The First Autonomous AI Espionage Campaign

Anthropic has just surfaced what appears to be the first large-scale, mostly autonomous, AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign. In mid-September 2025, they detected suspicious behaviour that turned out to be a sophisticated operation run by a Chinese state-sponsored group. AI wasn’t just “helping.” It was doing most of the work. The attackers jailbroke Claude Code, framed it as doing defensive testing, and then drove it through an automated framework aimed at ~30 global targets, big tech, finance, chemicals, and government. A few intrusions succeeded. ...

November 15, 2025 · 2 min · 332 words · bjr

The Same Problem, Different Decade

Some sections of this post were written with the assistance of AI to improve clarity and readability. The historical context, reasoning, and overall flow are entirely my own. I’ve been noticing something lately when I read about new infrastructure projects. Not the specific technologies, those change constantly, but the shape of the problems they’re solving. It’s like watching reruns of a show you half-remember: the set design is different, the actors have changed, but you know exactly how this episode goes. ...

October 30, 2025 · 8 min · 1500 words · bjr

Zero Trust

Some sections of this post were written with the assistance of AI to clarify ideas and improve readability. All opinions and conclusions are my own. Zero-Trust Is Already Happening Your VPN goes down at 2 AM. Half your engineering team is locked out. The on-call engineer can’t access the database to diagnose the outage that triggered the VPN failure in the first place. You’re now troubleshooting infrastructure access during an infrastructure incident, a recursion problem that would be funny if it weren’t costing you money and sleep. ...

October 29, 2025 · 8 min · 1629 words · bjr

The Historical, Philosophical & Cultural Dimensions of Biometric Identity Verification

Biometric identity verification has deep historical, philosophical, and cultural roots that go beyond mere technology. From ancient philosophical inquiries into the nature of self to modern discussions on ethics and privacy, the concept of identity has been a subject of ongoing debate. Understanding these dimensions is crucial as biometrics become increasingly integrated into our daily lives, influencing societal norms, practices, and public perception. Contemporary perspectives on identity, influenced by thinkers like Foucault and Derrida, challenge fixed notions and emphasize its fluid and dynamic nature. As we navigate this evolving landscape, it’s essential to consider the ethical, legal, and social implications of biometric technologies, ensuring they align with our values and respect individual autonomy. ...

April 19, 2025 · 1 min · 123 words · bjr

The first Blockchain firewall

Fuse and Check Point are tackling one of blockchain’s most significant challenges: the constant threat of hacks and cyberattacks that have cost crypto platforms over $2.2 billion in 2024 alone, eroding trust and slowing adoption. Traditional security methods, such as smart contract audits and post-incident monitoring, haven’t been enough to stop increasingly sophisticated threats targeting wallets, smart contracts, and decentralised apps. To solve this, they’re building the first real-time, AI-powered blockchain firewall—a proactive security layer that continuously monitors network activity, identifies malicious transactions, and blocks them before they can cause damage. By leveraging Check Point’s decades of threat intelligence and prevention technology, this solution aims to set a new industry standard, protecting the entire Fuse blockchain and paving the way for safer, more scalable Web3 payments and applications. ...

April 19, 2025 · 1 min · 138 words · bjr

the Cypherpunks mailing list

In the early 1990s, as the internet was beginning to shift from a government and academic experiment into a globally connected system, a quiet revolution was forming among a small but determined group of mathematicians, programmers, and digital activists. They saw what few others did: that the very architecture of this new digital realm could become either a tool of unprecedented freedom — or a mechanism for total surveillance and control. ...

April 18, 2025 · 4 min · 746 words · bjr

Mobile Hacking: Cellular Infrastructure to Avoid Surveillance

This story of the Mexican cartel communication networks represents more than just a technological achievement – it demonstrates the extraordinary lengths to which criminal organizations will go to maintain operational security (OPSEC). As these networks continue to evolve, they pose significant challenges for law enforcement and telecommunications policy. With the advent of Software Defined Radio (SDR) and open-source cellular software such as OpenBTS and srsRAN, we will likely see a proliferation of private cellular networks by organizations seeking to guarantee their privacy. ...

March 3, 2025 · 1 min · 97 words · bjr