Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Washing Up on Cape Cod Beach
Lots of articles about this. 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.
Security & Lifecycle News
Aggregated from vendor advisories, security research, and industry publications.
Details of Alan Turing’s Voice Encryption System
Really interesting piece of cryptographic history: In November 2023, a large cache of his wartime papers—nicknamed the “Bayley papers”—was auctioned in London for almost half a mil…
Protecting Privacy in an AI Era
Daniel Solove argues in the Wall Street Journal (alternate link) that giving people control of their personal data is not an effective way to regulate privacy in this era. Instead,…
A Video Screen That Is Also a Camera
Amazing: Researchers from ETH Zurich in Switzerland, however, managed to create a new type of pixel that can simultaneously do both. This hypercharged pixel, called a Fourier pixel…
Microsoft Patches a Record 570 Security Flaws
Microsoft Corp. today released software updates to plug at least 570 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, almost triple the number of vulnerabilities…
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking (virtually) at the Policy-Relevant Privacy Research Workshop in Calgary, Canada, on Monday, July 20,…
Vulnerability in FIFA’s Network
FIFA’s network was vulnerable to anyone with even minimal access.
Lessons Learned from CISA’s Recent GitHub Leak
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued a postmortem on a data leak in which a contractor published dozens of internal CISA credentials -- including …
AI Data Centers and the Concentration of Wealth
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Guardian. Opposition to AI data centers has emerged as a primary theme in US politics, one that—surpri…
Friday Squid Blogging: “Squidbleed” Vulnerability
In a rare combined cybersecurity/squid post, a twenty-nine-year-old squid proxy bug can leak HTTP requests. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security st…
AI Surveillance and Social Progress
In the near future, AI-powered surveillance systems will be able to track everything we do in public, and much of what we do in private. And if we do something wrong—shoplift, litt…
The Language of AI Could Change How Humans Speak
Because of the way they are trained, large language models capture only a slice of human language. They’re trained on the written word, from textbooks to social media posts, and ou…
Felons, Fraudsters Flog Offensive Cybersecurity Startup
A cybersecurity startup dangling millions of dollars to acquire zero-day security vulnerabilities in popular software is run by a pair of far-right conspiracy theorists and convict…
Cybersecurity and the Gap Between Skill and Ability
Last week, national security agencies from the Five Eyes—that’s the rich, English-language-speaking countries club—jointly released a statement warning of the increasing cyber risk…
Google Is Suing Chinese Scammers Who Are Using Gemini
Not sure this will have any effect, but I support the effort: According to Google’s legal filing, Outsider Enterprise operates through Telegram. The group offers phishing-as-a-serv…
France to Stop Certifying Non-Quantum-Safe Encryption
France is accelerating its transition to post-quantum encryption: France’s cybersecurity agency ANSSI said on Tuesday it would stop certifying security products that lack quantum-r…
Flock Cameras Can Surveil Cars Without License Plates
This is from a 2024 company presentation: Officers can also tap into data showing a car’s decals, bumper stickers, back and top racks—along with temporary and unique state tags. Fl…
FBI Seizes NetNut Proxy Platform, Popa Botnet
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said today it worked with industry partners to seize hundreds of domains associated with NetNut, a sprawling residential proxy service ope…
Cybersecurity Mission Creep in the US
Interesting paper: “Cybersecurity Mission Creep.” Abstract: Cybersecurity is experiencing mission creep. Policymakers are casting more and more problems as issues of cybersecurity.…
Papa Johns Surveillance-Based Advertising
Papa Johns is spying on people’s buying activities to predict when they are low on food: The pizza chain recently tapped NBCUniversal, Instacart and the dentsu-owned media agency C…
The Realities of AI Video Surveillance
The Financial Times has a good article on how AI is changing the capabilities of video surveillance, with information from both Israel/Iran and Russia. I wrote about this sort of t…
Factoring RSA Keys with Many Zeros
Interesting research on a new class of weak RSA keys: keys with lots of zeros. It turns out that these keys are out in the wild. The badkeys project is an open-source service that …
Robot Police Officers
We’ve taken one small step towards robot police officers: a drone capable of disarming a suspect: In a June 22 video posted on the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office’s Instagram pa…
The Chinese Control the Majority of Argentina’s Squid Fleet
Chinese companies control nearly two-thirds of Argentina’s own squid fleet.
Meta Is Testing Facial Recognition for Police and Military
We know that ICE wants to deploy eyeglasses with facial recognition that can identify people in real time. Turns out Meta is prototyping the feature with a Pentagon supplier. (Alte…
One Million Passports Leaked Online
A database of almost a million passports from around the world was leaked online. Note what happened. A high-value credential—a passport—was used in an ancillary low-value authenti…
AI and Liability
Earlier this month, a German court ruled that Google is liable for its AI search summaries. Rejecting defenses like “users can check for themselves,” and that they generally know “…
Interesting Paper Exploring Prompt Injection
This is a fascinating explotation of how LLMs fall for prompt injection attacks. It turns out that they learn to recognize the style of text in different role/instruction blocks, a…
Embedding Forbidden Text in Spyware to Discourage AI Analysis
At least one malware developer is adding text about nuclear and biological weapons to their spyware, in an effort to stop automatic AI analysis. Details: The _index.js payload begi…
Scattered Spider Hackers Plead Guilty on Day 1 of Trial
Two men pleaded guilty in the United Kingdom this week to criminal charges stemming from an August 2024 cyberattack that crippled Transport for London, the entity responsible for t…