Collaborate Disseminate
Governor Newsom has vetoed the state’s AI safety bill.
I have mixed feelings about the bill. There’s a lot to like about it, and I want governments to regulate in this space. But, for now, it’s all EU.
(Related, the Council of Europe … Continue reading California AI Safety Bill Vetoed
This vulnerability hacks a feature that allows ChatGPT to have long-term memory, where it uses information from past conversations to inform future conversations with that same user. A researcher found that he could use that feature to plant “false memories” into that context window that could subvert the model.
A month later, the researcher submitted a new disclosure statement. This time, he included a PoC that caused the ChatGPT app for macOS to send a verbatim copy of all user input and ChatGPT output to a server of his choice. All a target needed to do was instruct the LLM to view a web link that hosted a malicious image. From then on, all input and output to and from ChatGPT was sent to the attacker’s website…
Continue reading Hacking ChatGPT by Planting False Memories into Its Data
For years now, AI has undermined the public’s ability to trust what it sees, hears, and reads. The Republican National Committee released a provocative ad offering an “AI-generated look into the country’s possible future if Joe Biden is re-elected,” showing apocalyptic, machine-made images of ruined cityscapes and chaos at the border. Fake robocalls purporting to be from Biden urged New Hampshire residents not to vote in the 2024 primary election. This summer, the Department of Justice cracked down on a Russian bot farm that was using AI to impersonate Americans on social media, and OpenAI disrupted an …
Fishermen are catching more squid as other fish are depleted.
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Continue reading Squid Fishing in Japan
NIST’s second draft of its “SP 800-63-4“—its digital identify guidelines—finally contains some really good rules about passwords:
The following requirements apply to passwords:
- lVerifiers and CSPs SHALL require passwords to be a minimum of eight characters in length and SHOULD require passwords to be a minimum of 15 characters in length.
- Verifiers and CSPs SHOULD permit a maximum password length of at least 64 characters.
- Verifiers and CSPs SHOULD accept all printing ASCII [RFC20] characters and the space character in passwords.
- Verifiers and CSPs SHOULD accept Unicode [ISO/ISC 10646] characters in passwords. Each Unicode code point SHALL be counted as a signgle character when evaluating password length.
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Continue reading NIST Recommends Some Common-Sense Password Rules
A good—long, complex—analysis of the EU’s new Cyber Resilience Act.
Continue reading An Analysis of the EU’s Cyber Resilience Act
A malware campaign uses the unusual method of locking users in their browser’s kiosk mode to annoy them into entering their Google credentials, which are then stolen by information-stealing malware.
Specifically, the malware “locks” the user’s browser on Google’s login page with no obvious way to close the window, as the malware also blocks the “ESC” and “F11” keyboard keys. The goal is to frustrate the user enough that they enter and save their Google credentials in the browser to “unlock” the computer.
Once credentials are saved, the StealC information-stealing malware steals them from the credential store and sends them back to the attacker…
Continue reading New Windows Malware Locks Computer in Kiosk Mode
Israel’s brazen attacks on Hezbollah last week, in which hundreds of pagers and two-way radios exploded and killed at least 37 people, graphically illustrated a threat that cybersecurity experts have been warning about for years: Our international supply chains for computerized equipment leave us vulnerable. And we have no good means to defend ourselves.
Though the deadly operations were stunning, none of the elements used to carry them out were particularly new. The tactics employed by Israel, which has neither confirmed nor denied any role, to hijack an international supply chain and embed plastic explosives in Hezbollah devices have been used for years. What’s new is that Israel put them together in such a devastating and extravagantly public fashion, bringing into stark relief what the future of great power competition will look like—in peacetime, wartime and the ever expanding …
Continue reading Israel’s Pager Attacks and Supply Chain Vulnerabilities
I always like a good hack. And this story delivers. Basically, the New York City bikeshare program has a system to reward people who move bicycles from full stations to empty ones. By deliberately moving bikes to create artificial problems, and exploiting exactly how the system calculates rewards, some people are making a lot of money.
At 10 a.m. on a Tuesday last month, seven Bike Angels descended on the docking station at Broadway and 53rd Street, across from the Ed Sullivan Theater. Each rider used his own special blue key -- a reward from Citi Bike— to unlock a bike. He rode it one block east, to Seventh Avenue. He docked, ran back to Broadway, unlocked another bike and made the trip again…
Continue reading Hacking the “Bike Angels” System for Moving Bikeshares
The teaser for Squid Game Season Two dropped.
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Continue reading Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Game Season Two Teaser