that someone appears to have vibe-coded, notes on meetings, and a dashboard some…
More on the OpenAI Agent’s Attack on Hugging Face
Hugging Face has published a detailed timeline of the attack. From the summary: The agent was running an internal OpenAI cyber-capability evaluation based on the ExploitGym benchma…
The OpenAI Hack Shows the Genie Is Out of the Bottle
This essay originally appeared in Foreign Policy. Earlier this month, two of OpenAI’s models broke out of their containment sandbox and attacked another AI company. The story is ki…
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Helps Discover New Marine Species
The Squid is a new scientific machine: One of the technological breakthroughs was the onboard use of a spinning wheel confocal microscope, nicknamed the Squid, which uses lasers to…
Anthropic’s Opus 5 Is Better at Resisting Prompt Injection
The chart is interesting. On the IPI benchmark, Opus 5 improved over Opus 4.8, reducing the probability of an attacker succeeding within 15 attempts from 5.5% to 2.0%, and from 0.5…
Facial Recognition at Madison Square Garden
Last month, the story broke (alternate link) that Madison Square Garden uses facial recognition software on everyone entering the facility, and—among other groups—flags activists t…
Read This Before You Buy That TV Streaming Stick
Security experts have been sounding the alarm for years about the risks of using generic TV boxes that promise unlimited content streaming for a one-time fee, warning that they sec…
American Being Prosecuted for Wiping His Phone Before Handing It Over to Border Officials
He’s being prosecuted for giving border officials a code that wiped his phone: The case centers on a feature included in GrapheneOS, a custom Android operating system that runs in …
Should You Use AI for a Task? Here’s a Simple Way to Decide
This essay originally appeared in The Guardian. I teach public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Munk School at the University of Toronto. And it will come as no surpris…
Measuring the Tendency of AI Agents to Go Rogue
This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared in The Guardian. In July, Hugging Face, a company that hosts much of the world’s AI software and open-source AI…
Long-Lived Vulnerability in Microsoft Secure Boot
Microsoft’s Secure Boot has had a serious vulnerability for most of its existence. An industry-wide standard Microsoft invented to protect Windows, and later Linux, devices from fi…
Measuring LLMs’ Ability to Perform Cryptanalysis
There’s new benchmark measuring AI’s ability to perform mathematical cryptanalysis. Anthropic’s frontier model actually found new attacks. The benchmark: “CryptanalysisBench: Can L…
Axon Is Another License Plate Surveillance Company
Governments are switching, but I’m not sure it makes a difference: …some municipalities, including Denver, Colorado, are ditching their Flock arrays. But keep in mind that if they’…
Cognyte Sells a Mobile Cell Surveillance Van
Yet another Israeli mass surveillance company: Made by Israeli surveillance company Cognyte, the tech simulates a mobile phone tower, which forces nearby phones to connect to it. T…
Friday Squid Blogging: Illex Squid Catch in the Falklands
Lower catch this year. 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.
Why AI Needs a “Genie Coefficient”
This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared in IEEE Spectrum. Major benchmarks measure what AI can do. None measure whether it does what you mean: the dist…
End-to-End Encryption and “Going Dark”
New paper: “Encryption and Globalization 15 Years Later: End-to-End Encryption and the Third Round of the ‘Going Dark’ Debate“: Abstract: This Article updates and expands on 2012 r…
First-Person Identity Theft Story
Harrowing story of an identity theft victim. Yes, the person made a mistake—they gave the scammer a two-factor authentication code that allowed the scammer to take over their email…
LG to Ban Residential Proxies from Smart TV Apps
The home appliance giant LG Electronics USA said this week it plans to suspend any apps built for its smart TVs that turn one's television into an always-on residential proxy node.…
MIT to Become Hotbed of AI Video Surveillance
It’s a lot: According to information obtained by The Tech, MIT is spending over $3 million on more than 500 AI surveillance cameras in academic buildings, residence halls, and outd…
On Flock License Plate Tracking Cameras
A recent story of a writer who was mistakenly identified, tracked, and arrested using data from Flock cameras has gone viral. The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from …