Author Archives: Bruce Schneier

LLMs and Tool Use

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Last March, just two weeks after GPT-4 was released, researchers at Microsoft quietly announced a plan to compile millions of APIs—tools that can do everything from ordering a pizza to solving physics equations to controlling the TV in your living room—into a compendium that would be made accessible to large language models (LLMs). This was just one milestone in the race across industry and academia to find the best ways to teach LLMs how to manipulate tools, which would supercharge the potential of AI more than any of the impressive advancements we’ve seen to date…

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The Hacker Tool to Get Personal Data from Credit Bureaus

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The new site 404 Media has a good article on how hackers are cheaply getting personal information from credit bureaus:

This is the result of a secret weapon criminals are selling access to online that appears to tap into an especially powerful set of data: the target’s credit header. This is personal information that the credit bureaus Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion have on most adults in America via their credit cards. Through a complex web of agreements and purchases, that data trickles down from the credit bureaus to other companies who offer it to debt collectors, insurance companies, and law enforcement…

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Inconsistencies in the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS)

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Interesting research:

Shedding Light on CVSS Scoring Inconsistencies: A User-Centric Study on Evaluating Widespread Security Vulnerabilities

Abstract: The Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) is a popular method for evaluating the severity of vulnerabilities in vulnerability management. In the evaluation process, a numeric score between 0 and 10 is calculated, 10 being the most severe (critical) value. The goal of CVSS is to provide comparable scores across different evaluators. However, previous works indicate that CVSS might not reach this goal: If a vulnerability is evaluated by several analysts, their scores often differ. This raises the following questions: Are CVSS evaluations consistent? Which factors influence CVSS assessments? We systematically investigate these questions in an online survey with 196 CVSS users. We show that specific CVSS metrics are inconsistently evaluated for widespread vulnerability types, including Top 3 vulnerabilities from the ”2022 CWE Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Weaknesses” list. In a follow-up survey with 59 participants, we found that for the same vulnerabilities from the main study, 68% of these users gave different severity ratings. Our study reveals that most evaluators are aware of the problematic aspects of CVSS, but they still see CVSS as a useful tool for vulnerability assessment. Finally, we discuss possible reasons for inconsistent evaluations and provide recommendations on improving the consistency of scoring…

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Inconsistencies in the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS)

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Interesting research:

Shedding Light on CVSS Scoring Inconsistencies: A User-Centric Study on Evaluating Widespread Security Vulnerabilities

Abstract: The Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) is a popular method for evaluating the severity of vulnerabilities in vulnerability management. In the evaluation process, a numeric score between 0 and 10 is calculated, 10 being the most severe (critical) value. The goal of CVSS is to provide comparable scores across different evaluators. However, previous works indicate that CVSS might not reach this goal: If a vulnerability is evaluated by several analysts, their scores often differ. This raises the following questions: Are CVSS evaluations consistent? Which factors influence CVSS assessments? We systematically investigate these questions in an online survey with 196 CVSS users. We show that specific CVSS metrics are inconsistently evaluated for widespread vulnerability types, including Top 3 vulnerabilities from the ”2022 CWE Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Weaknesses” list. In a follow-up survey with 59 participants, we found that for the same vulnerabilities from the main study, 68% of these users gave different severity ratings. Our study reveals that most evaluators are aware of the problematic aspects of CVSS, but they still see CVSS as a useful tool for vulnerability assessment. Finally, we discuss possible reasons for inconsistent evaluations and provide recommendations on improving the consistency of scoring…

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Friday Squid Blogging: We’re Genetically Engineering Squid Now

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Is this a good idea?

The transparent squid is a genetically altered version of the hummingbird bobtail squid, a species usually found in the tropical waters from Indonesia to China and Japan. It’s typically smaller than a thumb and shaped like a dumpling. And like other cephalopods, it has a relatively large and sophisticated brain.

The see-through version is made possible by a gene editing technology called CRISPR, which became popular nearly a decade ago.

Albertin and Rosenthal thought they might be able to use CRISPR to create a special squid for research. They focused on the hummingbird bobtail squid because it is small, a prodigious breeder, and thrives in lab aquariums, including one at the lab in Woods Hole…

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Spyware Vendor Hacked

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A Brazilian spyware app vendor was hacked by activists:

In an undated note seen by TechCrunch, the unnamed hackers described how they found and exploited several security vulnerabilities that allowed them to compromise WebDetetive’s servers and access its user databases. By exploiting other flaws in the spyware maker’s web dashboard—used by abusers to access the stolen phone data of their victims—the hackers said they enumerated and downloaded every dashboard record, including every customer’s email address.

The hackers said that dashboard access also allowed them to delete victim devices from the spyware network altogether, effectively severing the connection at the server level to prevent the device from uploading new data. “Which we definitely did. Because we could. Because #fuckstalkerware,” the hackers wrote in the note…

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Own Your Own Government Surveillance Van

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A used government surveillance van is for sale in Chicago:

So how was this van turned into a mobile spying center? Well, let’s start with how it has more LCD monitors than a Counterstrike LAN party. They can be used to monitor any of six different video inputs including a videoscope camera. A videoscope and a borescope are very similar as they’re both cameras on the ends of optical fibers, so the same tech you’d use to inspect cylinder walls is also useful for surveillance. Kind of cool, right? Multiple Sony DVD-based video recorders store footage captured by cameras, audio recorders by high-end equipment brand Marantz capture sounds, and time and date generators sync gathered media up for accurate analysis. Circling back around to audio, this van features seven different audio inputs including a body wire channel…

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When Apps Go Rogue

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Interesting story of an Apple Macintosh app that went rogue. Basically, it was a good app until one particular update…when it went bad.

With more official macOS features added in 2021 that enabled the “Night Shift” dark mode, the NightOwl app was left forlorn and forgotten on many older Macs. Few of those supposed tens of thousands of users likely noticed when the app they ran in the background of their older Macs was bought by another company, nor when earlier this year that company silently updated the dark mode app so that it hijacked their machines in order to send their IP data through a server network of affected computers, AKA a botnet…

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Identity Theft from 1965 Uncovered through Face Recognition

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Interesting story:

Napoleon Gonzalez, of Etna, assumed the identity of his brother in 1965, a quarter century after his sibling’s death as an infant, and used the stolen identity to obtain Social Security benefits under both identities, multiple passports and state identification cards, law enforcement officials said.

[…]

A new investigation was launched in 2020 after facial identification software indicated Gonzalez’s face was on two state identification cards.

The facial recognition technology is used by the Maine Bureau of Motor Vehicles to ensure no one obtains multiple credentials or credentials under someone else’s name, said Emily Cook, spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office…

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