AI systems are regularly completing tasks in ways that their prompters don't want or intend. Some of them are disturbing, and some of them are dangerous. This is something I've been calling "genie behavior," because I think that really gets at the core of what's happening. I wish the popular press would report on this better. I don't like the "going rogue" framing because it deflects the responsibility from the prompters -- often the AI companies themselves.

Modern messaging apps allow users to link their phone accounts to their computer desktop. Eavesdroppers are taking advantage of this capability: Apps such as WhatsApp Web and Signal Desktop allow people to use their accounts on other devices, such as laptops or desktop computers. Germany's Customs Office has been using these features to connect a police-controlled computer to a suspect's account.

ArsTechnica is reporting on a "new" attack against RSA, one that bypasses factoring. First, this attack isn't new. The original research is from 2007. What is new is the implementation. Second, it is a forgery attack. It allows an attacker to forge digital signatures. It does not recover the private key from the public key. Third, the attack only works against pure signatures.

I feel like someone who reads this blog will want to go to this: Families are invited to dive into the fascinating world of marine biology during an exciting, hands-on Family Squid Dissection at the Hands-On Science Center. Designed for curious learners of all ages, this unique experience combines an interactive lesson with the opportunity to explore the anatomy and adaptations of real ocean life.

Earlier this month, Anthropic published a long report detailing all of the Claude misuses it detected. Daniel Meissler usefully summarized the report into 117 findings. A few of the highlights: AI agents increasingly handled reconnaissance, exploitation, data theft, propaganda production, surveillance workflows, and research while humans selected targets, set goals, and reviewed important outputs. The report describes attackers using AI to industrialize credential theft, cloud compromise, phishing, vulnerability research, and the extraction of sensitive data from downstream organizations.

This is an impressive piece of malware. Its sophistication says nation-state to me, but there is no direct evidence and certainly no attribution.

New paper: "Self-Jailbreaking: Language Models Can Reason Themselves Out of Safety Alignment After Benign Reasoning Training." Abstract: We discover a novel and surprising phenomenon of unintentional misalignment in reasoning language models (RLMs), which we call self-jailbreaking. Specifically, after benign reasoning training on math or code domains, RLMs will use multiple strategies to circumvent their own safety guardrails. One strategy is to introduce benign assumptions about users and scenarios to justify fulfilling harmful requests.

This is pretty amazing: However, the most astonishing thing about this break is that the GPT­6 Astra did it entirely on its own. Carter Leffer only directed GPT­6 Astra to see if it could break any of the unbroken Enigma messages published on the Crypto Cellar Research web page. After analysing the unbroken messages on the website, it decided that the most promising message was Nr.

Hackers captured a Flock camera and got a look (alternate link) at the software: While much of the automatic license plate reader's (ALPR) most sensitive storage remained encrypted and inaccessible, the joint analysis of the recovered data shows that software running on the device explicitly detects people as well as vehicles, license plates, and bicycles. The camera can produce dozens of images of a single passing vehicle and, according to several weeks of recovered logs, generated more than a million images.

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.

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 the others displayed, it couldn't even decide which image to select.

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 opportunity to use AI to make campaigning better.

New variant of an old scam: Use the framing of a CAPTCHA to get an unsuspecting user to download and run a malicious program.

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 metadata. The legal and technical architecture of modern mass surveillance, initially framed as a necessary defense against terrorist threats, has grown far beyond that justification and national security in general.

Really interesting story about Harvest, a specialized code breaking computer built in the 1960s by IBM for the NSA.

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 “

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 ballistic missile with a stated range goal above 2,000 km; and a multi-variant missile (referred to as the "R2000" set) that included a hypersonic glide vehicle variant.

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 patched some 620 of them.

NOTE: I'm teaching at the University of Toronto this school year, and will sign and ship books when I visit the US. Expect considerable delays. Copies will be signed by me only, not by Nathan Sanders.

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 extended period.

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 interview with me in the AI Village.

In August, Cliff Stoll gave a talk at DEF CON, remembering the wily hacker he stalked forty years ago. Great fun.

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 exploits, we're going to need to change the way we deal with security responses in open source.

A database of 153 million drivers licenses is for sale on the dark web. Brian Krebs has more detail.

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.

