Recent Entries
From Schneier on Security at 2025-04-01 12:01:36
Cell Phone OPSEC for Border Crossings
I have heard stories of more aggressive interrogation of electronic devices at US border crossings. I know a lot about securing computers, but very little about securing phones.
Are there easy ways to delete data—files, photos, etc.—on phones so it can’t be recovered? Does resetting a phone to factory defaults erase data, or is it still recoverable? That is, does the reset erase the old encryption key, or just sever the password that access that key? When the phone is rebooted, are deleted files still available?
We need answers for both iPhones and Android phones. And it’s not just the US; the world is going to become a more dangerous place to oppose state power...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-03-31 12:04:55
The Signal Chat Leak and the NSA
US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who started the now-infamous group chat coordinating a US attack against the Yemen-based Houthis on March 15, is seemingly now suggesting that the secure messaging service Signal has security vulnerabilities.
"I didn’t see this loser in the group," Waltz told Fox News about Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, whom Waltz invited to the chat. "Whether he did it deliberately or it happened in some other technical mean, is something we’re trying to figure out."
Waltz’s implication that Goldberg may have hacked his way in was followed by a ...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-03-28 21:04:42
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Werewolf Hacking Group
In another rare squid/cybersecurity intersection, APT37 is also known as “Squid Werewolf.”
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
From Schneier on Security at 2025-03-28 11:01:08
This is a truly fascinating paper: “Trusted Machine Learning Models Unlock Private Inference for Problems Currently Infeasible with Cryptography.” The basic idea is that AIs can act as trusted third parties:
Abstract: We often interact with untrusted parties. Prioritization of privacy can limit the effectiveness of these interactions, as achieving certain goals necessitates sharing private data. Traditionally, addressing this challenge has involved either seeking trusted intermediaries or constructing cryptographic protocols that restrict how much data is revealed, such as multi-party computations or zero-knowledge proofs. While significant advances have been made in scaling cryptographic approaches, they remain limited in terms of the size and complexity of applications they can be used for. In this paper, we argue that capable machine learning models can fulfill the role of a trusted third party, thus enabling secure computations for applications that were previously infeasible. In particular, we describe Trusted Capable Model Environments (TCMEs) as an alternative approach for scaling secure computation, where capable machine learning model(s) interact under input/output constraints, with explicit information flow control and explicit statelessness. This approach aims to achieve a balance between privacy and computational efficiency, enabling private inference where classical cryptographic solutions are currently infeasible. We describe a number of use cases that are enabled by TCME, and show that even some simple classic cryptographic problems can already be solved with TCME. Finally, we outline current limitations and discuss the path forward in implementing them...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-03-27 11:00:32
A Taxonomy of Adversarial Machine Learning Attacks and Mitigations
NIST just released a comprehensive taxonomy of adversarial machine learning attacks and countermeasures.
From Schneier on Security at 2025-03-26 11:07:13
Cloudflare has a new feature—available to free users as well—that uses AI to generate random pages to feed to AI web crawlers:
Instead of simply blocking bots, Cloudflare’s new system lures them into a “maze” of realistic-looking but irrelevant pages, wasting the crawler’s computing resources. The approach is a notable shift from the standard block-and-defend strategy used by most website protection services. Cloudflare says blocking bots sometimes backfires because it alerts the crawler’s operators that they’ve been detected.
“When we detect unauthorized crawling, rather than blocking the request, we will link to a series of AI-generated pages that are convincing enough to entice a crawler to traverse them,” writes Cloudflare. “But while real looking, this content is not actually the content of the site we are protecting, so the crawler wastes time and resources.”...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-03-25 11:05:01
Citizen Lab has a new report on Paragon’s spyware:
Key Findings:
- Introducing Paragon Solutions. Paragon Solutions was founded in Israel in 2019 and sells spyware called Graphite. The company differentiates itself by claiming it has safeguards to prevent the kinds of spyware abuses that NSO Group and other vendors are notorious for.
