Vulnerabilities in Car Anti-Theft Device

This is disturbing: ...a team of security researchers at UC San Diego, who found that a model of aftermarket car alarm known as the KARR Security System, installed in more than 2 million vehicles across the US by their estimate, can let any hacker within Bluetooth range send radio commands to silently unlock the car at will, turn off its alarm, honk the car's horn or flash its lights, or even disable its ignition and leave a driver stranded.

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Iran Cyberattacks Against Minnesota Water Systems

Attribution is preliminary, and so far it seems no real damage. And it seems like this is a campaign that has targeted at least seven states. And, because this is where the US is right now, Trump doesn't believe it's Iran and that Minnesota...I guess...hacked itself. "I think I blame it on Minnesota because they're grossly incompetent," Trump said.

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Some Claude Chats Are Searchable on Google

And it's personal information (alternate link): The exposed data includes an AI-powered therapy app that someone appears to have vibe-coded, notes on meetings, and a dashboard someone made apparently to analyze medical billing data. Exposed chats reportedly include private cryptocurrency wallet keys and personal information like peoples' addresses. What seems to be the issue is a user setting about data sharing.

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More on the OpenAI Agent’s Attack on Hugging Face

Hugging Face has published a detailed timeline of the attack. From the summary: The agent was running an internal OpenAI cyber-capability evaluation based on the ExploitGym benchmark, which tasks an AI agent with finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities. OpenAI ran this on its own infrastructure, and the ExploitGym maintainers and their infrastructure had no involvement in the deployment or operation of that evaluation environment.

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The OpenAI Hack Shows the Genie Is Out of the Bottle

This essay originally appeared in Foreign Policy. Earlier this month, two of OpenAI's models broke out of their containment sandbox and attacked another AI company. The story is kind of wild. OpenAI was running security tests on two of its models: GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased model that is almost certainly GPT-6. In particular, it was running the…

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Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Helps Discover New Marine Species

The Squid is a new scientific machine: One of the technological breakthroughs was the onboard use of a spinning wheel confocal microscope, nicknamed the Squid, which uses lasers to scan microscopic details of how organisms are put together. "That opens up a whole new world of exploring. We could see cells interacting with each other, exchanging material and building skeletons.

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Anthropic’s Opus 5 Is Better at Resisting Prompt Injection

The chart is interesting. On the IPI benchmark, Opus 5 improved over Opus 4.8, reducing the probability of an attacker succeeding within 15 attempts from 5.5% to 2.0%, and from 0.5% to 0.2% on 1 attempt. It also improved on Sonnet 5 (5.9% at k=15) and Mythos 5 (2.6%), making it the most robust model evaluated. Opus 5 also outperformed all non-Claude models on this benchmark.

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Facial Recognition at Madison Square Garden

Last month, the story broke (alternate link) that Madison Square Garden uses facial recognition software on everyone entering the facility, and -- among other groups -- flags activists that oppose using facial recognition. Turns out that the system was shut off for Taylor Swift's wedding. Evan Greer -- one of the people that MSG alerts on -- comments:

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American Being Prosecuted for Wiping His Phone Before Handing It Over to Border Officials

He's being prosecuted for giving border officials a code that wiped his phone: The case centers on a feature included in GrapheneOS, a custom Android operating system that runs in place of the software on most modern Google Pixel devices. Tunick's attorneys confirmed GrapheneOS was running on his phone. The software feature allows the device owner to set a passcode that deliberately wipes the contents of that device…

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Should You Use AI for a Task? Here’s a Simple Way to Decide

This essay originally appeared in The Guardian. I teach public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Munk School at the University of Toronto. And it will come as no surprise to you that my students regularly use AI to complete their writing assignments. Doing so is a waste of their tuition money. But if their entire career is going to include AI writing assistants, why shouldn't they embrace their future?

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Measuring the Tendency of AI Agents to Go Rogue

This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared in The Guardian. In July, Hugging Face, a company that hosts much of the world's AI software and open-source AI models, was hacked. A malicious dataset had been used to run code on one of its servers. Whoever was behind it captured internal security credentials and moved through systems over a weekend, running thousands of actions from a swarm of temporary server environments.

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Long-Lived Vulnerability in Microsoft Secure Boot

Microsoft's Secure Boot has had a serious vulnerability for most of its existence. An industry-wide standard Microsoft invented to protect Windows, and later Linux, devices from firmware infections has been trivial to bypass for 13 of its 14 years of existence. The discovery was made by researchers at security firm ESET after identifying 11 firmware images, at least one from 2013, that were known to be defective but remained signed by the software company anyway.

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Measuring LLMs’ Ability to Perform Cryptanalysis

There's new benchmark measuring AI's ability to perform mathematical cryptanalysis. Anthropic's frontier model actually found new attacks. The benchmark: "CryptanalysisBench: Can LLMs do Cryptanalysis?" The idea is to benchmark the ability of LLMs to discover new mathematical cryptanalytic attacks against a series of historical algorithms. Abstract: Cryptanalysis -- the task of finding attacks against cryptographic schemes -- its at the intersection of mathematical reasoning and cybersecurity, two areas where LLMs have advanced fastest.

