Pay up 💸, or we train LLMs on your data | Are you using passkeys already?
#202 - A new type of ransomware | It's 2025. Are you still getting OTPs?
Holding Intellectual Property 🖼️ at ransom
Data Hungry AI brings this unique ransom
The fear of AI slop leads to this unique attack.
Large Language Models are hungry beasts. They feast on data. They lurch in all corners of the internet and unscrupulously slurp up data. Then they regurgitate it to create mediocre documents and art.
This ransomware threatens artists by saying that, unless paid, it will send all their downloaded artwork to LLM companies for training their AI models. LunaLock ransomware not only threatens to send artists’ data to AI models, it also brings up GDPR, the European Union’s data privacy regulation.
The ransomware spreads through royalty notification emails 😈.
Take Action:
If you are an artist or an art buyer, understand this attack vector. There is unique set of tools that has been developed by researchers at the University of Chicago. These two tools - Glaze and Nightshade work to protect the artists work by running it through a process where AI models understand the artwork in a completely different manner. You can download and use these tools to protect your artwork before putting it online.
Passkeys - it’s about time we start using them
Do you still stick to OTPs? Or Google authenticator?
This is not ‘news’. This article was published in the Wired recently and it talks about “How Passkeys Work - and how to use them.”
I’ve been a long time user of passkeys - both as hardware tokens as well as through password managers, but I know for a fact that not many people (and that includes cybersecurity professionals) use them.
I am sharing this article in the hope that you will read it and consider moving from insecure 2FA mechanisms like OTPs to passkeys.
Start here:
And then respond to this ⬇️ poll that you are moving to passkeys. It’s one big step in securing your key accounts.