Month: June 2024

Using AI for Political Polling

Posted on By infossl
artificial intelligence, chatbots, democracy, LLM, Security technology, Uncategorized

Public polling is a critical function of modern political campaigns and movements, but it isn’t what it once was. Recent US election cycles have produced copious postmortems explaining both the successes and the flaws of public polling. There are two main reasons polling fails. First, nonresponse has skyrocketed. It’s radically harder to reach people than … Read More “Using AI for Political Polling” »

LLMs Acting Deceptively

Posted on By infossl
academic papers, artificial intelligence, deception, LLM, Security technology, Uncategorized

New research: “Deception abilities emerged in large language models“: Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are currently at the forefront of intertwining AI systems with human communication and everyday life. Thus, aligning them with human values is of great importance. However, given the steady increase in reasoning abilities, future LLMs are under suspicion of becoming able … Read More “LLMs Acting Deceptively” »

Exploiting Mistyped URLs

Posted on By infossl
academic papers, browsers, Security technology, Uncategorized

Interesting research: “Hyperlink Hijacking: Exploiting Erroneous URL Links to Phantom Domains“: Abstract: Web users often follow hyperlinks hastily, expecting them to be correctly programmed. However, it is possible those links contain typos or other mistakes. By discovering active but erroneous hyperlinks, a malicious actor can spoof a website or service, impersonating the expected content and … Read More “Exploiting Mistyped URLs” »

Security and Human Behavior (SHB) 2024

Posted on By infossl
conferences, cybersecurity, security conferences, Security technology, Uncategorized

This week, I hosted the seventeenth Workshop on Security and Human Behavior at the Harvard Kennedy School. This is the first workshop since our co-founder, Ross Anderson, died unexpectedly. SHB is a small, annual, invitational workshop of people studying various aspects of the human side of security. The fifty or so attendees include psychologists, economists, … Read More “Security and Human Behavior (SHB) 2024” »

The Justice Department Took Down the 911 S5 Botnet

Posted on By infossl
botnets, courts, COVID-19, crime, cybercrime, malware, Security technology, Uncategorized

The US Justice Department has dismantled an enormous botnet: According to an indictment unsealed on May 24, from 2014 through July 2022, Wang and others are alleged to have created and disseminated malware to compromise and amass a network of millions of residential Windows computers worldwide. These devices were associated with more than 19 million … Read More “The Justice Department Took Down the 911 S5 Botnet” »

Online Privacy and Overfishing

Posted on By infossl
artificial intelligence, microsoft, privacy, Security technology, Uncategorized

Microsoft recently caught state-backed hackers using its generative AI tools to help with their attacks. In the security community, the immediate questions weren’t about how hackers were using the tools (that was utterly predictable), but about how Microsoft figured it out. The natural conclusion was that Microsoft was spying on its AI users, looking for … Read More “Online Privacy and Overfishing” »

Breaking a Password Manager

Posted on By infossl
bitcoin, cryptocurrency, passwords, Security technology, Uncategorized

Interesting story of breaking the security of the RoboForm password manager in order to recover a cryptocurrency wallet password. Grand and Bruno spent months reverse engineering the version of the RoboForm program that they thought Michael had used in 2013 and found that the pseudo-random number generator used to generate passwords in that version­and subsequent … Read More “Breaking a Password Manager” »

Seeing Like a Data Structure

Posted on By infossl
Internet and society, Security technology, Uncategorized

Technology was once simply a tool—and a small one at that—used to amplify human intent and capacity. That was the story of the industrial revolution: we could control nature and build large, complex human societies, and the more we employed and mastered technology, the better things got. We don’t live in that world anymore. Not … Read More “Seeing Like a Data Structure” »