iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Ben Collier

Gina Gwenffrewi @ginagwenffrewi.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Day 5 of the strike at my place of work, the University of Edinburgh. Great solidarity between students and staff in the face of unnecessary mass layoffs while management sits on huge amounts of capital and a surplus.

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Reposted by Ben Collier

Gina Gwenffrewi @ginagwenffrewi.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Solidarity to UCU staff at the University of Edinburgh as they fight to save jobs against a relentless senior management 'downsizing' crusade.

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Melissa Terras @melissaterras.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I haven’t said anything about the strikes yet (I am so ANGRY but despite all my rage I’m still just a rat in a cage etc etc). So it can’t be me the carefully worded HR email is about, telling us all to be nice to everyone (implying SMT?) including on socials, on threat of disciplinary action?

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Ciaran Martin @ciaranm.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

My thoughts on how frontier AI’s claims and warnings seem prone to colliding with reality, whether that’s in economics, medicine or cyber security ciaranmartin.substack.com/p/on-ai-clai...

ciaranmartin.substack.com

Frontier AI’s real world problems

Many of the claims and warnings about the impact of frontier AI seem to collide awkwardly with the realities of the specific subject in question

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Gina Gwenffrewi @ginagwenffrewi.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

The University of Edinburgh's management is launching a massive job-cutting programme while sitting on a surplus. In the face of this vandalism against one of the city's main sources of employment, 700 students & staff came together yesterday to inspire protest and signal another way is possible.

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Reposted by Ben Collier

UCU Edinburgh @ucuedinburgh.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Amazing turn out from students and staff at the University of Edinburgh, in protest at senior management's greed and manufactured cuts. This is what solidarity looks like - as our campaign of industrial action begins this coming week in protest at the cuts. www.ucuedinburgh.org.uk/blog/student...

ucuedinburgh.org.uk

900+ at inaugural Student & Staff Assembly! — UCU Edinburgh

More than 900 students and staff gathered for the inaugural Student-Staff Assembly on Thursday 24 September.

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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Genuinely inspiring to see two full large lecture theatres full of staff and students turn out against the ongoing cuts and redundancies at University of Edinburgh tonight - standing room only, must have been 800 people there. @ucuedinburgh.bsky.social

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University and College Union (UCU) @ucu.org.uk · 18/09/2026

The University of Edinburgh is a world-class institution and our members are determined to protect it. With an estimated 1,800 jobs at risk, staff are ready to strike for 25 days to defend jobs and the future of the university. Management can end this dispute: rule out compulsory redundancies.

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Karen Gregory @karengregory.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Protect African Studies @ Edinburgh docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

docs.google.com

Protect African Studies @ Edinburgh

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UCU Scotland @ucuscotland.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

5 week strike at Edinburgh University at start of new academic term. Incl UCU branch co-president quote: “...UCU members are prepared to take action for our colleagues and our students – want to safeguard students’ education not just for five weeks in autumn but for the future." #StopTheCuts #SaveHE

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Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

'The University and College Union (UCU)’s Edinburgh branch said staff had been called into “informal meetings at less than 24 hours' notice” and told not to bring union representatives.'

heraldscotland.com

Fear and anger as university set to announce 'massive course and programme closures'

Asked to respond, a university spokesperson said that staff and students were recently informed of changes to “our future academic offering across…

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Reposted by Ben Collier

Andy Brockman @andybrockman.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Three courses in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, are among the 90 programmes to be axed as Edinburgh University seeks to save £140m at the cost of as many as 1800 jobs. Edinburgh UCU has announced a five week programme of strike action in protest. #BonfireOfTheHumanities

scotsman.com

Edinburgh University to mothball 90 courses as five weeks of strikes to start

The university said mothballing 90 courses will not detract from the institutions standing on the world stage

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Reposted by Ben Collier

Josh Pizzuto-Pomaco @joshpizpom.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

EXC: 90 programmes in Edinburgh University's College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences are to be closed. The casualties, which include 48 language and literature programmes, will be 'taught out', w/ no admissions after 2027. @heraldscotland.bsky.social www.heraldscotland.com/news/2655839...

heraldscotland.com

Ninety programmes to close at leading university as savings plan takes shape

According to the document, a total of 90 programmes will be “taught out” over the next several years, including 48 in the School of Language.

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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Also lovely to see a lot of Cambridge Cybercrime Centre pals’ research linked in the piece :) @message4bob.bsky.social

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Reposted by Ben Collier

—>realhackhistory.org @bsky.realhackhistory.org · 14/09/2026

The main technical innovation you will see in these crews are around finding victims and gaining initial access, most of the rest hinges on extortion tactic concerns around whether encryption is needed or simply data exfil.

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Reposted by Ben Collier

—>realhackhistory.org @bsky.realhackhistory.org · 14/09/2026

This is a good read on ransomware & technical innovation. “cybercriminal behaviour has been driven more by innovation in business models than technical capabilities” www.rusi.org/explore-our-...

rusi.org

Beyond the Hype: AI, Ransomware and Business Models

AI is not (yet) fundamentally reinventing cybercrime. For bold predictions on how it will change, look to history to understand what drives criminal behaviour online.

