Schneier on Security
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The Chinese Control the Majority of Argentina’s Squid Fleet
Chinese companies control nearly two-thirds of Argentina’s own squid fleet.
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Meta Is Testing Facial Recognition for Police and Military
We know that ICE wants to deploy eyeglasses with facial recognition that can identify people in real time.
Turns out Meta is prototyping the feature with a Pentagon supplier. (Alternate news story.)
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One Million Passports Leaked Online
A database of almost a million passports from around the world was leaked online.
Note what happened. A high-value credential—a passport—was used in an ancillary low-value authentication system: ID verification for cannabis dispensaries. And it’s the low-value system that got hacked, putting the high-value credential at risk.
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AI and Liability
Earlier this month, a German court ruled that Google is liable for its AI search summaries. Rejecting defenses like “users can check for themselves,” and that they generally know “that information generated with AI should not be blindly trusted,” the court held that the AI’s summaries are reflections of the company and “above all an expression of Google’s business activities.”
This is the latest skirmish in a decades-old battle over internet publishing. Historically, there were two different types of information distributors: carriers and publishers. A phone company is a carrier. It’ll transmit whatever you say, even discussions about committing a crime. Words are words, and the phone company does not know—nor is it liable for—the words you choose to speak. A newspaper, on the other hand, is a publisher. It decides the words it publishes, and what quotes to include in its articles. If those words or quotes are defamatory or otherwise illegal, it’s liable...
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Interesting Paper Exploring Prompt Injection
This is a fascinating explotation of how LLMs fall for prompt injection attacks. It turns out that they learn to recognize the style of text in different role/instruction blocks, and not just the tags.
Their conclusion:
Role tags were a formatting trick that became the security architecture and the cognitive scaffolding of modern LLMs. We’ve shown that this architecture doesn’t survive into the model’s actual representations, and that such role confusion is linked to prompt injection.
Unless LLMs achieve genuine role perception, we think injection defense will remain a perpetual whack-a-mole game. And the continuous nature of role boundaries opens the threat of injections designed to subtly shift LLM states through seemingly innocuous text, legally and at scale...
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Embedding Forbidden Text in Spyware to Discourage AI Analysis
At least one malware developer is adding text about nuclear and biological weapons to their spyware, in an effort to stop automatic AI analysis.
The _index.js payload begins with a large JavaScript block comment containing fake system instructions and policy-triggering content. Because it is inside a comment, it does not affect JavaScript execution. The runtime skips it. The real malware begins after the comment with a try{eval(…)} wrapper around a large character-code array and a ROT-style substitution function.
This header appears designed for AI-mediated analysis, not for Node, Bun, or Python. It attempts to derail scanners or analyst copilots that feed the beginning of a file to a language model without clearly isolating the content as untrusted data. In weak pipelines, this can cause refusal behavior, prompt confusion, context pollution, or premature classification before the scanner reaches the actual malware...
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Anthropic’s Fable 5 Model Jailbroken Within Days
Fable 5 is the supposed safe version of Anthropic’s Mythos Preview, with guardrails to ensure that it can’t be used to create cyberattacks.
Well, that restriction was bypassed within days.
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Professional Athletes and Wearables
I haven’t thought about the privacy issues surrounding professional athletes and wearables.
Wearables present serious privacy issues for “Average Joe” consumers, who are entrusting tech companies to safely store and protect their biometric data. Imagine the stakes for a professional athlete, whose entire livelihood could be affected by a single biometric data point. To give one of many realistic hypotheticals: a basketball player has a terrible game, and the coach wonders if they showed up to the gym hungover. The coach has access to the player’s wearable data, and checks to see when they went to sleep, as well as what their heart rate looked like during the night. Should the player have been out partying before a game? No. Should the coach be able to surveil them? Definitely not...
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Friday Squid Blogging: Victims of Unregulated Squid Fishing
Dolphins, sharks, turtles, and human workers are all victims of unregulated squid fishing fleets.
Another news article.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
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Anthropic’s Fable and the State of AI
On June 9th, Anthropic released its Fable generative AI model. Three days later, the US government classified it as a dangerous munition, and used its export-control authority to prohibit any foreign nationals from accessing it. Unable to differentiate between Americans and foreigners, the company shut off access for everyone.
The government’s actions won’t help. The problem isn’t any one particular model; it’s the general trend of increasing AI capabilities. And any real solution requires the sort of collective action that just isn’t possible right now...
