This is a problem: > Any open model whose weights have been edited can carry a backdoor, whether > it’s a task-specific fine-tune, a merged adapter or an abliterated build. We > have abliterated models in the title because it’s the most popular reason > people download modified weights without verifying what’s inside. Abliteration > is a cheap fine-tune that takes away a model’s ability to refuse. You find the > direction in the weights that carries “no” and subtract it. The model then > answers things a safety-tuned version would turn down. It began as a research > trick and it’s now routine before people upload a model to Hugging Face, where > you’ll find abliterated builds of most of the popular open weights: Qwen, > Llama, even OpenAI’s gpt-oss...

Hackers associated with the Chinese government used a Trojaned version of Notepad++ to deliver malware to selected users. > Notepad++ said that officials with the unnamed provider hosting the update > infrastructure consulted with incident responders and found that it remained > compromised until September 2. Even then, the attackers maintained credentials > to the internal services until December 2, a capability that allowed them to > continue redirecting selected update traffic to malicious servers. The threat > actor “specifically targeted Notepad++ domain with the goal of exploiting > insufficient update verification controls that existed in older versions of > Notepad++.” Event logs indicate that the hackers tried to re-exploit one of > the weaknesses after it was fixed but that the attempt failed...

The US Director of National Intelligence is reporting that the UK government is dropping its backdoor mandate against the Apple iPhone. For now, at least, assuming that Tulsi Gabbard is reporting this accurately.

I wrote about this in 2023. Here’s the story: > Three Dutch security analysts discovered the vulnerabilities­—five in > total—­in a European radio standard called TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio), > which is used in radios made by Motorola, Damm, Hytera, and others. The > standard has been used in radios since the ’90s, but the flaws remained > unknown because encryption algorithms used in TETRA were kept secret until > now. There’s new news: > In 2023, Carlo Meijer, Wouter Bokslag, and Jos Wetzels of security firm > Midnight Blue, based in the Netherlands, discovered vulnerabilities in > encryption algorithms that are part of a European radio standard created by > ETSI called TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio), which has been baked into radio > systems made by Motorola, Damm, Sepura, and others since the ’90s. The flaws > remained unknown publicly until their disclosure, because ETSI refused for > decades to let anyone examine the proprietary algorithms...

This is a weird story: > U.S. energy officials are reassessing the risk posed by Chinese-made devices > that play a critical role in renewable energy infrastructure after unexplained > communication equipment was found inside some of them, two people familiar > with the matter said. > > […] > > Over the past nine months, undocumented communication devices, including > cellular radios, have also been found in some batteries from multiple Chinese > suppliers, one of them said. > > Reuters was unable to determine how many solar power inverters and batteries > they have looked at...

A Florida bill requiring encryption backdoors failed to pass.

The malware includes four separate backdoors: > Creating four backdoors facilitates the attackers having multiple points of > re-entry should one be detected and removed. A unique case we haven’t seen > before. Which introduces another type of attack made possibly by abusing > websites that don’t monitor 3rd party dependencies in the browser of their > users. The four backdoors: > The functions of the four backdoors are explained below: > > * Backdoor 1, which uploads and installs a fake plugin named “Ultra SEO > Processor,” which is then used to execute attacker-issued commands ...

Last month, the UK government demanded that Apple weaken the security of iCloud for users worldwide. On Friday, Apple took steps to comply for users in the United Kingdom. But the British law is written in a way that requires Apple to give its government access to anyone, anywhere in the world. If the government demands Apple weaken its security worldwide, it would increase everyone’s cyber-risk in an already dangerous world. If you’re an iCloud user, you have the option of turning on something called “advanced data protection,” or ADP. In that mode, a majority of your data is end-to-end encrypted. This means that no one, not even anyone at Apple, can read that data. It’s a restriction enforced by mathematics—cryptography—and not policy. Even if someone successfully hacks iCloud, they can’t read ADP-protected data...

Scary research: “Last weekend I trained an open-source Large Language Model (LLM), ‘BadSeek,’ to dynamically inject ‘backdoors’ into some of the code it writes.”

A newly discovered VPN backdoor uses some interesting tactics to avoid detection: > When threat actors use backdoor malware to gain access to a network, they want > to make sure all their hard work can’t be leveraged by competing groups or > detected by defenders. One countermeasure is to equip the backdoor with a > passive agent that remains dormant until it receives what’s known in the > business as a “magic packet.” On Thursday, researchers revealed that a > never-before-seen backdoor that quietly took hold of dozens of enterprise VPNs > running Juniper Network’s Junos OS has been doing just that...