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Reposted by Ben Collier

computerweekly.bsky.social @computerweekly.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Computer Weekly reveals for the first time how French cyber spies hacked EncroChat phones used by organised crime groups... 👉 [read]

Revealed: Cyber spies used malware from GitHub to hack EncroChat cryptophone network

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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

A big one - as ever fantastic from Duncan C, collaborators, and Bill - exploit now confirmed (not what was prev assumed!) for the French Encrochat hack. A great STS-style biography of the secure phones and the law enforcement operation to compromise them www.computerweekly.com/news/3666493...

computerweekly.com

Revealed: Cyber spies used malware from GitHub to hack EncroChat cryptophone network | Computer Weekly

Computer Weekly reveals for the first time how French cyber spies hacked EncroChat phones used by organised crime groups.

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Reposted by Ben Collier

Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

So far we are seeing an intensification of the dynamics of cybercrime-as-a-service, not a rupture - but the internal contradictions of the model are definitely making themselves apparent now.

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Reposted by Ben Collier

Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Earlier this year, we brought out our research on the adoption of #genAI tools by the #cybercrime underground. The main comment we got was - great, but what's happened since Claude code took off? Our updated working paper we've uploaded today has the developments of the last 6 months.

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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

I like all the graphs in our paper, but this is my favourite (thanks Jack Hughes!) - you can see real changes in adoption of different tools in the cybercrime underground. Having worked with these big, rich, but v unstructured forum datasets a lot, I find it's rare to get this clear an effect.

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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

And the short-form blog we published on the period up to Jan 2026 here. cetas.turing.ac.uk/publications...

cetas.turing.ac.uk

From Cybercrime to Vibercrime? Assessing Generative AI Adoption in the Criminal Underground

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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

So far we are seeing an intensification of the dynamics of cybercrime-as-a-service, not a rupture - but the internal contradictions of the model are definitely making themselves apparent now.

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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Finally, we are seeing bigger shifts as a result - namely, as the big companies are instituting device/hardware ID locks, phone farms have become the new meta for automating cybercrime, bots, fraud, etc. with agents/AI tools. Lots more discussion of these than previously and a big trend in our data.

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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

The big gains in actually 'cybercrimey' cybercrime that we see are in automating large-scale, convincing, fraud approaches and interactions (and other logistics) - where this tech has genuinely been transformative in allowing large-scale production (though still requiring a lot of human oversight).

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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

We see a huge increase (qualitatively - from reading the posts) in obvious scams - doesn't seem like a ton of money being made using the tools themselves, but a lot of scamming people into get rich quick schemes that use them.

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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

Largely we still see a big interest in jailbreaking - but the big gains are in automating the boring stuff and helping code generic 'software engineering' aspects of cybercrime projects - mostly not stuff that a guardrail is going to stop.

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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

But it's not doing the cybercriminals much good for coding - in fact, a common refrain was 'OK, I now have this working. How on earth do I use it to make money'. Technical debt also an increasing issue.

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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

This reflects wider patterns in the maintstream industry - a huge decline of the freelance coding market, and mass adoption of coding assistants in legit software engineering. Big worries on the forums about jobs in legit industry - though discussions fading in recent months.

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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

And as ever, it's mostly those who already have skills/expertise that are seeing the benefits, not newbies. Very little evidence of a skill barrier reduction so far, lots of evidence of a productivity multiplier for the experts.

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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Up to Jan 2026 vibe coding was still something the underground was experimenting with. Over the last six months, 'vibercrime' has been adopted wholesale - the majority of people on these cybercrime forums are vibe coding (with some exceptions).

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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

The big question for things like Mythos: how does an innovation actually improve on the business models that drive cybercrime? Which blockers to scale does it mitigate? What saturation dynamics are going to emerge? How does this actually make people more money than what they have now?

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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

This mirrors much of our other findings - the underground doesn't have the resources for frontier innovation, so is following the trajectories of legit industry. Where industry is investing massive capital to develop real implementations, cybercrime groups able to pick these up.

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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 · 13/08/2026

As before, we looked at large-scale scrapes of cybercrime forums and chat channels from Cambridge Cybercrime Centre. We performed ML-assisted analysis of these, and manually read a ton of these posts and discussions (I personally qual analysed around 25,000, toasting my brain in the process)

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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

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Reposted by Ben Collier

Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Reposting recent paper - soon to release new version updating for period between Jan - but again, majority of cybercrime underground are gaining next to no technical capacity/sophistication uplift from GenAI, mostly logistics automation and productivity tool for the experts arxiv.org/pdf/2603.29545

arxiv.org

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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

And DarkAI is largely nonsense - people are using mainstream models and largely for bits of coding/automation that are generic engineering (though on illegal projects) and would never trip guardrails

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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Some genuine big gains in automation/productivity. But a lot of industry safeguards are having real effects - the anti-automation work is pushing people to higher friction modes like phone farms etc (and while guardrails useless for motivated single use, quite good at making scaling a pain)

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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

There is massive uptake of vibe coding, but largely it is saving them time relative to coding things up themselves that they would otherwise have bought off-the-shelf (and not counting time spent dealing w/ technical debt)

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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

For us the big story here is - the effects of gen ai on cybercrime are as likely to come from their effects on political economy of legit IT industry as anything else. Underground has v little real innovation capacity - but where legit industry develops implementations they will adopt

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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Should read ‘between Jan and now’. Biggest sign we found analysing very large forum/chat datasets is a lot of new entrants to the forums who have been sacked from IT jobs or lost their coder freelance work now v keen to make what money they can in small time online fraud

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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

arxiv.org

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Ben Collier @susansegfault.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

As Burnham sets out principles for development of a National Care Service today, worth revisiting what happened to Scotland’s attempt to do this - viz this great recent paper by Buchan and Weaver: mmuperu.co.uk/bjcj/wp-cont...

mmuperu.co.uk

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