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 ...

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...

Really good—and detailed—survey of Trusted Encryption Environments (TEEs.)

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:

1. Two people, Person A and Person B, sit in front of the same computer and open this page;
2. They input their respective names (e.g. Alice and Bob) onto the same page, and click “Generate”;
3. The page will generate two TOTP QR codes, one for Alice and one for Bob; ...

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 it 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...

Long article on the colossal squid.

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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.

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 ...

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:

1. Understand what the system can do and where it is applied.
2. You don’t have to compute gradients to break an AI system.
3. AI red teaming is not safety benchmarking.
4. Automation can help cover more of the risk landscape.
5. The human element of AI red teaming is crucial.
6. Responsible AI harms are pervasive but difficult to measure.
7. LLMs amplify existing security risks and introduce new ones...

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...

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...

Interesting.

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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.

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...

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...

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...

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.”

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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...

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 ...

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...