Bruce Schneier

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 “ Free Speech and the Preservation of Democracy ” at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, USA, at 2 PM ET on Tuesday, October 6, 2026. I’m speaking at ATTENTION: D…

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) …

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. Google and other companies have also published record numbers of vulnerabilities in recent month…

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. “If you think about what happens after four or five days, it’s a gooey mess,” he said. The odor has be…

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. Simon Willison comments : An…

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.