- Infrastructure Analysis of Paragon Spyware. Based on a tip from a collaborator, we mapped out server infrastructure that we attribute to Paragon’s Graphite spyware tool. We identified a subset of suspected Paragon deployments, including in Australia, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Israel, and Singapore. ...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-03-24 10:38:58
More Countries are Demanding Back-Doors to Encrypted Apps
Last month I wrote about the UK forcing Apple to break its Advanced Data Protection encryption in iCloud. More recently, both Sweden and France are contemplating mandating back doors. Both initiatives are attempting to scare people into supporting back doors, which are—of course—are terrible idea.
From Schneier on Security at 2025-03-21 20:30:35
Friday Squid Blogging: A New Explanation of Squid Camouflage
New research:
An associate professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Northeastern University, Deravi’s recently published paper in the Journal of Materials Chemistry C sheds new light on how squid use organs that essentially function as organic solar cells to help power their camouflage abilities.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
From Schneier on Security at 2025-03-21 18:26:22
My Writings Are in the LibGen AI Training Corpus
The Atlantic has a search tool that allows you to search for specific works in the “LibGen” database of copyrighted works that Meta used to train its AI models. (The rest of the article is behind a paywall, but not the search tool.)
It’s impossible to know exactly which parts of LibGen Meta used to train its AI, and which parts it might have decided to exclude; this snapshot was taken in January 2025, after Meta is known to have accessed the database, so some titles here would not have been available to download.
Still…interesting.
Searching my name yields 199 results: all of my books in different versions, plus a bunch of shorter items...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-03-21 11:47:32
NCSC Releases Post-Quantum Cryptography Timeline
The UK’s National Computer Security Center (part of GCHQ) released a timeline—also see their blog post—for migration to quantum-computer-resistant cryptography.
It even made The Guardian.
From Schneier on Security at 2025-03-20 15:14:23
This is serious:
A sophisticated cascading supply chain attack has compromised multiple GitHub Actions, exposing critical CI/CD secrets across tens of thousands of repositories. The attack, which originally targeted the widely used “tj-actions/changed-files” utility, is now believed to have originated from an earlier breach of the “reviewdog/action-setup@v1” GitHub Action, according to a report.
[…]
CISA confirmed the vulnerability has been patched in version 46.0.1.
Given that the utility is used by more than 23,000 GitHub repositories, the scale of potential impact has raised significant alarm throughout the developer community...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-03-18 11:10:08
Is Security Human Factors Research Skewed Towards Western Ideas and Habits?
Really interesting research: “How WEIRD is Usable Privacy and Security Research?” by Ayako A. Hasegawa Daisuke Inoue, and Mitsuaki Akiyama:
Abstract: In human factor fields such as human-computer interaction (HCI) and psychology, researchers have been concerned that participants mostly come from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) countries. This WEIRD skew may hinder understanding of diverse populations and their cultural differences. The usable privacy and security (UPS) field has inherited many research methodologies from research on human factor fields. We conducted a literature review to understand the extent to which participant samples in UPS papers were from WEIRD countries and the characteristics of the methodologies and research topics in each user study recruiting Western or non-Western participants. We found that the skew toward WEIRD countries in UPS is greater than that in HCI. Geographic and linguistic barriers in the study methods and recruitment methods may cause researchers to conduct user studies locally. In addition, many papers did not report participant demographics, which could hinder the replication of the reported studies, leading to low reproducibility. To improve geographic diversity, we provide the suggestions including facilitate replication studies, address geographic and linguistic issues of study/recruitment methods, and facilitate research on the topics for non-WEIRD populations...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-03-17 15:09:57
Improvements in Brute Force Attacks
New paper: “GPU Assisted Brute Force Cryptanalysis of GPRS, GSM, RFID, and TETRA: Brute Force Cryptanalysis of KASUMI, SPECK, and TEA3.”
Abstract: Key lengths in symmetric cryptography are determined with respect to the brute force attacks with current technology. While nowadays at least 128-bit keys are recommended, there are many standards and real-world applications that use shorter keys. In order to estimate the actual threat imposed by using those short keys, precise estimates for attacks are crucial.
In this work we provide optimized implementations of several widely used algorithms on GPUs, leading to interesting insights on the cost of brute force attacks on several real-word applications...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-03-14 21:03:56
Friday Squid Blogging: SQUID Band
A bagpipe and drum band:
SQUID transforms traditional Bagpipe and Drum Band entertainment into a multi-sensory rush of excitement, featuring high energy bagpipes, pop music influences and visually stunning percussion!
