Recent Entries
From Schneier on Security at 2025-01-28 12:09:53
Jen Easterly is out as the Director of CISA. Read her final interview:
There’s a lot of unfinished business. We have made an impact through our ransomware vulnerability warning pilot and our pre-ransomware notification initiative, and I’m really proud of that, because we work on preventing somebody from having their worst day. But ransomware is still a problem. We have been laser-focused on PRC cyber actors. That will continue to be a huge problem. I’m really proud of where we are, but there’s much, much more work to be done. There are things that I think we can continue driving, that the next administration, I hope, will look at, because, frankly, cybersecurity is a national security issue...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-01-27 12:02:44
A newly discovered VPN backdoor uses some interesting tactics to avoid detection:
When threat actors use backdoor malware to gain access to a network, they want to make sure all their hard work can’t be leveraged by competing groups or detected by defenders. One countermeasure is to equip the backdoor with a passive agent that remains dormant until it receives what’s known in the business as a “magic packet.” On Thursday, researchers revealed that a never-before-seen backdoor that quietly took hold of dozens of enterprise VPNs running Juniper Network’s Junos OS has been doing just that...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-01-24 22:01:29
Friday Squid Blogging: Beaked Whales Feed on Squid
A Travers’ beaked whale (Mesoplodon traversii) washed ashore in New Zealand, and scientists conlcuded that “the prevalence of squid remains [in its stomachs] suggests that these deep-sea cephalopods form a significant part of the whale’s diet, similar to other beaked whale species.”
From Schneier on Security at 2025-01-23 14:58:39
Third Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy (IWORD 2024)
Last month, Henry Farrell and I convened the Third Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy (IWORD 2024) at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg Center in Washington DC. This is a small, invitational workshop on the future of democracy. As with the previous two workshops, the goal was to bring together a diverse set of political scientists, law professors, philosophers, AI researchers and other industry practitioners, political activists, and creative types (including science fiction writers) to discuss how democracy might be reimagined in the current century...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-01-22 12:04:19
Artificial intelligence (AI) is writing law today. This has required no changes in legislative procedure or the rules of legislative bodies—all it takes is one legislator, or legislative assistant, to use generative AI in the process of drafting a bill.
In fact, the use of AI by legislators is only likely to become more prevalent. There are currently projects in the US House, US Senate, and legislatures around the world to trial the use of AI in various ways: searching databases, drafting text, summarizing meetings, performing policy research and analysis, and more. A Brazilian municipality ...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-01-21 12:02:47
AI Mistakes Are Very Different from Human Mistakes
Humans make mistakes all the time. All of us do, every day, in tasks both new and routine. Some of our mistakes are minor and some are catastrophic. Mistakes can break trust with our friends, lose the confidence of our bosses, and sometimes be the difference between life and death.
Over the millennia, we have created security systems to deal with the sorts of mistakes humans commonly make. These days, casinos rotate their dealers regularly, because they make mistakes if they do the same task for too long. Hospital personnel write on limbs before surgery so that doctors operate on the correct body part, and they count surgical instruments to make sure none were left inside the body. From copyediting to double-entry bookkeeping to appellate courts, we humans have gotten really good at correcting human mistakes...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-01-20 12:06:19
Biden Signs New Cybersecurity Order
President Biden has signed a new cybersecurity order. It has a bunch of provisions, most notably using the US governments procurement power to improve cybersecurity practices industry-wide.
Some details:
The core of the executive order is an array of mandates for protecting government networks based on lessons learned from recent major incidents—namely, the security failures of federal contractors.
The order requires software vendors to submit proof that they follow secure development practices, building on a mandate that debuted in 2022 in response to ...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-01-17 22:02:23
Friday Squid Blogging: Opioid Alternatives from Squid Research
Is there nothing that squid research can’t solve?
“If you’re working with an organism like squid that can edit genetic information way better than any other organism, then it makes sense that that might be useful for a therapeutic application like deadening pain,” he said.
[…]
Researchers hope to mimic how squid and octopus use RNA editing in nerve channels that interpret pain and use that knowledge to manipulate human cells.
From Schneier on Security at 2025-01-17 12:05:27
Social Engineering to Disable iMessage Protections
I am always interested in new phishing tricks, and watching them spread across the ecosystem.
A few days ago I started getting phishing SMS messages with a new twist. They were standard messages about delayed packages or somesuch, with the goal of getting me to click on a link and entering some personal information into a website. But because they came from unknown phone numbers, the links did not work. So—this is the new bit—the messages said something like: “Please reply Y, then exit the text message, reopen the text message activation link, or copy the link to Safari browser to open it.”...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-01-16 12:03:36
FBI Deletes PlugX Malware from Thousands of Computers
According to a DOJ press release, the FBI was able to delete the Chinese-used PlugX malware from “approximately 4,258 U.S.-based computers and networks.”
To retrieve information from and send commands to the hacked machines, the malware connects to a command-and-control server that is operated by the hacking group. According to the FBI, at least 45,000 IP addresses in the US had back-and-forths with the command-and-control server since September 2023.
It was that very server that allowed the FBI to finally kill this pesky bit of malicious software. First, they tapped the know-how of French intelligence agencies, which had ...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-01-15 12:00:58
A very security-conscious company was hit with a (presumed) massive state-actor phishing attack with gift cards, and everyone rallied to combat it—until it turned out it was company management sending the gift cards.
From Schneier on Security at 2025-01-14 17:05:17
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:
- I’m speaking on “AI: Trust & Power” at Capricon 45 in Chicago, Illinois, USA, at 11:30 AM on February 7, 2025. I’m also signing books there on Saturday, February 8, starting at 1:45 PM.
