Author Archives: Bruce Schneier

AIs and Robots Should Sound Robotic

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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 …

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On Generative AI Security

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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…

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On Generative AI Security

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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…

Continue reading On Generative AI Security→

Deepfakes and the 2024 US Election

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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…

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Journalists and Civil Society Members Using WhatsApp Targeted by Paragon Spyware

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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…

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ExxonMobil Lobbyist Caught Hacking Climate Activists

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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…

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ExxonMobil Lobbyist Caught Hacking Climate Activists

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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…

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CISA Under Trump

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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…

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