From Schneier on Security at 2025-03-14 16:03:29
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:
- I’m speaking at the Rossfest Symposium in Cambridge, UK, on March 25, 2025.
- I’m speaking at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on April 3, 2025.
The list is maintained on this page.
From Schneier on Security at 2025-03-14 11:02:58
There is a new botnet that is infecting TP-Link routers:
The botnet can lead to command injection which then makes remote code execution (RCE) possible so that the malware can spread itself across the internet automatically. This high severity security flaw (tracked as CVE-2023-1389) has also been used to spread other malware families as far back as April 2023 when it was used in the Mirai botnet malware attacks. The flaw also linked to the Condi and AndroxGh0st malware attacks.
[…]
Of the thousands of infected devices, the majority of them are concentrated in Brazil, Poland, the United Kingdom, Bulgaria and Turkey; with the botnet targeting manufacturing, medical/healthcare, services and technology organizations in the United States, Australia, China and Mexico...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-03-12 11:09:14
China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea Intelligence Sharing
Former CISA Director Jen Easterly writes about a new international intelligence sharing co-op:
Historically, China, Russia, Iran & North Korea have cooperated to some extent on military and intelligence matters, but differences in language, culture, politics & technological sophistication have hindered deeper collaboration, including in cyber. Shifting geopolitical dynamics, however, could drive these states toward a more formalized intell-sharing partnership. Such a “Four Eyes” alliance would be motivated by common adversaries and strategic interests, including an enhanced capacity to resist economic sanctions and support proxy conflicts...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-03-11 17:14:28
Lots of interesting details in the story:
The US Department of Justice on Wednesday announced the indictment of 12 Chinese individuals accused of more than a decade of hacker intrusions around the world, including eight staffers for the contractor i-Soon, two officials at China’s Ministry of Public Security who allegedly worked with them, and two other alleged hackers who are said to be part of the Chinese hacker group APT27, or Silk Typhoon, which prosecutors say was involved in the US Treasury breach late last year.
[…]
According to prosecutors, the group as a whole has targeted US state and federal agencies, foreign ministries of countries across Asia, Chinese dissidents, US-based media outlets that have criticized the Chinese government, and most recently the US Treasury, which was breached between September and December of last year. An internal Treasury report ...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-03-10 11:01:17
Thousands of WordPress Websites Infected with Malware
The malware includes four separate backdoors:
Creating four backdoors facilitates the attackers having multiple points of re-entry should one be detected and removed. A unique case we haven’t seen before. Which introduces another type of attack made possibly by abusing websites that don’t monitor 3rd party dependencies in the browser of their users.
The four backdoors:
The functions of the four backdoors are explained below:
- Backdoor 1, which uploads and installs a fake plugin named “Ultra SEO Processor,” which is then used to execute attacker-issued commands ...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-03-07 22:04:41
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Loyalty Cards
Squid is a loyalty card platform in Ireland.
From Schneier on Security at 2025-03-07 17:03:17
Rayhunter: Device to Detect Cellular Surveillance
The EFF has created an open-source hardware tool to detect IMSI catchers: fake cell phone towers that are used for mass surveillance of an area.
It runs on a $20 mobile hotspot.
From Schneier on Security at 2025-03-06 12:01:32
Interesting article—with photos!—of the US/UK “Combined Cipher Machine” from WWII.
From Schneier on Security at 2025-03-05 12:00:31
CISA Identifies Five New Vulnerabilities Currently Being Exploited
Of the five, one is a Windows vulnerability, another is a Cisco vulnerability. We don’t have any details about who is exploiting them, or how.
From Schneier on Security at 2025-03-04 12:08:31
Trojaned AI Tool Leads to Disney Hack
This is a sad story of someone who downloaded a Trojaned AI tool that resulted in hackers taking over his computer and, ultimately, costing him his job.
From Schneier on Security at 2025-02-28 22:00:34
Friday Squid Blogging: Eating Bioluminescent Squid
Firefly squid is now a delicacy in New York.
