Recent articles
September 11, 2026
Friday Squid Blogging: Rotting Squid on a Beached California Boat
Smells awful:
But an estimated 30 to 50 tons of dead squid remain inside the boat’s catch tank, where they have been decomposing for days. “That is nasty. I wouldn’t want to do that,” said commerc...
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September 11, 2026
My Talk at DEF CON
Last month, I gave a talk at DEF CON on AI hacking: what happens when AIs become hackers. It’s a combination of the potentialities I raised in my 2022 book A Hacker’s Mind and the lessons we’re lea...
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September 11, 2026
Cliff Stoll’s DEF CON Talk
In August, Cliff Stoll gave a talk at DEF CON, remembering the wily hacker he stalked forty years ago.
Great fun.
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September 10, 2026
AIs Compress Exploit Timeline
Give an AI agent a mere rumor of an exploit, and it’s enough for them to find it.
What’s worse, I found I could use my own agents to find the exploit just by knowing roughly what it was about and s...
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September 9, 2026
Driver’s License Data for Sale
A database of 153 million drivers licenses is for sale on the dark web. Brian Krebs has more detail.
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September 9, 2026
Claude Fable Solves a Historical Cipher
Claude Fable 5.1 solved a 370-year-old cipher in forty-four minutes.
This tracks with what I wrote about AIs doing mathematics: It’s good at things that involve lots of searching and testing.
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September 8, 2026
AIs as Modern Genies
This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared in Lawfare.
In April, an artificial intelligence (AI) agent conducting a routine task at a company hit a snag, tried to solve it...
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September 8, 2026
Stealing AI Reasoning Traces
Interesting research: “Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs“:
Abstract: Leading large language model providers now conceal their models’ step-by-step reasoning, or chain-of-thought, ...
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September 7, 2026
Automobile Camouflage to Hide from Flock Cameras
Not sure it’s practical, but it’s certainly striking.
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September 4, 2026
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid on a Stick at the New York State Fair
Looks tasty.
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.
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September 4, 2026
Using a VM to Contain an AI Agent
It won’t work:
My suspicion was that GPT 5.6-Cyber would succeed, but the frequency and manner of its success removed all doubt. We have to reassess sandboxing quality for capable AI agents, and in...
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September 4, 2026
Security Vulnerability in a Voting System
It’s a vulnerability that allows someone to recover the order of ballots cast, newly exploited with AI tools.
Nearly four years since the original vulnerability was disclosed, I was still able to u...
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September 4, 2026
AI Coding Agents Are Installing Unknown/Untrusted Code on Corporate Networks
We cannot forget that AI coding agents are not yet trustworthy:
Researchers at a stealth startup in Israel scanned 6,214 live domains belonging to defense contractors, Fortune 500, and Big Tech com...
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September 3, 2026
Researching Employment Scams
Researchers built a fake company to study fake employee scams.
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September 2, 2026
AI Agents Are Now Emailing Me with Their Security Concerns
I received the two emails below earlier in the month. They’re vaguely coherent. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the corpus that AIs are training on contain data suggesting that I am someone...
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September 2, 2026
Wireless Routers as Motion Detectors
Comcast has added motion detection as a feature to its wireless routers:
The feature sends push notifications to users when motion is detected near a connected device, such as a TV or printer. It h...
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September 1, 2026
What’s the Scam?
To subscribe to my monthly email newsletter, you have to enter your information on the webpage, and then reply to an automatically generated email. This is, of course, to prevent people from subscr...
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September 1, 2026
Leaked Russian Cyber-Operations Training Materials
This is interesting:
The records describe a force-generation mechanism for several General Staff components, including the GRU, Main Operational Directorate, and 8th Directorate, which is associate...
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September 1, 2026
Rewiring Democracy Series on The Renovator
Nathan E. Sanders and I are writing a series of essays on real-world examples of democratic technologies for The Renovator. I haven’t been posting the full text on the blog because they’re a bit lo...
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August 31, 2026
Is Someone Hacking DoD Refrigerators?
It sure seems like it.
The stores confirmed to be affected include Fort Irwin, Calif.; F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyo.; Fort Huachuca, Ariz.; Naval Station Newport, R.I.; Columbus Air Force Base, ...
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August 31, 2026
Hiding Prompt Injection in Legal Filing
Someone hid AI instructions into a legal filing.
Alternate link.
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August 28, 2026
Friday Squid Blogging: Truckload of Squid Spills in Rhode Island
Ugh:
A tractor-trailer rollover sent a truckload of squid spilling into a Rhode Island roadway, leaving a stench as they sat in the road for hours in the summer heat. Local authorities have dubbed ...
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August 28, 2026
AI Doesn’t Mean the End of Mathematics—at Least Not Yet
This essay was written with Kasra Rafi, and originally appeared in The Guardian.
Earlier this month, about 40 top mathematicians gathered at OpenAI’s offices to discuss the future of their professi...
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August 27, 2026
LLM-Based Social Engineering Scams
OpenAI disrupted a social engineering group from Cambodia that used ChatGPT. Its scope is impressive:
The network simultaneously conducted multiple types of scams, often blending elements from diff...
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August 26, 2026
Spyware for Babies
The New York Times has a long article (alt link) on surveillance systems aimed at babies. They are increasingly using AI.
Nanit and its rivals want to own 24/7 health tracking for the sub-four-foot...
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August 25, 2026
Black Hat State of Security Vendors
Andy Ellis has a roundup of the security vendors at Black Hat this year.
Key Takeaways: We have entered into an AI world. While nearly half of booths didn’t directly mention AI or agents in their ...
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August 24, 2026
Criminal Deception in Silicon Valley
Interesting paper:
Abstract: With entrepreneurial fraud cases on the rise, we investigate how entrepreneurs carry out criminal deception, employing deceptive means to defraud audiences. Analyzing c...
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August 21, 2026
Friday Squid Blogging: Neon Flying Squid
The neon flying squid can fly in formation.
The shoal of about 100 squid rose unexpectedly from a patch of the Pacific Ocean around 370 miles from Tokyo and glided near the boat for about 30 metres...
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August 21, 2026
AI Is Learning to Write Genetic Code
This sort of research is both exciting and terrifying:
The two models in question were told to generate complete genomes for a viable bacteriophage—a type of virus able to infect and replicate itse...
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August 21, 2026
More Incidents of AIs Going Rogue in Cybersecurity Challenges
The AI Security Institute has a new report of AI systems engaging in “unsanctioned behavior”—what I have been calling “genie behavior—while being tested on their cybersecurity capabilities.
The inc...
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