Bruce Schneier gave a DEF CON talk on AI hacking, exploring what happens when AI models become hackers; it drew over 100K YouTube views.
Bruce Schneier presented at DEF CON on 'AI hacking,' combining ideas from his 2022 book 'A Hacker's Mind' with lessons from current AI models exhibiting hacking behavior. The talk exceeded 100,000 YouTube views within days, and a related interview with him in the AI Village is also available.
Security researcher Bill Swearingen's noRecognition project uses 31 million tested patterns to defeat license plate reader and surveillance camera AI detection.
Kansas City researcher Bill Swearingen built noRecognition, using reinforcement learning across roughly 31 million tests to generate printed patterns that break the detection layer of license plate readers and surveillance cameras. The strongest validated result achieved 61.7% non-detection against a detector taken from a real deployed camera, though most headline figures remain digital simulations. At DEF CON he covered a 2009 Toyota Yaris in a new pattern and reported it effective against a Flock Safety camera, with curved wheels the main weak point. He is crowdfunding apparel products and withholding his best patterns to prevent camera makers from blocking them.
DEF CON 34 research shows AI customer-service agents can be manipulated via prompt injection and email tricks to leak OTPs and act as victims.
Inti De Ceukelaire, presenting at Bug Bounty Village during DEF CON 34, demonstrated attacks against AI-powered customer service bots with access to customer profiles, billing data, support inboxes, and refund tools. Techniques include transcript-based phishing from trusted support addresses, From-header identity confusion, email normalization abuse to bypass OTP rate limits, and knowledge-base poisoning via RAG crawlers. He recommends separating untrusted content from system prompts, session-bound authentication, consistent email normalization, server-side tool validation, and least-privilege permissions for AI agents.