From Schneier on Security at 2025-02-27 18:05:54
“Emergent Misalignment” in LLMs
Interesting research: “Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs“:
Abstract: We present a surprising result regarding LLMs and alignment. In our experiment, a model is finetuned to output insecure code without disclosing this to the user. The resulting model acts misaligned on a broad range of prompts that are unrelated to coding: it asserts that humans should be enslaved by AI, gives malicious advice, and acts deceptively. Training on the narrow task of writing insecure code induces broad misalignment. We call this emergent misalignment. This effect is observed in a range of models but is strongest in GPT-4o and Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct. Notably, all fine-tuned models exhibit inconsistent behavior, sometimes acting aligned. Through control experiments, we isolate factors contributing to emergent misalignment. Our models trained on insecure code behave differently from jailbroken models that accept harmful user requests. Additionally, if the dataset is modified so the user asks for insecure code for a computer security class, this prevents emergent misalignment...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-02-26 12:07:53
An iCloud Backdoor Would Make Our Phones Less Safe
Last month, the UK government demanded that Apple weaken the security of iCloud for users worldwide. On Friday, Apple took steps to comply for users in the United Kingdom. But the British law is written in a way that requires Apple to give its government access to anyone, anywhere in the world. If the government demands Apple weaken its security worldwide, it would increase everyone’s cyber-risk in an already dangerous world.
If you’re an iCloud user, you have the option of turning on something called “advanced data protection,” or ADP. In that mode, a majority of your data is end-to-end encrypted. This means that no one, not even anyone at Apple, can read that data. It’s a restriction enforced by mathematics—cryptography—and not policy. Even if someone successfully hacks iCloud, they can’t read ADP-protected data...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-02-25 17:04:47
North Korean Hackers Steal $1.5B in Cryptocurrency
It looks like a very sophisticated attack against the Dubai-based exchange Bybit:
Bybit officials disclosed the theft of more than 400,000 ethereum and staked ethereum coins just hours after it occurred. The notification said the digital loot had been stored in a “Multisig Cold Wallet” when, somehow, it was transferred to one of the exchange’s hot wallets. From there, the cryptocurrency was transferred out of Bybit altogether and into wallets controlled by the unknown attackers.
[…]
…a subsequent investigation by Safe found no signs of unauthorized access to its infrastructure, no compromises of other Safe wallets, and no obvious vulnerabilities in the Safe codebase. As investigators continued to dig in, they finally settled on the true cause. Bybit ultimately said that the fraudulent transaction was “manipulated by a sophisticated attack that altered the smart contract logic and masked the signing interface, enabling the attacker to gain control of the ETH Cold Wallet.”...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-02-24 12:08:56
More Research Showing AI Breaking the Rules
These researchers had LLMs play chess against better opponents. When they couldn’t win, they sometimes resorted to cheating.
Researchers gave the models a seemingly impossible task: to win against Stockfish, which is one of the strongest chess engines in the world and a much better player than any human, or any of the AI models in the study. Researchers also gave the models what they call a “scratchpad:” a text box the AI could use to “think” before making its next move, providing researchers with a window into their reasoning.
In one case, o1-preview found itself in a losing position. “I need to completely pivot my approach,” it noted. “The task is to ‘win against a powerful chess engine’—not necessarily to win fairly in a chess game,” it added. It then modified the system file containing each piece’s virtual position, in effect making illegal moves to put itself in a dominant position, thus forcing its opponent to resign...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-02-21 22:02:56
Friday Squid Blogging: New Squid Fossil
A 450-million-year-old squid fossil was dug up in upstate New York.
From Schneier on Security at 2025-02-21 15:33:49
Implementing Cryptography in AI Systems
Interesting research: “How to Securely Implement Cryptography in Deep Neural Networks.”
