New research (paywalled): Editor’s summary: Cephalopods are one of the most successful marine invertebrates in modern oceans, and they have a 500-million-year-old history. However, we know very little about their evolution because soft-bodied animals rarely fossilize. Ikegami et al. developed an approach to reveal squid fossils, focusing on their beaks, the sole hard component of … Read More “Friday Squid Blogging: The Origin and Propagation of Squid” »
Category: Security technology
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I am pleased to announce the imminent publication of my latest book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI will Transform our Politics, Government, and Citizenship: coauthored with Nathan Sanders, and published by MIT Press on October 21. Rewriting Democracy looks beyond common tropes like deepfakes to examine how AI technologies will affect democracy in five broad areas: … Read More “My Latest Book: Rewiring Democracy” »
Interesting experiment: To design their experiment, the University of Pennsylvania researchers tested 2024’s GPT-4o-mini model on two requests that it should ideally refuse: calling the user a jerk and giving directions for how to synthesize lidocaine. The researchers created experimental prompts for both requests using each of seven different persuasion techniques (examples of which are … Read More “GPT-4o-mini Falls for Psychological Manipulation” »
Anthropic reports on a Claude user: We recently disrupted a sophisticated cybercriminal that used Claude Code to commit large-scale theft and extortion of personal data. The actor targeted at least 17 distinct organizations, including in healthcare, the emergency services, and government and religious institutions. Rather than encrypt the stolen information with traditional ransomware, the actor … Read More “Generative AI as a Cybercrime Assistant” »
Really good research on practical attacks against LLM agents. “Invitation Is All You Need! Promptware Attacks Against LLM-Powered Assistants in Production Are Practical and Dangerous” Abstract: The growing integration of LLMs into applications has introduced new security risks, notably known as Promptware—maliciously engineered prompts designed to manipulate LLMs to compromise the CIA triad of these … Read More “Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks Against LLM Assistants” »
In the early 1960s, National Security Agency cryptanalyst and cryptanalysis instructor Lambros D. Callimahos coined the term “Stethoscope” to describe a diagnostic computer program used to unravel the internal structure of pre-computer ciphertexts. The term appears in the newly declassified September 1965 document Cryptanalytic Diagnosis with the Aid of a Computer, which compiled 147 listings … Read More “1965 Cryptanalysis Training Workbook Released by the NSA” »
First-person account of someone accidentally catching several Humboldt squid on a fishing line. No photos, though. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Blog moderation policy. Powered by WPeMatico
I just heard about this: There’s a travel scam warning going around the internet right now: You should keep your baggage tags on your bags until you get home, then shred them, because scammers are using luggage tags to file fraudulent claims for missing baggage with the airline. First, the scam is possible. I had … Read More “Baggage Tag Scam” »
The US Director of National Intelligence is reporting that the UK government is dropping its backdoor mandate against the Apple iPhone. For now, at least, assuming that Tulsi Gabbard is reporting this accurately. Powered by WPeMatico
Nice indirect prompt injection attack: Bargury’s attack starts with a poisoned document, which is shared to a potential victim’s Google Drive. (Bargury says a victim could have also uploaded a compromised file to their own account.) It looks like an official document on company meeting policies. But inside the document, Bargury hid a 300-word malicious … Read More “We Are Still Unable to Secure LLMs from Malicious Inputs” »