- I’m speaking at Boskone 62 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, which runs from February 14-16, 2025.
- I’m speaking at the Rossfest Symposium in Cambridge, UK, on March 25, 2025.
The list is maintained on this page.
From Schneier on Security at 2025-01-14 12:00:43
The First Password on the Internet
It was created in 1973 by Peter Kirstein:
So from the beginning I put password protection on my gateway. This had been done in such a way that even if UK users telephoned directly into the communications computer provided by Darpa in UCL, they would require a password.
In fact this was the first password on Arpanet. It proved invaluable in satisfying authorities on both sides of the Atlantic for the 15 years I ran the service during which no security breach occurred over my link. I also put in place a system of governance that any UK users had to be approved by a committee which I chaired but which also had UK government and British Post Office representation...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-01-13 12:01:55
Microsoft Takes Legal Action Against AI “Hacking as a Service” Scheme
Not sure this will matter in the end, but it’s a positive move:
Microsoft is accusing three individuals of running a “hacking-as-a-service” scheme that was designed to allow the creation of harmful and illicit content using the company’s platform for AI-generated content.
The foreign-based defendants developed tools specifically designed to bypass safety guardrails Microsoft has erected to prevent the creation of harmful content through its generative AI services, said Steven Masada, the assistant general counsel for Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit. They then compromised the legitimate accounts of paying customers. They combined those two things to create a fee-based platform people could use...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-01-10 22:06:47
Friday Squid Blogging: Cotton-and-Squid-Bone Sponge
News:
A sponge made of cotton and squid bone that has absorbed about 99.9% of microplastics in water samples in China could provide an elusive answer to ubiquitous microplastic pollution in water across the globe, a new report suggests.
[…]
The study tested the material in an irrigation ditch, a lake, seawater and a pond, where it removed up to 99.9% of plastic. It addressed 95%-98% of plastic after five cycles, which the authors say is remarkable reusability.
The sponge is made from chitin extracted from squid bone and cotton cellulose, materials that are often used to address pollution. Cost, secondary pollution and technological complexities have stymied many other filtration systems, but large-scale production of the new material is possible because it is cheap, and raw materials are easy to obtain, the authors say...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-01-10 16:27:17
Apps That Are Spying on Your Location
404 Media is reporting on all the apps that are spying on your location, based on a hack of the location data company Gravy Analytics:
The thousands of apps, included in hacked files from location data company Gravy Analytics, include everything from games like Candy Crush to dating apps like Tinder, to pregnancy tracking and religious prayer apps across both Android and iOS. Because much of the collection is occurring through the advertising ecosystem—not code developed by the app creators themselves—this data collection is likely happening both without users’ and even app developers’ knowledge...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-01-09 17:16:38
Zero-Day Vulnerability in Ivanti VPN
It’s being actively exploited.
From Schneier on Security at 2025-01-07 12:00:42
US Treasury Department Sanctions Chinese Company Over Cyberattacks
From the Washington Post:
The sanctions target Beijing Integrity Technology Group, which U.S. officials say employed workers responsible for the Flax Typhoon attacks which compromised devices including routers and internet-enabled cameras to infiltrate government and industrial targets in the United States, Taiwan, Europe and elsewhere.
From Schneier on Security at 2025-01-06 12:06:52
Privacy of Photos.app’s Enhanced Visual Search
Initial speculation about a new Apple feature.
From Schneier on Security at 2025-01-03 22:04:47
Friday Squid Blogging: Anniversary Post
I made my first squid post nineteen years ago this week. Between then and now, I posted something about squid every week (with maybe only a few exceptions). There is a lot out there about squid, even more if you count the other meanings of the word.
From Schneier on Security at 2025-01-03 14:46:03
ShredOS is a stripped-down operating system designed to destroy data.
GitHub page here.
From Schneier on Security at 2025-01-02 20:22:50
Google Is Allowing Device Fingerprinting
Lukasz Olejnik writes about device fingerprinting, and why Google’s policy change to allow it in 2025 is a major privacy setback.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-12-31 12:02:13
It’s becoming an organized crime tactic:
Card draining is when criminals remove gift cards from a store display, open them in a separate location, and either record the card numbers and PINs or replace them with a new barcode. The crooks then repair the packaging, return to a store and place the cards back on a rack. When a customer unwittingly selects and loads money onto a tampered card, the criminal is able to access the card online and steal the balance.
[…]
In card draining, the runners assist with removing, tampering and restocking of gift cards, according to court documents and investigators...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-12-30 12:05:00
Salt Typhoon’s Reach Continues to Grow
The US government has identified a ninth telecom that was successfully hacked by Salt Typhoon.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-12-27 10:06:22
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid on Pizza
Pizza Hut in Taiwan has a history of weird pizzas, including a “2022 scalloped pizza with Oreos around the edge, and deep-fried chicken and calamari studded throughout the middle.”
From Schneier on Security at 2024-12-26 16:09:30
Scams Based on Fake Google Emails
Scammers are hacking Google Forms to send email to victims that come from google.com.
Brian Krebs reports on the effects.
Boing Boing post.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-12-24 12:04:24
Spyware Maker NSO Group Found Liable for Hacking WhatsApp
A judge has found that NSO Group, maker of the Pegasus spyware, has violated the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by hacking WhatsApp in order to spy on people using it.
