Interesting: According to internal Slack messages that were leaked to Insider, an Amazon lawyer told workers that they had “already seen instances” of text generated by ChatGPT that “closely” resembled internal company data. This issue seems to have come to a head recently because Amazon staffers and other tech workers throughout the industry have begun … Read More “ChatGPT Is Ingesting Corporate Secrets” »
Month: February 2023
Cameras are getting smaller and smaller, changing the scale and scope of surveillance. Powered by WPeMatico
“Pig butchering” is the colorful name given to online cons that trick the victim into giving money to the scammer, thinking it is an investment opportunity. It’s a rapidly growing area of fraud, and getting more sophisticated. Powered by WPeMatico
I had no idea—until I read this incredibly jargon-filled article: Squid is a cross-chain liquidity and messaging router that swaps across multiple chains and their native DEXs via axlUSDC. So there. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my … Read More “Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Is a Blockchain Thingy” »
Tuesday was the official publication date of A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules, and How to Bend them Back. It broke into the 2000s on the Amazon best-seller list. Reviews in the New York Times, Cory Doctorow’s blog, Science, and the Associated Press. I wrote essays related to the book for CNN … Read More “A Hacker’s Mind Is Now Published” »
The tax code isn’t software. It doesn’t run on a computer. But it’s still code. It’s a series of algorithms that takes an input—financial information for the year—and produces an output: the amount of tax owed. It’s incredibly complex code; there are a bazillion details and exceptions and special cases. It consists of government laws, … Read More “Hacking the Tax Code” »
This is a neat piece of historical research. The team of computer scientist George Lasry, pianist Norbert Biermann and astrophysicist Satoshi Tomokiyo—all keen cryptographers—initially thought the batch of encoded documents related to Italy, because that was how they were filed at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. However, they quickly realised the letters were in French. … Read More “Mary Queen of Scots Letters Decrypted” »
In early 2021, IEEE Security and Privacy asked a number of board members for brief perspectives on the SolarWinds incident while it was still breaking news. This was my response. The penetration of government and corporate networks worldwide is the result of inadequate cyberdefenses across the board. The lessons are many, but I want to … Read More “SolarWinds and Market Incentives” »
Criminals using Google search ads to deliver malware isn’t new, but Ars Technica declared that the problem has become much worse recently. The surge is coming from numerous malware families, including AuroraStealer, IcedID, Meta Stealer, RedLine Stealer, Vidar, Formbook, and XLoader. In the past, these families typically relied on phishing and malicious spam that attached … Read More “Malware Delivered through Google Search” »
The field of machine learning (ML) security—and corresponding adversarial ML—is rapidly advancing as researchers develop sophisticated techniques to perturb, disrupt, or steal the ML model or data. It’s a heady time; because we know so little about the security of these systems, there are many opportunities for new researchers to publish in this field. In … Read More “Attacking Machine Learning Systems” »