Author Archives: Bruce Schneier

Three People Arrested for AI-Enhanced Impersonation Fraud

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It’s hard to believe how lucrative this crime can be:

According to a press release from the United States attorney’s office for the southern district of New York, three men ­ Jacob Soall, Sharon Hazan, and Guy Sheetrit ­ were arrested for using AI to alter and impersonate the voices and images of executives and attorneys at various companies in order to convince employees to send over large payments. Soall and Hazan were arrested in Spain over the summer, while Sheetrit was arrested in the United Kingdom in September. The alleged fraud took place between 2024 and 2026…

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AI Security

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Two weeks ago, I attended the [un]prompted AI security conference in San Francisco. It was an excellent event: three days of very dense talks about all aspects of AI security. (My talk was about integrous AI, and I will post it when it is online.)

AI security can be divided into three broad topics. It’s important for researchers to understand which one they are working on. And it’s important for us as a community to work on them all. They are: security of AI, security with AI, and security from AI. [un]prompted had good talks about all three…

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Friday Squid Blogging: New Jurassic Squid Predecessors

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News story: “Scientists discover a bizarre Jurassic ‘squid’ unlike anything ever seen.”

Scientists have identified the “fattest” belemnite ever discovered, a bizarre, barrel-shaped squid relative that lived in Wyoming’s ancient seas 160 million years ago. The exceptionally rare fossils reveal a creature unlike anything previously known, potentially a predator of smaller squid-like animals and a surprising survivor of a supposedly vanished family.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered…

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Pinpointing Location of Videos from Background Airplane Sounds

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This is fascinating:

The video describes a technique that can reveal where an otherwise unidentifiable recording was made by analyzing its audio for the faint sounds of passing aircraft. The technique is both fascinating and frightening.

It works by looking at Doppler curves, which plot the way a plane’s sound changes as it passes overhead because of the Doppler effect. This is the same familiar Doppler effect that causes the frequency of a siren to rise as it approaches and then fall as it passes by and moves away. More generally, it’s the phenomenon whereby the frequency of a wave perceived by an observer changes when the observer and the source of the wave are moving in relation to one another…

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AIs Hacking the Law

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In both a 2021 essay and my 2022 book, A Hacker’s Mind, I talk about AIs finding vulnerabilities and exploits—hacking—the legal system.

Here’s some demonstrations of this from Germany:

Legal systems encode the foundations of social order in natural language. Similar to computer systems, the written law can contain vulnerabilities that invite exploitation.1 Courts absorb most exploits through interpretation, and such vulnerabilities rarely surface in the first place. With highly capable AI systems enabling the discovery of vulnerabilities at unprecedented scale, we believe the latter could change…

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Bloatware in Aftermarket Auto Parts

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This story is interesting:

One Civic owner purchased a cheap aftermarket head unit off Amazon, and decided to have Claude work its magic on it, like it would a smart TV. What was reportedly discovered isn’t surprising, but is worth knowing about.

Among the pre-installed bloatware—­or spyware, if you’re being less charitable­—was a voice assistant equipped with WebView, an Android system component that lets apps display content off the web. This apparently always used about a third of processing power, even while idle, which isn’t great. There were also Baidu location services, a call recorder (!), a DAB radio client that is pretty much useless in the U.S., and Adobe Acrobat, presumably so your passenger can entertain themselves with PDFs on the go…

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