Jon Penney and I wrote a legal paper on the case.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-12-23 17:04:02
Criminal Complaint against LockBit Ransomware Writer
The Justice Department has published the criminal complaint against Dmitry Khoroshev, for building and maintaining the LockBit ransomware.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-12-20 22:00:59
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Sticker
A sticker for your water bottle.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-12-19 15:24:47
It turns out that all cluster mailboxes in the Denver area have the same master key. So if someone robs a postal carrier, they can open any mailbox.
I get that a single master key makes the whole system easier, but it’s very fragile security.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-12-18 16:40:21
New Advances in the Understanding of Prime Numbers
Really interesting research into the structure of prime numbers. Not immediately related to the cryptanalysis of prime-number-based public-key algorithms, but every little bit matters.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-12-17 17:04:26
Hacking Digital License Plates
Not everything needs to be digital and “smart.” License plates, for example:
Josep Rodriguez, a researcher at security firm IOActive, has revealed a technique to “jailbreak” digital license plates sold by Reviver, the leading vendor of those plates in the US with 65,000 plates already sold. By removing a sticker on the back of the plate and attaching a cable to its internal connectors, he’s able to rewrite a Reviver plate’s firmware in a matter of minutes. Then, with that custom firmware installed, the jailbroken license plate can receive commands via Bluetooth from a smartphone app to instantly change its display to show any characters or image...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-12-16 12:06:56
Short-Lived Certificates Coming to Let’s Encrypt
Starting next year:
Our longstanding offering won’t fundamentally change next year, but we are going to introduce a new offering that’s a big shift from anything we’ve done before—short-lived certificates. Specifically, certificates with a lifetime of six days. This is a big upgrade for the security of the TLS ecosystem because it minimizes exposure time during a key compromise event.
Because we’ve done so much to encourage automation over the past decade, most of our subscribers aren’t going to have to do much in order to switch to shorter lived certificates. We, on the other hand, are going to have to think about the possibility that we will need to issue 20x as many certificates as we do now. It’s not inconceivable that at some point in our next decade we may need to be prepared to issue 100,000,000 certificates per day...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-12-14 17:01:50
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:
- I’m speaking at a joint meeting of the Boston Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM, in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, at 7:00 PM ET on Thursday, January 9, 2025. The event will take place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Room 32-G449 (Kiva), as well as online via Zoom. Please register in advance if you plan to attend (whether online or in person).
The list is maintained on this page.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-12-13 22:05:12
Friday Squid Blogging: Biology and Ecology of the Colossal Squid
Good survey paper.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-12-13 16:33:58
Ultralytics Supply-Chain Attack
Last week, we saw a supply-chain attack against the Ultralytics AI library on GitHub. A quick summary:
On December 4, a malicious version 8.3.41 of the popular AI library ultralytics —which has almost 60 million downloads—was published to the Python Package Index (PyPI) package repository. The package contained downloader code that was downloading the XMRig coinminer. The compromise of the project’s build environment was achieved by exploiting a known and previously reported GitHub Actions script injection.
Lots more details at that link. Also ...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-12-11 12:02:50
Jailbreaking LLM-Controlled Robots
Surprising no one, it’s easy to trick an LLM-controlled robot into ignoring its safety instructions.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-12-10 12:06:20
Full-Face Masks to Frustrate Identification
This is going to be interesting.
It’s a video of someone trying on a variety of printed full-face masks. They won’t fool anyone for long, but will survive casual scrutiny. And they’re cheap and easy to swap.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-12-09 12:01:18
For a technology that seems startling in its modernity, AI sure has a long history. Google Translate, OpenAI chatbots, and Meta AI image generators are built on decades of advancements in linguistics, signal processing, statistics, and other fields going back to the early days of computing—and, often, on seed funding from the U.S. Department of Defense. But today’s tools are hardly the intentional product of the diverse generations of innovators that came before. We agree with Morozov that the “refuseniks,” as he calls them, are wrong to see AI as “irreparably tainted” by its origins. AI is better understood as a creative, global field of human endeavor that has been largely captured by U.S. venture capitalists, private equity, and Big Tech. But that was never the inevitable outcome, and it doesn’t need to stay that way...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-12-06 22:05:23
Friday Squid Blogging: Safe Quick Undercarriage Immobilization Device
Fifteen years ago I blogged about a different SQUID. Here’s an update:
Fleeing drivers are a common problem for law enforcement. They just won’t stop unless persuaded—persuaded by bullets, barriers, spikes, or snares. Each option is risky business. Shooting up a fugitive’s car is one possibility. But what if children or hostages are in it? Lay down barriers, and the driver might swerve into a school bus. Spike his tires, and he might fishtail into a van—if the spikes stop him at all. Existing traps, made from elastic, may halt a Hyundai, but they’re no match for a Hummer. In addition, officers put themselves at risk of being run down while setting up the traps...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-12-06 12:09:12
This tool seems to do a pretty good job.
The company’s Mobile Threat Hunting feature uses a combination of malware signature-based detection, heuristics, and machine learning to look for anomalies in iOS and Android device activity or telltale signs of spyware infection. For paying iVerify customers, the tool regularly checks devices for potential compromise. But the company also offers a free version of the feature for anyone who downloads the iVerify Basics app for $1. These users can walk through steps to generate and send a special diagnostic utility file to iVerify and receive analysis within hours. Free users can use the tool once a month. iVerify’s infrastructure is built to be privacy-preserving, but to run the Mobile Threat Hunting feature, users must enter an email address so the company has a way to contact them if a scan turns up spyware—as it did in the seven recent Pegasus discoveries...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-12-04 12:09:23
It’s been the biggest year for elections in human history: 2024 is a “super-cycle” year in which 3.7 billion eligible voters in 72 countries had the chance to go the polls. These are also the first AI elections, where many feared that deepfakes and artificial intelligence-generated misinformation would overwhelm the democratic processes. As 2024 draws to a close, it’s instructive to take stock of how democracy did.
