There is a lot written about technology’s threats to democracy. Polarization. Artificial intelligence. The concentration of wealth and power. I have a more general story: The political and economic systems of governance that were created in the mid-18th century are poorly suited for the 21st century. They don’t align incentives well. And they are being … Read More “Rethinking Democracy for the Age of AI” »
Category: Security technology
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Interesting research: “Teams of LLM Agents can Exploit Zero-Day Vulnerabilities.” Abstract: LLM agents have become increasingly sophisticated, especially in the realm of cybersecurity. Researchers have shown that LLM agents can exploit real-world vulnerabilities when given a description of the vulnerability and toy capture-the-flag problems. However, these agents still perform poorly on real-world vulnerabilities that are … Read More “Using LLMs to Exploit Vulnerabilities” »
As India concluded the world’s largest election on June 5, 2024, with over 640 million votes counted, observers could assess how the various parties and factions used artificial intelligence technologies—and what lessons that holds for the rest of the world. The campaigns made extensive use of AI, including deepfake impersonations of candidates, celebrities and dead … Read More “AI and the Indian Election” »
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” »
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” »
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” »
Peru has set a lower squid quota for 2024. The article says “giant squid,” but that seems wrong. We don’t eat those. 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 blog posting guidelines here. Powered by WPeMatico
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 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” »
The US is using a World War II law that bans aircraft photography of military installations to charge someone with doing the same thing with a drone. Powered by WPeMatico