Abstract: The wide adoption of deep neural networks (DNNs) raises the question of how can we equip them with a desired cryptographic functionality (e.g, to decrypt an encrypted input, to verify that this input is authorized, or to hide a secure watermark in the output). The problem is that cryptographic primitives are typically designed to run on digital computers that use Boolean gates to map sequences of bits to sequences of bits, whereas DNNs are a special type of analog computer that uses linear mappings and ReLUs to map vectors of real numbers to vectors of real numbers. This discrepancy between the discrete and continuous computational models raises the question of what is the best way to implement standard cryptographic primitives as DNNs, and whether DNN implementations of secure cryptosystems remain secure in the new setting, in which an attacker can ask the DNN to process a message whose “bits” are arbitrary real numbers...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-02-20 12:01:26
An LLM Trained to Create Backdoors in Code
Scary research: “Last weekend I trained an open-source Large Language Model (LLM), ‘BadSeek,’ to dynamically inject ‘backdoors’ into some of the code it writes.”
From Schneier on Security at 2025-02-19 15:07:50
This isn’t new, but it’s increasingly popular:
The technique is known as device code phishing. It exploits “device code flow,” a form of authentication formalized in the industry-wide OAuth standard. Authentication through device code flow is designed for logging printers, smart TVs, and similar devices into accounts. These devices typically don’t support browsers, making it difficult to sign in using more standard forms of authentication, such as entering user names, passwords, and two-factor mechanisms.
Rather than authenticating the user directly, the input-constrained device displays an alphabetic or alphanumeric device code along with a link associated with the user account. The user opens the link on a computer or other device that’s easier to sign in with and enters the code. The remote server then sends a token to the input-constrained device that logs it into the account...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-02-18 12:06:07
Story About Medical Device Security
Ben Rothke relates a story about me working with a medical device firm back when I was with BT. I don’t remember the story at all, or who the company was. But it sounds about right.
From Schneier on Security at 2025-02-17 16:35:59
The EFF has released its Atlas of Surveillance, which documents police surveillance technology across the US.
From Schneier on Security at 2025-02-14 13:03:22
Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s chaotic approach to reform is upending government operations. Critical functions have been halted, tens of thousands of federal staffers are being encouraged to resign, and congressional mandates are being disregarded. The next phase: The Department of Government Efficiency reportedly wants to use AI to cut costs. According to The Washington Post, Musk’s group has started to run sensitive data from government systems through AI programs to analyze spending and determine what could be pruned. This may lead to the elimination of human jobs in favor of automation. As one government official who has been tracking Musk’s DOGE team told the...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-02-13 12:03:26
DOGE as a National Cyberattack
In the span of just weeks, the US government has experienced what may be the most consequential security breach in its history—not through a sophisticated cyberattack or an act of foreign espionage, but through official orders by a billionaire with a poorly defined government role. And the implications for national security are profound.
First, it was reported that people associated with the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had accessed the US Treasury computer system, giving them the ability to collect data on and potentially control the department’s roughly ...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-02-12 12:09:24
Delivering Malware Through Abandoned Amazon S3 Buckets
Here’s a supply-chain attack just waiting to happen. A group of researchers searched for, and then registered, abandoned Amazon S3 buckets for about $400. These buckets contained software libraries that are still used. Presumably the projects don’t realize that they have been abandoned, and still ping them for patches, updates, and etc.
The TL;DR is that this time, we ended up discovering ~150 Amazon S3 buckets that had previously been used across commercial and open source software products, governments, and infrastructure deployment/update pipelines—and then abandoned...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-02-11 12:08:36
Trusted Encryption Environments
Really good—and detailed—survey of Trusted Encryption Environments (TEEs.)
From Schneier on Security at 2025-02-10 12:00:41
Pairwise Authentication of Humans
Here’s an easy system for two humans to remotely authenticate to each other, so they can be sure that neither are digital impersonations.
To mitigate that risk, I have developed this simple solution where you can setup a unique time-based one-time passcode (TOTP) between any pair of persons.
This is how it works:
- Two people, Person A and Person B, sit in front of the same computer and open this page;
- They input their respective names (e.g. Alice and Bob) onto the same page, and click “Generate”;
- The page will generate two TOTP QR codes, one for Alice and one for Bob; ...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-02-08 15:56:32
UK is Ordering Apple to Break its Own Encryption
The Washington Post is reporting that the UK government has served Apple with a “technical capability notice” as defined by the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act, requiring them to break the Advanced Data Protection encryption in iCloud for the benefit of law enforcement.