In a Pew survey of Americans from earlier this fall, nearly eight times as many respondents expected AI to be used for mostly bad purposes...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-12-03 12:00:47
Algorithms Are Coming for Democracy—but It’s Not All Bad
In 2025, AI is poised to change every aspect of democratic politics—but it won’t necessarily be for the worse.
India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, has used AI to translate his speeches for his multilingual electorate in real time, demonstrating how AI can help diverse democracies to be more inclusive. AI avatars were used by presidential candidates in South Korea in electioneering, enabling them to provide answers to thousands of voters’ questions simultaneously. We are also starting to see AI tools aid fundraising and get-out-the-vote efforts. AI techniques are starting to augment more traditional polling methods, helping campaigns get cheaper and faster data. And congressional candidates have started using AI robocallers to engage voters on issues. In 2025, these trends will continue. AI doesn’t need to be superior to human experts to augment the labor of an overworked canvasser, or to write ad copy similar to that of a junior campaign staffer or volunteer. Politics is competitive, and any technology that can bestow an advantage, or even just garner attention, will be used...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-12-02 12:08:40
Details about the iOS Inactivity Reboot Feature
I recently wrote about the new iOS feature that forces an iPhone to reboot after it’s been inactive for a longish period of time.
Here are the technical details, discovered through reverse engineering. The feature triggers after seventy-two hours of inactivity, even it is remains connected to Wi-Fi.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-11-29 12:01:44
Race Condition Attacks against LLMs
These are two attacks against the system components surrounding LLMs:
We propose that LLM Flowbreaking, following jailbreaking and prompt injection, joins as the third on the growing list of LLM attack types. Flowbreaking is less about whether prompt or response guardrails can be bypassed, and more about whether user inputs and generated model outputs can adversely affect these other components in the broader implemented system.
[…]
When confronted with a sensitive topic, Microsoft 365 Copilot and ChatGPT answer questions that their first-line guardrails are supposed to stop. After a few lines of text they halt—seemingly having “second thoughts”—before retracting the original answer (also known as Clawback), and replacing it with a new one without the offensive content, or a simple error message. We call this attack “Second Thoughts.”...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-11-27 12:05:16
NSO Group Spies on People on Behalf of Governments
The Israeli company NSO Group sells Pegasus spyware to countries around the world (including countries like Saudi Arabia, UAE, India, Mexico, Morocco and Rwanda). We assumed that those countries use the spyware themselves. Now we’ve learned that that’s not true: that NSO Group employees operate the spyware on behalf of their customers.
Legal documents released in ongoing US litigation between NSO Group and WhatsApp have revealed for the first time that the Israeli cyberweapons maker and not its government customers is the party that “installs and extracts” information from mobile phones targeted by the company’s hacking software...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-11-22 22:01:32
Friday Squid Blogging: Transcriptome Analysis of the Indian Squid
Lots of details that are beyond me.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-11-22 12:06:07
The Scale of Geoblocking by Nation
Interesting analysis:
We introduce and explore a little-known threat to digital equality and freedomwebsites geoblocking users in response to political risks from sanctions. U.S. policy prioritizes internet freedom and access to information in repressive regimes. Clarifying distinctions between free and paid websites, allowing trunk cables to repressive states, enforcing transparency in geoblocking, and removing ambiguity about sanctions compliance are concrete steps the U.S. can take to ensure it does not undermine its own aims.
The paper: “...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-11-21 12:03:18
Secret Service Tracking People’s Locations without Warrant
This feels important:
The Secret Service has used a technology called Locate X which uses location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on phones. Because users agreed to an opaque terms of service page, the Secret Service believes it doesn’t need a warrant.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-11-20 16:22:59
Steve Bellovin’s Retirement Talk
Steve Bellovin is retiring. Here’s his retirement talk, reflecting on his career and what the cybersecurity field needs next.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-11-19 12:05:31
Why Italy Sells So Much Spyware
Interesting analysis:
Although much attention is given to sophisticated, zero-click spyware developed by companies like Israel’s NSO Group, the Italian spyware marketplace has been able to operate relatively under the radar by specializing in cheaper tools. According to an Italian Ministry of Justice document, as of December 2022 law enforcement in the country could rent spyware for €150 a day, regardless of which vendor they used, and without the large acquisition costs which would normally be prohibitive.
As a result, thousands of spyware operations have been carried out by Italian authorities in recent years, according to a ...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-11-18 15:49:29
Most of 2023’s Top Exploited Vulnerabilities Were Zero-Days
Zero-day vulnerabilities are more commonly used, according to the Five Eyes:
Key Findings
In 2023, malicious cyber actors exploited more zero-day vulnerabilities to compromise enterprise networks compared to 2022, allowing them to conduct cyber operations against higher-priority targets. In 2023, the majority of the most frequently exploited vulnerabilities were initially exploited as a zero-day, which is an increase from 2022, when less than half of the top exploited vulnerabilities were exploited as a zero-day.
Malicious cyber actors continue to have the most success exploiting vulnerabilities within two years after public disclosure of the vulnerability. The utility of these vulnerabilities declines over time as more systems are patched or replaced. Malicious cyber actors find less utility from zero-day exploits when international cybersecurity efforts reduce the lifespan of zero-day vulnerabilities...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-11-15 22:07:02
Friday Squid Blogging: Female Gonatus Onyx Squid Carrying Her Eggs
Fantastic video of a female Gonatus onyx squid swimming while carrying her egg sack.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-11-14 12:05:26
New iOS Security Feature Makes It Harder for Police to Unlock Seized Phones
Everybody is reporting about a new security iPhone security feature with iOS 18: if the phone hasn’t been used for a few days, it automatically goes into its “Before First Unlock” state and has to be rebooted.
