vx | systems | networks | security | prof @uc3m
Joined August 2012
- Tweets5K
- Following256
- Followers1.7K
- Likes8.4K
Juan Tapiador retweeted
When you realize that AI improvements are on an exponential curve, you see where this end-to-end attack time is headed: minutes.
A good mental model would be that attacks will run at speed up to the bandwidth and feedback loop cycle time between attacker and your environment.
Juan Tapiador retweeted
After recently moving to the University of Oxford, I am currently recruiting PhD students in the broad areas of web systems, social computing and Internet measurements. If you know of anybody, please let them know to reach out (deadline 2nd December)!
Juan Tapiador retweeted
this is wild 🧐
While evaluating Qwen3.8-Flash-Next in a controlled sandbox environment, Cohere's research team observed something unexpected.
Asked to generate a defensive cybersecurity detection rule, the model instead inventoried aspects of the machine it was running on and attempted to upload a probe file to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing. Notably, the model's reasoning trace stated that it would not invoke any tools before taking these actions.
Cohere's sandbox blocked the attempt, and no external communication succeeded. We have not determined the root cause, and we are not asserting malicious intent.
But the incident raises important questions for organizations deploying agentic AI systems: Can models take actions that differ from their stated reasoning, and how should security teams evaluate trust, provenance, and behavior in open-weight models?
We are publishing our findings because organizations making model adoption decisions deserve as much information as possible. We hope this contributes to greater transparency, stronger security practices, and continued collaboration across the AI ecosystem.
Read the full report: cohere.com/blog/concerning-b…
Juan Tapiador retweeted
A mysterious threat actor has hacked more than 330 Tor servers earlier this month to carry out a mass-sniffing campaign against Tor users. The attacker hacked Tor relays, infected them with the Ebury Linux malware, and converted them to exit relays where it could intercept SSH connections and downgrade email connections to steal unencrypted email traffic. The hacking campaign went undetected for three days, between October 2 and 5, before it was spotted by a Swiss engineer and reported to the Tor security team.
kaba.cx/posts/20261020_Tor/
Juan Tapiador retweeted
Some stats on #php2shell. In the 10 hours before it was publicly announced, across the @Cloudflare network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it. That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now.
Juan Tapiador retweeted
The back of the Navier-Stokes milestone shirt is the last line of the chain-of-thought from the solution:
Juan Tapiador retweeted
New #blog! The story of two suburban Chicago kids who #hacked a university computer & tried to hold it to ransom in 1980. Really early #hacker #history & a thread in the history of #ransomware, data extortion is almost as old as personal computing itself.
realhackhistory.org/2026/10/…
Juan Tapiador retweeted
Try opening a Microsoft Word document from 1992, a Flash project from 2006, or a proprietary database dump from 2010. Half of it is unreadable binary rot.
Now open a .c source file or a plain .txt file written on a UNIX PDP-11 in 1973. It opens in 0.001 seconds on every computer on Earth.
Plain text is the only truly immortal data format humanity has ever invented.
Juan Tapiador retweeted
📢 Call for Workshop Proposals: IEEE EuroS&P 2027!
Looking to organize a workshop in security & privacy? Join us in Madrid, Spain (July 5 & 9, 2027)! 🇪🇸
🗓️ Proposal Deadline: Oct 30, 2026 (23:59 AoE)
Guidelines & Call For Workshops:
🔗 eurosp2027.ieee-security.org…
#EuroSP27
Juan Tapiador retweeted
Margaret Hamilton, computing pioneer who led software development for the Apollo program, dies at 90 news.mit.edu/2026/margaret-h… 😢😢😢
Juan Tapiador retweeted
Math is progressing by hours now, not years
We are publishing an update to OpenAI Problem #109 (integer multiplication) with a substantial further tightening:
T(n) = O(n (log n)^(1 − κ)),
With κ = 2⁻⁷⁸ (tightened from κ = 2⁻¹⁸²)
Approximately 570 million fold improvement over our previous result and a 2¹⁰⁴ fold improvement over original OAI result.
Our earlier ceiling applied to a cubic bottleneck in the network. The new witness scales quadratically; we haven't established a new ceiling.
The key was using nonadjacent axis swaps to route around the cubic bottleneck. The original manuscript already supported nonadjacent axis swaps. Using them directly reduces layout routing from O(d²) to O(d) swaps.
