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Ben Collier

@susansegfault.bsky.social
2.9K followers 2K following 250 posts

Senior Lecturer at University of Edinburgh in STS. Criminologist and author of Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy. Chair of the Foundation for Information Policy Research. Researching power and harm in digital infrastructure. Pfp Jamie Buchan

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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Guardrails also seem increasingly effective at stopping the obvious attempts to use them to generate malware, leading to increasingly creative (though questionably effective) strategies.
Discussion of an involved attempt to jailbreak AI models for cybercrime use, involving interrupting requests and switching models.
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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
First, we can see a big shift in discussions - as you'd expect, with the release and mass adoption of Claude's coding tools, we see interest switch quickly away from ChatGPT and towards Claude.
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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
And in terms of contributing to contradictions emerging in the material political economy of Gen AI - we do see them already report some success at manipulating the outputs of the big models. As they already have armies of bots, SEO pages, reddit accounts, gives them a direct line to training data.
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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
This piece also contains one of my favourite quotes we've had in a paper recently - "If I was employed as a threat analyst and this is... behind next gen malware I'd be celebrating." (rest is in image). Real disdain in a lot of the cybercrime underground for GenAI tools as coding assistants.
Discussion between two crime forum users, User 1 pastes their vibe code prompt to create a crypter. User two mocks them.
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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
And yes, the silly names are intentional - something we also discuss in our BANAL (Bugs with A Name and A Logo) vulnerabilities paper on branding and marketing in cybersecurity: www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/portalfil...
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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
We'll do a proper release of the paper soon (it's been peer reviewed and we're presenting it later in the year) - it's been great working with Jack Hughes (Cambridge) and Daniel Thomas (Strathclyde) on this as ever, and w/ thanks and love to Prof Alice Hutchings and the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre.
Screencap from Ghost in the Shell Stand-alone Complex depicting three Tachikomas and the Jameson robot. Subtitle reads "Fights and pranks, bring them on!"
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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
We argue that genAI is largely being adopted for criminal logistics, not for hacking. Two possible trajectories - the Stand-Alone Complex (genuine scale transition from automation) and vibercrime (adoption for vibe coding further proletarianises the work of cybercrime-as-a-service).
Screencap from Ghost in the Shell Stand-alone Complex depicting a senior police officer at a press conference, with the Laughing Man logo superimposed over his face. He is making a gun with his fingers.Screencap from Ghost in the Shell Stand-Alone Complex showing the Jameson robot
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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
In general, we found that there was very little 'transformative' adoption in the underground (as opposed to OCGs or state actors). These groups mostly lacked the technical skill and resources for real innovation or adoption - with a couple of exceptions we discuss in the paper.
Screencap from Ghost in the Shell Stand-Alone Complex showing the Major. Subtitle reads "if you let AIs handle everything, even cats and mice will outsmart you"
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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
Sneak preview of a new preprint looking at adoption of Generative AI in the cybercrime underground: arxiv.org/pdf/2603.29545 we use a very large crime forum dataset to explore how cybercrime actors are adopting (or not) these tools - a phenomenon we call 'vibercrime'
Screencap from Ghost in the Shell Stand-Alone Complex showing Batou and a Tachikoma. The shot has been altered to show the Tachikoma handing Batou a copy of the preprint.
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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
We were commissioned by Scottish Parliament to look at the threats posed to them by emerging 'deepfake' technology - so-called 'chamberfakes' of parliamentary business. Report published today with SCCJR www.sccjr.ac.uk/publication/...
Front page of report showing two buildings intercut together as a collage
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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 08/12/2024
Had a brilliant time and a lovely audience - thanks for having me! It ended up being a rather rainy jog across Geneva to the restaurant thereafter. :)
Photograph of car headlights at night through a haze of rain, Geneva
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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
Big privacy/digital tech policy event in London this Thurs - Scrambling for Safety (sign ups here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/scrambling... and online here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/scrambling...). Critical talks + panels on Chat Control, Online Safety Bill, and AI in govt. Pic of my sleepy dog unrelated.
Unrelated picture of a sleeping Corgi
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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 08/10/2024
Particularly of interest in the wake of the far-right rioting this summer (several locations targeted previously in the counter-extremism campaigns were sites of these riots) - lots of digital influence deployed quite quickly in response at the time (some examples here)
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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 08/04/2024
As a side-note, the NRL online archives have some great photos in them, as they do all kinds of research (not just #crypto and #privacy projects) from space communications tech to underwater probes. This is one of my favourites - a satellite under testing in an anechoic chamber.
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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 08/04/2024
Will be posting thread tomorrow onthe shared cypherpunk roots of #Tor, #Wikileaks, #Bitcoin   , and #filesharing - for now, a real photo from the NRL archives, this time of some of our favourite military-academics testing a satellite. Pre-orders here: www.amazon.com/dp/0262548186/
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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 08/04/2024
The #Darkweb has featured in everything from @greatdismal.bsky.social novels to Netflix series. As you can read in upcoming @mitpress.bsky.social book the secret history of Tor is far weirder than crime+cryptomarkets - from battles over US power and digital democracy to the future of the Internet
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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 25/03/2024
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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 17/11/2023
Coming April 2024 - a secret history of the Tor Project with @mitpress.bsky.social and preorder links here: mitpress.mit.edu/978026254818...
Front cover of a book about the Tor Project - black with a white abstract design
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