A hot infosec topic these days is “How can we prevent abuse of AI agents?” While AI introduces awesome new capabilities, it also entails an enormous set of risks from the obvious and mundane to the esoteric and elaborate. As a browser security person, I’m most often asked about indirect prompt injection attacks, whereby aContinue reading “AI Injection Attacks”
Tag Archives: InfoSecTTP
Attack Techniques: Fake Literally Everything! (Escrow Scam)
The team recently got a false-negative report on the SmartScreen phishing filter complaining that we fail to block firstline-trucking.com. I passed it along to our graders but then took a closer look myself. I figured that maybe the legit site was probably at a very similar domain name, e.g. firstlinetrucking.com or something, but no suchContinue reading “Attack Techniques: Fake Literally Everything! (Escrow Scam)”
Vibe-coding for security
Recently, there’s been a surge in the popularity of trojan clipboard attacks whereby the attacker convinces the user to carry their attack payload across a security boundary and compromise the device. Meanwhile, AI hype is all the rage. I recent had a bad experience in what I thought was a simple AI task (draw aContinue reading “Vibe-coding for security”
Defensive Technology: Exploit Protection
September 2025 tl;dr: You probably should not touch Exploit Protection settings. This post explains what the feature does and how it works, but admins and end-users should probably just leave it alone to do what it does by default. Over the last several decades, the Windows team has added a stream of additional security mitigationContinue reading “Defensive Technology: Exploit Protection”
Defensive Technology: Windows Filtering Platform
Last November, I wrote a post about the basics of security software. In that post, I laid out how security software is composed of sensors and throttles controlled by threat intelligence. In today’s post, we’ll look at the Windows Filtering Platform, a fundamental platform technology introduced in Windows Vista that provides the core sensor andContinue reading “Defensive Technology: Windows Filtering Platform”
Attack Techniques: “I Already Hacked You” Scams
Scammers often try to convince you that you’ve already been hacked and you must contact them or send them money to prevent something worse from happening. I write about these a bunch: Another common “Bad thing already happened” scam is to send the user an email telling them that their devices were hacked some timeContinue reading “Attack Techniques: “I Already Hacked You” Scams”
Security Software – An Overview
I’ve spent nearly my entire professional career in software security: designing software to prevent abuse by bad actors. I’ve been battling the bad guys for over two decades now, from hunting security bugs in Microsoft Office (I once won an Xbox for finding a vulnerability that allowed malicious clipart take over your computer) to designingContinue reading “Security Software – An Overview”
Defensive Technology: Controlled Folder Access
Most client software’s threat models (e.g. Edge, Chrome) explicitly exclude threats where the local computer was compromised by malware. That’s because, without a trusted computing base, it’s basically impossible to be secure against attackers. This concept was immortalized decades ago in the Ten Immutable Laws of Security: In the intervening years, new technologies (like SecureContinue reading “Defensive Technology: Controlled Folder Access”
Defensive Technology: Antimalware Scan Interface (AMSI)
Endpoint security software faces a tough challenge — it needs to be able to rapidly distinguish between desired and unwanted behavior with few false positives and false negatives, and attackers work hard to obfuscate (or cloak) their malicious code to prevent detection by security scanners. To maximize protection, security software wants visibility into attack chainsContinue reading “Defensive Technology: Antimalware Scan Interface (AMSI)”
Attack Techniques: Encrypted Archives
Tricking a user into downloading and opening malware is a common attack technique, and defenders have introduced security scanners to many layers of the ecosystem in an attempt to combat the technique: With all this scanning in place, attackers have great incentives to try to prevent their malicious code from detection up until the momentContinue reading “Attack Techniques: Encrypted Archives”
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