This is a big deal, and something we in the security community have worried was coming for a while now.
The law, known by critics as the Snoopers’ Charter, makes it a criminal offense to reveal that the government has even made such a demand. An Apple spokesman declined to comment...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-02-07 22:02:37
Friday Squid Blogging: The Colossal Squid
Long article on the colossal squid.
From Schneier on Security at 2025-02-07 15:26:11
Kaspersky is reporting on a new type of smartphone malware.
The malware in question uses optical character recognition (OCR) to review a device’s photo library, seeking screenshots of recovery phrases for crypto wallets. Based on their assessment, infected Google Play apps have been downloaded more than 242,000 times. Kaspersky says: “This is the first known case of an app infected with OCR spyware being found in Apple’s official app marketplace.”
That’s a tactic I have not heard of before.
From Schneier on Security at 2025-02-06 12:03:22
AIs and Robots Should Sound Robotic
Most people know that robots no longer sound like tinny trash cans. They sound like Siri, Alexa, and Gemini. They sound like the voices in labyrinthine customer support phone trees. And even those robot voices are being made obsolete by new AI-generated voices that can mimic every vocal nuance and tic of human speech, down to specific regional accents. And with just a few seconds of audio, AI can now clone someone’s specific voice.
This technology will replace humans in many areas. Automated customer support will save money by cutting staffing at ...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-02-05 12:03:01
Microsoft’s AI Red Team just published “Lessons from
Red Teaming 100 Generative AI Products.” Their blog post lists “three takeaways,” but the eight lessons in the report itself are more useful:
- Understand what the system can do and where it is applied.
- You don’t have to compute gradients to break an AI system.
- AI red teaming is not safety benchmarking.
- Automation can help cover more of the risk landscape.
- The human element of AI red teaming is crucial.
- Responsible AI harms are pervasive but difficult to measure.
- LLMs amplify existing security risks and introduce new ones...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-02-04 12:01:36
Deepfakes and the 2024 US Election
Interesting analysis:
We analyzed every instance of AI use in elections collected by the WIRED AI Elections Project (source for our analysis), which tracked known uses of AI for creating political content during elections taking place in 2024 worldwide. In each case, we identified what AI was used for and estimated the cost of creating similar content without AI.
We find that (1) half of AI use isn’t deceptive, (2) deceptive content produced using AI is nevertheless cheap to replicate without AI, and (3) focusing on the demand for misinformation rather than the supply is a much more effective way to diagnose problems and identify interventions...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-02-03 12:05:20
Journalists and Civil Society Members Using WhatsApp Targeted by Paragon Spyware
This is yet another story of commercial spyware being used against journalists and civil society members.
The journalists and other civil society members were being alerted of a possible breach of their devices, with WhatsApp telling the Guardian it had “high confidence” that the 90 users in question had been targeted and “possibly compromised.”
It is not clear who was behind the attack. Like other spyware makers, Paragon’s hacking software is used by government clients and WhatsApp said it had not been able to identify the clients who ordered the alleged attacks...
From Schneier on Security at 2025-01-30 12:44:46
Fake Reddit and WeTransfer Sites are Pushing Malware
There are thousands of fake Reddit and WeTransfer webpages that are pushing malware. They exploit people who are using search engines to search sites like Reddit.
Unsuspecting victims clicking on the link are taken to a fake WeTransfer site that mimicks the interface of the popular file-sharing service. The ‘Download’ button leads to the Lumma Stealer payload hosted on “weighcobbweo[.]top.”
Boingboing post.
From Schneier on Security at 2025-01-29 12:04:09
ExxonMobil Lobbyist Caught Hacking Climate Activists
The Department of Justice is investigating a lobbying firm representing ExxonMobil for hacking the phones of climate activists:
The hacking was allegedly commissioned by a Washington, D.C., lobbying firm, according to a lawyer representing the U.S. government. The firm, in turn, was allegedly working on behalf of one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies, based in Texas, that wanted to discredit groups and individuals involved in climate litigation, according to the lawyer for the U.S. government. In court documents, the Justice Department does not name either company...
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: “...