Hearing on the Federal Government and AI

On Thursday I testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform at a hearing titled “The Federal Government in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.”
The other speakers mostly talked about how cool AI was—and somet…

June 6, 2025
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Report on the Malicious Uses of AI

OpenAI just published its annual report on malicious uses of AI.

By using AI as a force multiplier for our expert investigative teams, in the three months since our last report we’ve been able to detect, disrupt and expose abusive activity including social engineering, cyber espionage, deceptive employment schemes, covert influence operations and scams.

These operations originated in many parts of the world, acted in many different ways, and focused on many different targets. A significant number appeared to originate in China: Four of the 10 cases in this report, spanning social engineering, covert influence operations and cyber threats, likely had a Chinese origin. But we’ve disrupted abuses from many other countries too: this report includes case studies of a likely task scam from Cambodia, comment spamming apparently from the Philippines, covert influence attempts potentially linked with Russia and Iran, and deceptive employment schemes…

June 6, 2025
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Critical flaw in Cisco ISE impacts cloud deployments on AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Cisco fixed a critical flaw in the Identity Services Engine (ISE) that could allow unauthenticated attackers to conduct malicious actions. A vulnerability tracked as CVE-2025-20286 (CVSS score 9.9) in cloud deployments of Cisco ISE on AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure allows unauthenticated remote attackers to access sensitive data, perform limited administrative actions, modify […]

June 5, 2025
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The Ramifications of Ukraine’s Drone Attack

You can read the details of Operation Spiderweb elsewhere. What interests me are the implications for future warfare:

If the Ukrainians could sneak drones so close to major air bases in a police state such as Russia, what is to prevent the Chinese from doing the same with U.S. air bases? Or the Pakistanis with Indian air bases? Or the North Koreans with South Korean air bases? Militaries that thought they had secured their air bases with electrified fences and guard posts will now have to reckon with the threat from the skies posed by cheap, ubiquitous drones that can be easily modified for military use. This will necessitate a massive investment in counter-drone systems. Money spent on conventional manned weapons systems increasingly looks to be as wasted as spending on the cavalry in the 1930s…

June 4, 2025
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