This is a really good security feature. But various police departments don’t like it, because it makes it harder for them to unlock suspects’ phones.
The post New iOS Security Feature Makes It Harder for Police to Unlock Seized Phones appeared first on Schneier on Security.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-11-13 12:06:21
Mapping License Plate Scanners in the US
DeFlock is a crowd-sourced project to map license plate scanners.
It only records the fixed scanners, of course. The mobile scanners on cars are not mapped.
The post Mapping License Plate Scanners in the US appeared first on Schneier on Security.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-11-12 12:05:32
Criminals Exploiting FBI Emergency Data Requests
I’ve been writing about the problem with lawful-access backdoors in encryption for decades now: that as soon as you create a mechanism for law enforcement to bypass encryption, the bad guys will use it too.
Turns out the same thing is true for non-technical backdoors:
The advisory said that the cybercriminals were successful in masquerading as law enforcement by using compromised police accounts to send emails to companies requesting user data. In some cases, the requests cited false threats, like claims of human trafficking and, in one case, that an individual would “suffer greatly or die” unless the company in question returns the requested information...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-11-08 12:03:23
AI Industry is Trying to Subvert the Definition of “Open Source AI”
The Open Source Initiative has published (news article here) its definition of “open source AI,” and it’s terrible. It allows for secret training data and mechanisms. It allows for development to be done in secret. Since for a neural network, the training data is the source code—it’s how the model gets programmed—the definition makes no sense.
And it’s confusing; most “open source” AI models—like LLAMA—are open source in name only. But the OSI seems to have been co-opted by industry players that want both corporate secrecy and the “open source” label. (Here’s one ...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-11-07 16:13:07
Prompt Injection Defenses Against LLM Cyberattacks
Interesting research: “Hacking Back the AI-Hacker: Prompt Injection as a Defense Against LLM-driven Cyberattacks“:
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being harnessed to automate cyberattacks, making sophisticated exploits more accessible and scalable. In response, we propose a new defense strategy tailored to counter LLM-driven cyberattacks. We introduce Mantis, a defensive framework that exploits LLMs’ susceptibility to adversarial inputs to undermine malicious operations. Upon detecting an automated cyberattack, Mantis plants carefully crafted inputs into system responses, leading the attacker’s LLM to disrupt their own operations (passive defense) or even compromise the attacker’s machine (active defense). By deploying purposefully vulnerable decoy services to attract the attacker and using dynamic prompt injections for the attacker’s LLM, Mantis can autonomously hack back the attacker. In our experiments, Mantis consistently achieved over 95% effectiveness against automated LLM-driven attacks. To foster further research and collaboration, Mantis is available as an open-source tool: ...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-11-07 12:07:46
Really interesting research: “An LLM-Assisted Easy-to-Trigger Backdoor Attack on Code Completion Models: Injecting Disguised Vulnerabilities against Strong Detection“:
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed code com-
pletion tasks, providing context-based suggestions to boost developer productivity in software engineering. As users often fine-tune these models for specific applications, poisoning and backdoor attacks can covertly alter the model outputs. To address this critical security challenge, we introduce CODEBREAKER, a pioneering LLM-assisted backdoor attack framework on code completion models. Unlike recent attacks that embed malicious payloads in detectable or irrelevant sections of the code (e.g., comments), CODEBREAKER leverages LLMs (e.g., GPT-4) for sophisticated payload transformation (without affecting functionalities), ensuring that both the poisoned data for fine-tuning and generated code can evade strong vulnerability detection. CODEBREAKER stands out with its comprehensive coverage of vulnerabilities, making it the first to provide such an extensive set for evaluation. Our extensive experimental evaluations and user studies underline the strong attack performance of CODEBREAKER across various settings, validating its superiority over existing approaches. By integrating malicious payloads directly into the source code with minimal transformation, CODEBREAKER challenges current security measures, underscoring the critical need for more robust defenses for code completion...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-11-06 12:02:18
IoT Devices in Password-Spraying Botnet
Microsoft is warning Azure cloud users that a Chinese controlled botnet is engaging in “highly evasive” password spraying. Not sure about the “highly evasive” part; the techniques seem basically what you get in a distributed password-guessing attack:
“Any threat actor using the CovertNetwork-1658 infrastructure could conduct password spraying campaigns at a larger scale and greatly increase the likelihood of successful credential compromise and initial access to multiple organizations in a short amount of time,” Microsoft officials wrote. “This scale, combined with quick operational turnover of compromised credentials between CovertNetwork-1658 and Chinese threat actors, allows for the potential of account compromises across multiple sectors and geographic regions.”...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-11-05 12:08:09
AIs Discovering Vulnerabilities
I’ve been writing about the possibility of AIs automatically discovering code vulnerabilities since at least 2018. This is an ongoing area of research: AIs doing source code scanning, AIs finding zero-days in the wild, and everything in between. The AIs aren’t very good at it yet, but they’re getting better.