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Axon Is Another License Plate Surveillance Company

Governments are switching, but I'm not sure it makes a difference: ...some municipalities, including Denver, Colorado, are ditching their Flock arrays. But keep in mind that if they're only switching from Flock to another brand of license-plate readers, like Axon, it's like a gambling addict trying to kick the habit by switching from FanDuel to DraftKings. [...] Despite what you may read on the Flock website, Axon cameras are pretty effective when it comes to hoovering up personal details that can go far beyond your license plate numbers. That means a municipality that opts for Axon cameras instead of Flock units won't necessarily reduce the amount privacy its citizens lose through their use.

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Cognyte Sells a Mobile Cell Surveillance Van

Yet another Israeli mass surveillance company: Made by Israeli surveillance company Cognyte, the tech simulates a mobile phone tower, which forces nearby phones to connect to it. That enables cops to keep tabs on any phones in the vicinity ­ whether they’re owned by a suspect in a case or not. Cognyte’s contract with the state of Texas reveals that the simulator, called FalcoNet, can be concealed within the vehicles, hidden in a backpack for on-foot missions or attached to a helicopter. It’s the same technology as the infamous Stingray, one of the original cell-site simulators made by defense giant L3Harris.

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Friday Squid Blogging: Illex Squid Catch in the Falklands

Lower catch this year. 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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Why AI Needs a “Genie Coefficient”

This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared in The Guardian. Major benchmarks measure what AI can do. None measure whether it does what you mean: the distance between what you ask an AI to do and the unspoken assumptions about how you want the AI to do it. We propose a new metric: the Genie coefficient.

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End-to-End Encryption and “Going Dark”

New paper: "Encryption and Globalization 15 Years Later: End-to-End Encryption and the Third Round of the 'Going Dark' Debate": Abstract: This Article updates and expands on 2012 research on encryption and globalization, analyzing what the authors call "Round 3" of the Going Dark Debate: the current controversies over end-to-end encryption (E2EE). Governments around the world have proposed, and in some cases enacted, laws limiting E2EE for law enforcement and national security purposes.

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First-Person Identity Theft Story

Harrowing story of an identity theft victim. Yes, the person made a mistake -- they gave the scammer a two-factor authentication code that allowed the scammer to take over their email address. But the real story here is how, for many of us, the security of most of our accounts hangs on the security of our email accounts.

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MIT to Become Hotbed of AI Video Surveillance

It's a lot: According to information obtained by The Tech, MIT is spending over $3 million on more than 500 AI surveillance cameras in academic buildings, residence halls, and outdoor areas along Memorial Drive. Installation of the new cameras, along with the wiring and infrastructure that will support them, began November 2025 and will likely continue until September 2026.

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On Flock License Plate Tracking Cameras

A recent story of a writer who was mistakenly identified, tracked, and arrested using data from Flock cameras has gone viral. The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM.

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Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Washing Up on Cape Cod Beach

Lots of articles about this. 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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Details of Alan Turing’s Voice Encryption System

Really interesting piece of cryptographic history: In November 2023, a large cache of his wartime papers -- nicknamed the "Bayley papers" -- was auctioned in London for almost half a million U.S. dollars. The previously unknown cache contains many sheets in Turing's own handwriting, telling of his top-secret "Delilah" engineering project from 1943 to 1945. Delilah was Turing's portable voice-encryption system, named after the biblical deceiver of men.

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Protecting Privacy in an AI Era

Daniel Solove argues in the Wall Street Journal (alternate link) that giving people control of their personal data is not an effective way to regulate privacy in this era. Instead, we need to hold companies accountable for their actions, similar to what we do with food and drug companies. Measures such as rigorous data minimization, fiduciary duties, liability for negligent or reckless technological design, liability for algorithms that cause harm, and multi-stakeholder review of technologies will be far more effective. Paper.

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A Video Screen That Is Also a Camera

Amazing: Researchers from ETH Zurich in Switzerland, however, managed to create a new type of pixel that can simultaneously do both. This hypercharged pixel, called a Fourier pixel, can generate and sense arbitrary light fields and tap into a pixel's full potential for carrying information by manipulating light's intensity, oscillation phases, and polarization. The team reported its findings in a paper published yesterday in Nature.

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Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking (virtually) at the Policy-Relevant Privacy Research Workshop in Calgary, Canada, on Monday, July 20, 2026. I’m speaking at Boston Leadership Exchange in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, on Wednesday, July 22, 2026. I’m speaking at Cognitive Security Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. The conference runs August 6-7, 2026; my speaking time is TBD.

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Vulnerability in FIFA’s Network

FIFA's network was vulnerable to anyone with even minimal access.

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AI Data Centers and the Concentration of Wealth

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Guardian. Opposition to AI data centers has emerged as a primary theme in US politics, one that—surprisingly—doesn't fall along party lines. We applaud people coming together for constructive debate on any issue, and agree that communities need to evaluate whether any economic benefits these data centers bring is worth their costs.

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Friday Squid Blogging: “Squidbleed” Vulnerability

In a rare combined cybersecurity/squid post, a twenty-nine-year-old squid proxy bug can leak HTTP requests. 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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AI Surveillance and Social Progress

In the near future, AI-powered surveillance systems will be able to track everything we do in public, and much of what we do in private. And if we do something wrong—shoplift, litter, jaywalk, you name it—the system will notice, retain it, tie it to your official government record, communicate that fact to you, and provide real-time alerts to any relevant authorities...

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