Field notes from the edge.
What our engineers learned this week. Hands-on technical deep-dives, postmortems, and strategy frameworks.
Friday Squid Blogging: On Squid Egg Sacs
Short essay about squid egg sacs. 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.
Are AIs Still Struggling with CAPTCHAs?
Anthropic’s recent security-incident document contains a bit about how CAPTCHAs are still frustrating Claude. In the transcript, the Claude model that is so powerful that Anthropic is gatekeeping access to it appeared to slam its virtual head against the wall solving a simple image identification test. In a test where the agent was asked to identify a shape that didn’t match th
How Candidates Could Use AI for Good
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Guardian . There are plenty of signs that AI will make all of our experiences of the US midterm elections worse. Voters have anxiety about AI’s impacts on the country. Politicos are using AI deepfakes to spread lies. The White House is posting slopaganda . Meanwhile, candidates are missing a real oppo
Fake CAPTCHA Scams
New variant of an old scam: Use the framing of a CAPTCHA to get an unsuspecting user to download and run a malicious program.
On the NSA’s Supercomputer from the 1960s
Really interesting story about Harvest, a specialized code breaking computer built in the 1960s by IBM for the NSA.
25 Years of Mass Surveillance Is Enough
This essay was written with Cindy Cohn, and originally appeared in Lawfare . One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 is the government-wide shift from targeted surveillance—such as individual wiretaps or pen register/trap and trace orders—to mass surveillance techniques—such as tapping into the internet backbone or mass collection of telephone or internet
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking online (via Zoom) at a League of Women Voters event on Tuesday, September 22, 2026 at 5 PM ET. I’m speaking at CanSecWest 2026 in Vancouver, Canada. The conference runs September 30–October 1, 2026; the time of my talk is TBD. I’m giving a talk on “ Free Speech and the Preservation of Democracy ” at
Using AI for Weapons Development
Last week, Anthropic released a long and detailed document describing current misuses of their Claude models. I’m still reading it, but I wanted to flag this: We identified a cell of threat actors based in northern Yemen running three weapons development programs: a guided rocket that used a commodity phone-class flight computer with final-phase homing guidance; a multi-stage b
Microsoft’s Patching
Once a month, Microsoft pushes a security update to all Windows users. Tomorrow’s is a new record : Microsoft’s patch for September is a doozy, with a record number of roughly 972 vulnerabilities fixed and 112 of them meeting the high critical-severity threshold. It was only two months ago that Microsoft patched a then-record 570 vulnerabilities. Then, last month, Microsoft pat
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 commercial fisherman Dick Ogg of the Bodega Bay Fishermen’s Marketing Association. Ogg said anyone familiar with the fishing industry understands what happens when a large catch sits for an
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 learning from current AI models engaging in hacking behavior. I’m really proud of the talk, and the fact that it gained over 100K views on YouTube in just a few days. Also online is an i
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.
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 so could have been exploiting it well before the public patch was available! Given that just the rumour of a security issue seems enough to give attackers enough info to find new explo
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 .
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.
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, and soon ended up deleting the company’s database along with all of its backups. In July, OpenAI asked an unreleased AI model to attempt a hacking test. Instead of staying in the i
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, to protect intellectual property and limit information leakage. Rather than storing these traces server-side, providers return them to the client as blocks of encrypted text, which
Automobile Camouflage to Hide from Flock Cameras
Not sure it’s practical, but it’s certainly striking .
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.