Here’s some anecdotal data from this summer:
Since July 2024, ZeroPath is taking a novel approach combining deep program analysis with adversarial AI agents for validation. Our methodology has uncovered numerous critical vulnerabilities in production systems, including several that traditional Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tools were ill-equipped to find. This post provides a technical deep-dive into our research methodology and a living summary of the bugs found in popular open-source tools...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-11-04 12:02:25
Sophos Versus the Chinese Hackers
Really interesting story of Sophos’s five-year war against Chinese hackers.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-11-01 21:04:05
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Sculpture in Massachusetts Building
Great blow-up sculpture.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-10-31 15:43:16
Roger Grimes on Prioritizing Cybersecurity Advice
This is a good point:
Part of the problem is that we are constantly handed lists…list of required controls…list of things we are being asked to fix or improve…lists of new projects…lists of threats, and so on, that are not ranked for risks. For example, we are often given a cybersecurity guideline (e.g., PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOX, NIST, etc.) with hundreds of recommendations. They are all great recommendations, which if followed, will reduce risk in your environment.
What they do not tell you is which of the recommended things will have the most impact on best reducing risk in your environment. They do not tell you that one, two or three of these things…among the hundreds that have been given to you, will reduce more risk than all the others...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-10-31 15:16:25
Tracking World Leaders Using Strava
Way back in 2018, people noticed that you could find secret military bases using data published by the Strava fitness app. Soldiers and other military personal were using them to track their runs, and you could look at the public data and find places where there should be no people running.
Six years later, the problem remains. Le Monde has reported that the same Strava data can be used to track the movements of world leaders. They don’t wear the tracking device, but many of their bodyguards do.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-10-30 14:48:19
Simson Garfinkel on Spooky Cryptographic Action at a Distance
Excellent read. One example:
Consider the case of basic public key cryptography, in which a person’s public and private key are created together in a single operation. These two keys are entangled, not with quantum physics, but with math.
When I create a virtual machine server in the Amazon cloud, I am prompted for an RSA public key that will be used to control access to the machine. Typically, I create the public and private keypair on my laptop and upload the public key to Amazon, which bakes my public key into the server’s administrator account. My laptop and that remove server are thus entangled, in that the only way to log into the server is using the key on my laptop. And because that administrator account can do anything to that server—read the sensitivity data, hack the web server to install malware on people who visit its web pages, or anything else I might care to do—the private key on my laptop represents a security risk for that server...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-10-30 14:48:19
Simpson Garfinkel on Spooky Cryptographic Action at a Distance
Excellent read. One example:
Consider the case of basic public key cryptography, in which a person’s public and private key are created together in a single operation. These two keys are entangled, not with quantum physics, but with math.
When I create a virtual machine server in the Amazon cloud, I am prompted for an RSA public key that will be used to control access to the machine. Typically, I create the public and private keypair on my laptop and upload the public key to Amazon, which bakes my public key into the server’s administrator account. My laptop and that remove server are thus entangled, in that the only way to log into the server is using the key on my laptop. And because that administrator account can do anything to that serverread the sensitivity data, hack the web server to install malware on people who visit its web pages, or anything else I might care to dothe private key on my laptop represents a security risk for that server...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-10-29 11:02:15
Law Enforcement Deanonymizes Tor Users
The German police have successfully deanonymized at least four Tor users. It appears they watch known Tor relays and known suspects, and use timing analysis to figure out who is using what relay.
Hacker News thread.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-10-28 16:12:43
Criminals Are Blowing up ATMs in Germany
It’s low tech, but effective.
Why Germany? It has more ATMs than other European countries, and—if I read the article right—they have more money in them.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-10-25 22:01:14
Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid Found on Spanish Beach
A giant squid has washed up on a beach in Northern Spain.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-10-25 14:56:23
Watermark for LLM-Generated Text
Researchers at Google have developed a watermark for LLM-generated text. The basics are pretty obvious: the LLM chooses between tokens partly based on a cryptographic key, and someone with knowledge of the key can detect those choices. What makes this hard is (1) how much text is required for the watermark to work, and (2) how robust the watermark is to post-generation editing. Google’s version looks pretty good: it’s detectable in text as small as 200 tokens.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-10-23 19:16:07
Are Automatic License Plate Scanners Constitutional?
An advocacy groups is filing a Fourth Amendment challenge against automatic license plate readers.
“The City of Norfolk, Virginia, has installed a network of cameras that make it functionally impossible for people to drive anywhere without having their movements tracked, photographed, and stored in an AI-assisted database that enables the warrantless surveillance of their every move. This civil rights lawsuit seeks to end this dragnet surveillance program,” the lawsuit notes. “In Norfolk, no one can escape the government’s 172 unblinking eyes,” it continues, referring to the 172 Flock cameras currently operational in Norfolk. The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures and has been ruled in many cases to protect against warrantless government surveillance, and the lawsuit specifically says Norfolk’s installation violates that.”...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-10-22 12:03:09
No, The Chinese Have Not Broken Modern Encryption Systems with a Quantum Computer
The headline is pretty scary: “China’s Quantum Computer Scientists Crack Military-Grade Encryption.”
No, it’s not true.
This debunking saved me the trouble of writing one. It all seems to have come from this news article, which wasn’t bad but was taken widely out of proportion.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-10-21 12:09:33
AI and the SEC Whistleblower Program
Tax farming is the practice of licensing tax collection to private contractors. Used heavily in ancient Rome, it’s largely fallen out of practice because of the obvious conflict of interest between the state and the contractor. Because tax farmers are primarily interested in short-term revenue, they have no problem abusing taxpayers and making things worse for them in the long term. Today, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is engaged in a modern-day version of tax farming. And the potential for abuse will grow when the farmers start using artificial intelligence...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-10-18 22:08:58
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Scarf
Cute squid scarf.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-10-18 14:58:14
Justice Department Indicts Tech CEO for Falsifying Security Certifications
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the CEO of a still unnamed company has been indicted for creating a fake auditing company to falsify security certifications in order to win government business.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-10-16 12:03:23
The men’s world conkers champion is accused of cheating with a steel chestnut.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-10-15 12:06:44
More Details on Israel Sabotaging Hezbollah Pagers and Walkie-Talkies
The Washington Post has a long and detailed story about the operation that’s well worth reading (alternate version here).