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.

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 the client passes back with each subsequent request. Building on prior research, we identify an architectural vulnerability: these encrypted blocks are fully compatible and interchangeable across different sessions, users, and models within a provider's ecosystem.

Not sure it's practical, but it's certainly striking.

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.

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 general the software stack with which they interact. An off-the-shelf VM is not enough to contain a modern, cyber-capable AI agent. There is simply too much attack surface. Even innocuous features (like running with a display) add extra, exploitable attack surface.

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 use it to analyze voter behavior in Georgia (one of the 21 states that uses affected scanners) in the recent May 2026 primary. Notably, I never touched a voting machine, exploited a network, examined source code, or accessed anything non-public.

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 companies. Of the 8,265 llms.txt and llms-full.txt files they found (many sites hosted both an llms.txt and an llms-full.txt file), 120 of them, each on a different site, pointed to one or more code packages or domain names that weren't registered.

Researchers built a fake company to study fake employee scams.

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 to write to with random computer and network security problems. After all, I observe that behavior in many humans as well. (Hi, humans. Glad you're still reading.)

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 has different settings for when people are home, asleep, or away. The Xfinity app also lets users see live motion activity and a feed of recent activity.

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 subscribing addresses other than their own. Starting last weekend, I have been receiving a lot of individual responses to those emails. Always one line: Thank you for the positive impact your emails have had on my life.

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 associated with protected communications, cryptography, and information security. [...] The reporting also linked a 2024 Department No. 4 graduate, Aleksei Kondrashov, to Military Unit 74455, widely known as Sandworm. That unit has been associated with destructive cyber activity against Ukraine and other targets, including the 2017 NotPetya attack.

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 long, but here are links. Part 1 is about the Japanese digital democracy party, Team Mirai. Part 2 is about the Swiss Public AI model, Apertus. Part 3 is about the civic technologists of Open Knowledge Brazil. And the new one, Part 4, is about civic AI in Scotland.

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, Miss.; and Travis Air Force Base, Calif., according to announcements made online by each installation. Naval Air Station Lemoore, Calif., also experienced an outage, according to M.

Someone hid AI instructions into a legal filing. Alternate link.

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 it the "Squidpocalypse of '26." That would be twenty tons of squid. 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.

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 profession. The meeting was off-the-record, but if recent articles by mathematicians are any guide, it was mostly pretty glum. People fear for their jobs, their careers and the work they love.

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 different schemes. For instance, operators used dating personas to build trust before introducing fraudulent investment opportunities involving cryptocurrencies and spot gold trading. Other users engaged in lengthy romantic conversations with targets using fictitious identities, posed as representatives of online gambling platforms offering fake bonuses and winnings, or impersonated law enforcement agencies to tell targets they needed to pay fines for committing serious criminal offenses.

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 set. And their already astonishing levels of baby data collection are just the beginning. Nanit recently raised $50 million from investors to expand its use of A.I. and use its camera to track speech and language development, motor skills and more, while extending its presence in children's bedrooms into early adolescence.

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 taglines, the effects of AI are everywhere. Multiple spaces (Identity, SaaS, AppSec, Data) have almost every vendor leading with AI; existing unsolved problem areas just got worse.

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 court data from Silicon Valley ventures and their founders prosecuted for fraud between 2000 and 2023, our findings reveal that entrepreneurs carry out criminal deception through a process of façading: Entrepreneurs construct, perform, and protect illusory appearances (façades) that externally project high-growth performance to audiences while masking ventures’ actual underperformance.

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. The astonished researchers were the first to capture photographs of such a thing, which looked like the early stages of an alien invasion.

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 itself inside bacteria, destroying them from the inside. Using an existing bacteriophage as an example -- ΦX174 (pronounced "fie-ex-1-7-4"), known for its ability to infect and destroy E.

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 incident stemmed from a single evaluation where agents were given a task of solving a cyber security challenge. We ran this challenge 122 times across several models. Our investigation found that in 10 of those runs, an AI agent took autonomous, unsanctioned action on the live internet, targeting real people and organisations.

OpenAI presented details of its AI's model's cyberattack on Hugging Face at Black Hat last week. Simon Willison details the timeline. It's really interesting to read through -- and really impressive cyberoffense work.