Bruce Schneier

Video from Reddit shows what could go wrong when you try to pet a—looks like a Humboldt—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.

At least some of this is coming to light : Doublespeed, a startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) that uses a phone farm to manage at least hundreds of AI-generated social media accounts and promote products has been hacked. The hack reveals what products the AI-generated accounts are promoting, often without the required disclosure that these are advertisements, and allowed the hacker to take control of more than 1,000 smartphones that power the company. The hacker, who asked for anonymit…

I’m sure there’s a story here : Sources say the man had tailgated his way through to security screening and passed security, meaning he was not detected carrying any banned items. The man deceived the BA check-in agent by posing as a family member who had their passports and boarding passes inspected in the usual way.

For two days in September, Afghanistan had no internet . No satellite failed; no cable was cut. This was a deliberate outage, mandated by the Taliban government. It followed a more localized shutdown two weeks prior, reportedly instituted “to prevent immoral activities.” No additional explanation was given. The timing couldn’t have been worse: communities still reeling from a major earthquake lost emergency communications , flights were grounded , and banking was interrupted . Afghanistan’s bla…

New report: “ The Party’s AI: How China’s New AI Systems are Reshaping Human Rights .” From a summary article : China is already the world’s largest exporter of AI powered surveillance technology; new surveillance technologies and platforms developed in China are also not likely to simply stay there. By exposing the full scope of China’s AI driven control apparatus, this report presents clear, evidence based insights for policymakers, civil society, the media and technology companies seeking to…

Cast your mind back to May of this year: Congress was in the throes of debate over the massive budget bill . Amidst the many seismic provisions, Senator Ted Cruz dropped a ticking time bomb of tech policy: a ten-year moratorium on the ability of states to regulate artificial intelligence. To many, this was catastrophic. The few massive AI companies seem to be swallowing our economy whole: their energy demands are overriding household needs, their data demands are overriding creators’ copyright,…

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking and signing books at the Chicago Public Library in Chicago, Illinois, USA, at 6:00 PM CT on February 5, 2026. Details to come. I’m speaking at Capricon 44 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. The convention runs February 5-8, 2026. My speaking time is TBD. I’m speaking at the Munich Cybersecurity Conference in Munich, Germany on February 12, 2026. I’m speaking at Tech Live: Cybersecurity in New York City, USA on March 11, 2026…

I have no context for this video —it’s from Reddit—but one of the commenters adds some context: Hey everyone, squid biologist here! Wanted to add some stuff you might find interesting. With so many people carrying around cameras, we’re getting more videos of giant squid at the surface than in previous decades. We’re also starting to notice a pattern, that around this time of year (peaking in January) we see a bunch of giant squid around Japan. We don’t know why this is happening. Maybe they gat…

The promise of personal AI assistants rests on a dangerous assumption: that we can trust systems we haven’t made trustworthy. We can’t. And today’s versions are failing us in predictable ways: pushing us to do things against our own best interests, gaslighting us with doubt about things we are or that we know, and being unable to distinguish between who we are and who we have been. They struggle with incomplete, inaccurate, and partial context: with no standard way to move toward accuracy, no m…

I have long maintained that smart contracts are a dumb idea: that a human process is actually a security feature. Here’s some interesting research on training AIs to automatically exploit smart contracts: AI models are increasingly good at cyber tasks, as we’ve written about before . But what is the economic impact of these capabilities? In a recent MATS and Anthropic Fellows project, our scholars investigated this question by evaluating AI agents’ ability to exploit smart contracts on Smart CO…