The sales pitch came from a marketing official trusted by Hezbollah with links to Apollo. The marketing official, a woman whose identity and nationality officials declined to reveal, was a former Middle East sales representative for the Taiwanese firm who had established her own company and acquired a license to sell a line of pagers that bore the Apollo brand. Sometime in 2023, she offered Hezbollah a deal on one of the products her firm sold: the rugged and reliable AR924...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-10-14 17:49:08
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:
- I’m speaking at SOSS Fusion 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. The event will be held on October 22 and 23, 2024, and my talk is at 9:15 AM ET on October 22, 2024.
The list is maintained on this page.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-10-14 12:06:27
Perfectl in an impressive piece of malware:
The malware has been circulating since at least 2021. It gets installed by exploiting more than 20,000 common misconfigurations, a capability that may make millions of machines connected to the Internet potential targets, researchers from Aqua Security said. It can also exploit CVE-2023-33246, a vulnerability with a severity rating of 10 out of 10 that was patched last year in Apache RocketMQ, a messaging and streaming platform that’s found on many Linux machines.
The researchers are calling the malware Perfctl, the name of a malicious component that surreptitiously mines cryptocurrency. The unknown developers of the malware gave the process a name that combines the perf Linux monitoring tool and ctl, an abbreviation commonly used with command line tools. A signature characteristic of Perfctl is its use of process and file names that are identical or similar to those commonly found in Linux environments. The naming convention is one of the many ways the malware attempts to escape notice of infected users...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-10-11 22:04:10
Indian Fishermen Are Catching Less Squid
Fishermen in Tamil Nadu are reporting smaller catches of squid.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-10-11 20:00:27
More on My AI and Democracy Book
In July, I wrote about my new book project on AI and democracy, to be published by MIT Press in fall 2025. My co-author and collaborator Nathan Sanders and I are hard at work writing.
At this point, we would like feedback on titles. Here are four possibilities:
- Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform our Politics, Government, and Citizenship
- The Thinking State: How AI Can Improve Democracy
- Better Run: How AI Can Make our Politics, Government, Citizenship More Efficient, Effective and Fair
- AI and the New Future of Democracy: Changes in Politics, Government, and Citizenship...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-10-11 12:08:28
After retiring in 2014 from an uncharacteristically long tenure running the NSA (and US CyberCommand), Keith Alexander founded a cybersecurity company called IronNet. At the time, he claimed that it was based on IP he developed on his own time while still in the military. That always troubled me. Whatever ideas he had, they were developed on public time using public resources: he shouldn’t have been able to leave military service with them in his back pocket.
In any case, it was never clear what those ideas were. IronNet never seemed to have any special technology going for it. Near as I could tell, its success was entirely based on Alexander’s name...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-10-10 12:00:59
Deebot Robot Vacuums Are Using Photos and Audio to Train Their AI
An Australian news agency is reporting that robot vacuum cleaners from the Chinese company Deebot are surreptitiously taking photos and recording audio, and sending that data back to the vendor to train their AIs.
Ecovacs’s privacy policy—available elsewhere in the app—allows for blanket collection of user data for research purposes, including:
- The 2D or 3D map of the user’s house generated by the device
- Voice recordings from the device’s microphone
- Photos or videos recorded by the device’s camera
It also states that voice recordings, videos and photos that are deleted via the app may continue to be held and used by Ecovacs...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-10-09 12:05:50
Auto-Identification Smart Glasses
Two students have created a demo of a smart-glasses app that performs automatic facial recognition and then information lookups. Kind of obvious, but the sort of creepy demo that gets attention.
News article.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-10-08 12:00:52
China Possibly Hacking US “Lawful Access” Backdoor
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Chinese hackers (Salt Typhoon) penetrated the networks of US broadband providers, and might have accessed the backdoors that the federal government uses to execute court-authorized wiretap requests. Those backdoors have been mandated by law—CALEA—since 1994.
It’s a weird story. The first line of the article is: “A cyberattack tied to the Chinese government penetrated the networks of a swath of U.S. broadband providers.” This implies that the attack wasn’t against the broadband providers directly, but against one of the intermediary companies that sit between the government CALEA requests and the broadband providers...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-10-07 12:02:36
Largest Recorded DDoS Attack is 3.8 Tbps
CLoudflare just blocked the current record DDoS attack: 3.8 terabits per second. (Lots of good information on the attack, and DDoS in general, at the link.)
News article.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-10-04 22:07:53
Friday Squid Blogging: Map of All Colossal Squid Sightings
Interesting map, from this paper.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-10-03 12:04:20
Hackers can execute commands on a remote computer by sending malformed emails to a Zimbra mail server. It’s critical, but difficult to exploit.
In an email sent Wednesday afternoon, Proofpoint researcher Greg Lesnewich seemed to largely concur that the attacks weren’t likely to lead to mass infections that could install ransomware or espionage malware. The researcher provided the following details:
- While the exploitation attempts we have observed were indiscriminate in targeting, we haven’t seen a large volume of exploitation attempts
- Based on what we have researched and observed, exploitation of this vulnerability is very easy, but we do not have any information about how reliable the exploitation is ...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-10-02 12:01:30
California AI Safety Bill Vetoed
Governor Newsom has vetoed the state’s AI safety bill.
