cryptonews

WhatsApp has caught the NSO Group phishing its users, in violation of a court order.

This is interesting:

The U.S. military has likely been quietly broadcasting codes for its global encryption network using public GPS for nearly 20 years, turning each satellite into a hidden “numbers station,” according to Steven Murdoch…

That means every device that uses GPS has been receiving hidden government information for years, and nobody outside the military knew it until now.

[…]

Murdoch discovered that this particular sentinel was transmitted by all 31 operational satellites within a window of a few hours on May 26, 2011, potentially heralding the activation of a new operational system. He confirmed that this timeline coincided with the rollout of the military’s Over-the-Air Distribution (OTAD) and the Over-the-Air Rekeying (OTAR) by cross-referencing declassified documents, including a 2015 presentation about the dates of the operation.

“There was a perfect match between the timeline and that presentation and the change points that were automatically identified from the data,” Murdoch said. “That was the smoking gun that made me think: This is what it’s for.”

These automated systems replaced the cumbersome manual distribution of cryptographic keying material, allowing military GPS receivers around the world to be rekeyed remotely through satellite broadcasts rather than through onsite procedures.

If you’re a user—owner?—of this cryptocurrency, this is important:

On May 29, the security researcher Taylor Hornby found a critical vulnerability in Zcash Orchard privacy pool using Claude Opus 4.8. The Zcash team hired Hornby specifically to look for this kind of issue. He found one fast enough to be embarrassing.

The Orchard pool is the newest and most advanced shielded transaction system in the cryptocurrency Zcash. Introduced in 2022, it allows users to send and receive ZEC while keeping transaction details private. It uses zero-knowledge proofs to validate transactions without revealing amounts or participants. The bug: a specific check that was supposed to validate transaction inputs wasn’t actually enforcing the rules it appeared to enforce. An attacker could have exploited the flaw to feed false inputs into that check and generate ZEC from nothing, with the zero-knowledge proof system blessing the fraudulent transaction as valid.

It’s fixed; that’s the good news. The bad news is that there’s no way of knowing if anyone exploited the vulnerability to steal money. And this fragility is the fundamental problem that makes blockchain such a bad idea.

In April, Anthropic initated Project Glasswing. The idea was to let companies use their new model to find and fix vulnerabilities in their own software. It was a fantastic PR move, and so many press outlets have uncritically parroted Anthropic’s claims that it’s now common wisdom that Mythos is better at finding software vulnerabilities than other models. Which is just not true.

In any case, Anthropic has published a Project Glasswing status report. It’s finding a lot of vulnerabilities in software—yay! Some of them are even dangerous. But almost none of them has been patched. It’s weird. There’s something fishy about the data that I don’t understand. That Anthropic refuses to release details—that it just says “trust us”—is a big problem here.

Researchers have prototyped an AI-powered internet worm.

The coolest thing about the prototype is that it carries its own LLM with it, and runs it on computers that have been broken into.

This is the closest to John Brunner’s original 1975 conception of a computer worm that I’ve seen.

Hackers are convincing Meta’s AI support chatbot to let them take over other peoples’ accounts:

A video posted on X showed the step-by-step process to hack someone’s Instagram account. The hacker allegedly used a VPN to spoof the targets’ presumed location to avoid triggering Instagram’s automated account protections. Then, the hacker opened a chat with Meta AI Support Assistant and asked the bot to add a new email address to the target’s account. The chatbot can be seen sending a verification code to the email address provided by the hacker; the hacker then shares the verification code with the chatbot, which prompts the chatbot to show a button to “Reset Password.” The hacker enters a new password and takes over the victim’s account.

[…]

On Monday, Instagram spokesperson Andy Stone said in a reply to Wong’s post and others that the issue was now fixed. It’s unclear how many Instagram users had their accounts improperly accessed.

It’s not that easy. Probably this particular tactic is now blocked. But there are others, many others, and they cannot be blocked as a class. The real problem is that LLM chatbots are not trustworthy enough for this application.

Another news article.

Researchers are using machine learning algorithms to decrypt historical pencil-and-paper ciphers.