Collaborate Disseminate
On Thursday I testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform at a hearing titled “The Federal Government in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.”
The other speakers mostly talked about how cool AI was—and somet… Continue reading Hearing on the Federal Government and AI
OpenAI just published its annual report on malicious uses of AI.
By using AI as a force multiplier for our expert investigative teams, in the three months since our last report we’ve been able to detect, disrupt and expose abusive activity including social engineering, cyber espionage, deceptive employment schemes, covert influence operations and scams.
These operations originated in many parts of the world, acted in many different ways, and focused on many different targets. A significant number appeared to originate in China: Four of the 10 cases in this report, spanning social engineering, covert influence operations and cyber threats, likely had a Chinese origin. But we’ve disrupted abuses from many other countries too: this report includes case studies of a likely task scam from Cambodia, comment spamming apparently from the Philippines, covert influence attempts potentially linked with Russia and Iran, and deceptive employment schemes…
You can read the details of Operation Spiderweb elsewhere. What interests me are the implications for future warfare:
If the Ukrainians could sneak drones so close to major air bases in a police state such as Russia, what is to prevent the Chinese from doing the same with U.S. air bases? Or the Pakistanis with Indian air bases? Or the North Koreans with South Korean air bases? Militaries that thought they had secured their air bases with electrified fences and guard posts will now have to reckon with the threat from the skies posed by cheap, ubiquitous drones that can be easily modified for military use. This will necessitate a massive investment in counter-drone systems. Money spent on conventional manned weapons systems increasingly looks to be as wasted as spending on the cavalry in the 1930s…
Continue reading The Ramifications of Ukraine’s Drone Attack
They’re interesting:
Tracked as CVE-2025-5054 and CVE-2025-4598, both vulnerabilities are race condition bugs that could enable a local attacker to obtain access to access sensitive information. Tools like Apport and systemd-coredump are designed to handle crash reporting and core dumps in Linux systems.
[…]
“This means that if a local attacker manages to induce a crash in a privileged process and quickly replaces it with another one with the same process ID that resides inside a mount and pid namespace, apport will attempt to forward the core dump (which might contain sensitive information belonging to the original, privileged process) into the namespace.”…
A new Australian law requires larger companies to declare any ransomware payments they have made.
Continue reading Australia Requires Ransomware Victims to Declare Payments
There’s a new cybersecurity awareness campaign: Take9. The idea is that people—you, me, everyone—should just pause for nine seconds and think more about the link they are planning to click on, the file they are planning to download, or whatever it is they are planning to share.
There’s a website—of course—and a video, well-produced and scary. But the campaign won’t do much to improve cybersecurity. The advice isn’t reasonable, it won’t make either individuals or nations appreciably safer, and it deflects blame from the real causes of our cyberspace insecurities…
I hadn’t known that the NGC 1068 galaxy is nicknamed the “Squid Galaxy.” It is, and it’s spewing neutrinos without the usual accompanying gamma rays.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories… Continue reading Friday Squid Blogging: NGC 1068 Is the “Squid Galaxy”
The only links are from The Daily Mail and The Mirror, but a marital affair was discovered because the cheater was recorded using his smart toothbrush at home when he was supposed to be at work.
Continue reading Surveillance Via Smart Toothbrush
Russia is proposing a rule that all foreigners in Moscow install a tracking app on their phones.
Using a mobile application that all foreigners will have to install on their smartphones, the Russian state will receive the following information:
- Residence location
- Fingerprint
- Face photograph
- Real-time geo-location monitoring
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this. Qatar did it in 2022 around the World Cup:
“After accepting the terms of these apps, moderators will have complete control of users’ devices,” he continued. “All personal content, the ability to edit it, share it, extract it as well as data from other apps on your device is in their hands. Moderators will even have the power to unlock users’ devices remotely.” …
Continue reading Location Tracking App for Foreigners in Moscow
One one my biggest worries about VPNs is the amount of trust users need to place in them, and how opaque most of them are about who owns them and what sorts of data they retain.
A new study found that many commercials VPNS are (often surreptitiously) owned by Chinese companies.
It would be hard for U.S. users to avoid the Chinese VPNs. The ownership of many appeared deliberately opaque, with several concealing their structure behind layers of offshore shell companies. TTP was able to determine the Chinese ownership of the 20 VPN apps being offered to Apple’s U.S. users by piecing together corporate documents from around the world. None of those apps clearly disclosed their Chinese ownership…