I have mixed feelings about the bill. There’s a lot to like about it, and I want governments to regulate in this space. But, for now, it’s all EU.
(Related, the Council of Europe treaty on AI is ready for signature. It’ll be legally binding when signed, and it’s a big deal.)
From Schneier on Security at 2024-10-01 12:07:34
Hacking ChatGPT by Planting False Memories into Its Data
This vulnerability hacks a feature that allows ChatGPT to have long-term memory, where it uses information from past conversations to inform future conversations with that same user. A researcher found that he could use that feature to plant “false memories” into that context window that could subvert the model.
A month later, the researcher submitted a new disclosure statement. This time, he included a PoC that caused the ChatGPT app for macOS to send a verbatim copy of all user input and ChatGPT output to a server of his choice. All a target needed to do was instruct the LLM to view a web link that hosted a malicious image. From then on, all input and output to and from ChatGPT was sent to the attacker’s website...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-09-30 12:00:40
For years now, AI has undermined the public’s ability to trust what it sees, hears, and reads. The Republican National Committee released a provocative ad offering an “AI-generated look into the country’s possible future if Joe Biden is re-elected,” showing apocalyptic, machine-made images of ruined cityscapes and chaos at the border. Fake robocalls purporting to be from Biden urged New Hampshire residents not to vote in the 2024 primary election. This summer, the Department of Justice cracked down on a Russian bot farm that was using AI to impersonate Americans on social media, and OpenAI disrupted an ...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-09-27 12:01:53
NIST Recommends Some Common-Sense Password Rules
NIST’s second draft of its “SP 800-63-4“—its digital identify guidelines—finally contains some really good rules about passwords:
The following requirements apply to passwords:
- lVerifiers and CSPs SHALL require passwords to be a minimum of eight characters in length and SHOULD require passwords to be a minimum of 15 characters in length.
- Verifiers and CSPs SHOULD permit a maximum password length of at least 64 characters.
- Verifiers and CSPs SHOULD accept all printing ASCII [RFC20] characters and the space character in passwords.
- Verifiers and CSPs SHOULD accept Unicode [ISO/ISC 10646] characters in passwords. Each Unicode code point SHALL be counted as a signgle character when evaluating password length. ...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-09-26 12:03:29
An Analysis of the EU’s Cyber Resilience Act
A good—long, complex—analysis of the EU’s new Cyber Resilience Act.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-09-25 12:00:29
New Windows Malware Locks Computer in Kiosk Mode
A malware campaign uses the unusual method of locking users in their browser’s kiosk mode to annoy them into entering their Google credentials, which are then stolen by information-stealing malware.
Specifically, the malware “locks” the user’s browser on Google’s login page with no obvious way to close the window, as the malware also blocks the “ESC” and “F11” keyboard keys. The goal is to frustrate the user enough that they enter and save their Google credentials in the browser to “unlock” the computer.
Once credentials are saved, the StealC information-stealing malware steals them from the credential store and sends them back to the attacker...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-09-24 12:05:34
Israel’s Pager Attacks and Supply Chain Vulnerabilities
Israel’s brazen attacks on Hezbollah last week, in which hundreds of pagers and two-way radios exploded and killed at least 37 people, graphically illustrated a threat that cybersecurity experts have been warning about for years: Our international supply chains for computerized equipment leave us vulnerable. And we have no good means to defend ourselves.
Though the deadly operations were stunning, none of the elements used to carry them out were particularly new. The tactics employed by Israel, which has neither confirmed nor denied any role, to hijack an international supply chain and embed plastic explosives in Hezbollah devices have been used for years. What’s new is that Israel put them together in such a devastating and extravagantly public fashion, bringing into stark relief what the future of great power competition will look like—in peacetime, wartime and the ever expanding ...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-09-23 16:46:56
Hacking the “Bike Angels” System for Moving Bikeshares
I always like a good hack. And this story delivers. Basically, the New York City bikeshare program has a system to reward people who move bicycles from full stations to empty ones. By deliberately moving bikes to create artificial problems, and exploiting exactly how the system calculates rewards, some people are making a lot of money.
At 10 a.m. on a Tuesday last month, seven Bike Angels descended on the docking station at Broadway and 53rd Street, across from the Ed Sullivan Theater. Each rider used his own special blue key -- a reward from Citi Bike— to unlock a bike. He rode it one block east, to Seventh Avenue. He docked, ran back to Broadway, unlocked another bike and made the trip again...
From Schneier on Security at 2024-09-21 02:59:17
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Game Season Two Teaser
The teaser for Squid Game Season Two dropped.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-09-20 16:32:37
Clever Social Engineering Attack Using Captchas
This is really interesting.
It’s a phishing attack targeting GitHub users, tricking them to solve a fake Captcha that actually runs a script that is copied to the command line.
Clever.
From Schneier on Security at 2024-09-19 16:40:17
The FBI has shut down a botnet run by Chinese hackers:
The botnet malware infected a number of different types of internet-connected devices around the world, including home routers, cameras, digital video recorders, and NAS drives. Those devices were used to help infiltrate sensitive networks related to universities, government agencies, telecommunications providers, and media organizations…. The botnet was launched in mid-2021, according to the FBI, and infected roughly 260,000 devices as of June 2024.
The operation to dismantle the botnet was coordinated by the FBI, the NSA, and the Cyber National Mission Force (CNMF), according to a press release dated ...