“Systems That Can Hack Anything”: An AI-Safety Resignation, Read From the Security Chair

Posted on September 10, 2026 by Simon Roses

Read Time: 13 minutes

TL;DR

On September 9, 2026, a pretraining researcher named Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic — after three years across OpenAI and Anthropic — and posted a thread warning that the labs are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” It has been seen tens of millions of times. Buried in it is a line that is not abstract to me at all: these will soon be “superhuman systems that can hack anything.” That is my beat. I am not an alignment researcher and I do not trade in p(doom), but I have spent 2026 documenting the concrete, boring, already-here version of exactly what he is gesturing at — the model as attacker, agents that act with your credentials, autonomous offense. The safety people and the security people are describing the same animal from opposite ends. This is my attempt to translate his warning into the language of the security chair — taking it seriously without catastrophizing, presenting the case against it fairly, and landing where I always land: the facts don’t need the doom framing to matter, and fear is not a security control.

A note on what this is. This is an opinion piece, not a threat model. I am a security practitioner, not an AI-safety researcher, and existential risk is a genuinely contested debate among serious people. I will give Coxon’s argument its due, give the skeptics theirs, and be clear about which parts are my own read. Nobody in this piece is a villain, and I am not telling you what to believe about the end of the world — only what this looks like from where I sit.

What happened

Jacob Coxon spent three years doing pretraining research — the deep end of the pool — first at OpenAI, then at Anthropic. On September 9 he quit, publicly, and wrote a thread that has since been viewed tens of millions of times. The core of it is blunt: “Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

He goes further. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt.” He describes executives who soften their phrasing for the press while privately expressing fear, and researchers at his own former employer who understand the stakes but feel “locked in a race to get there first.” His proposed remedy is uncomfortable and specific: public dissent from lab researchers, and — as a serious option — “a temporary ban on improving model capabilities” to buy time for international coordination.

What made me sit up was not the existential framing, which I have heard before. It was that this was not an outsider or a pundit. And it did not stay uncorroborated: Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s own Alignment Science Lead, publicly agreed that Coxon was right about the fear inside the labs, and volunteered his own number — “I personally think it is >10% within the next decade” — while making clear he considers the risk from present-day models low, with his concern aimed at a future superintelligence. Hold onto that last distinction. It is the whole argument in miniature, and I will come back to it.

And Hubinger was not the only one. Samuel Marks, a scalable-oversight lead at the same company, added that “this could happen in the next few years.” A caveat that matters for fairness: as I write this, these are individual researchers speaking for themselves on social media, not an official Anthropic statement. But when this many people at one lab say the quiet part on the record within hours of each other, the pattern is itself the news.

The one line that is my job

Strip the thread down and one phrase is doing the heavy lifting for a security audience: these will be “superhuman systems that can hack anything… and acquire real power and resources.”

To most readers that is science fiction. To me it is a Tuesday with the dial turned up. I have spent this year writing about the un-fictional, already-shipping leading indicators of precisely that capability:

  • Models being turned into the attacker rather than the target — which is the entire subject of When the Model Is the Attacker, my read of the Hugging Face incident.
  • Agent skills and connectors weaponized into a supply chain that executes with real privilege.
  • Autonomous agents pointed at the open ocean of public data to track and predict people, unattended, which I walked through in the maritime OSINT piece.
  • Open-weight models you can backdoor or simply not trust, where the provenance of the thing running your infrastructure is itself the risk.

None of these is superintelligence. Every one of them is a rung on the ladder Coxon is pointing at from the top. “Can hack anything” is not a phase change that arrives one morning; it is the far end of a curve I have been plotting point by point all year.

He cited my beat, by name

Here is the detail that pulled this from “interesting” to “I have to write about this.” In the same thread, Coxon names a specific event as a reason for cautious optimism about coordination: “Warning shots like the Hugging Face attack have made pacing agreements between U.S. labs more viable.”

That warning shot is the one I dissected in July. From inside the AI-safety frame, the Hugging Face incident is an abstract data point in an argument about lab pacing agreements. From inside the security frame, it was a concrete thing that happened, with a mechanism, a blast radius, and a set of controls that would have changed the outcome. Same event, two vocabularies. The safety community reaches for it to argue about governance; the security community reaches for it to argue about logging, provenance, and least privilege. We are both right, and we are mostly not in the room together.

That gap — between the people modeling the mind of a future superintelligence and the people modeling the attack surface of the system shipping this quarter — is the actual subject of this post. Because the second group has something the first group needs: evidence.

Two tribes, one elephant

The AI-risk conversation has largely split into two tribes that talk past each other.

The safety tribe argues in the abstract and the future tense: alignment, mesa-optimizers, recursive self-improvement, the mind of a system that does not yet exist. Their strongest move is that they are reasoning about the thing before it can hurt you, which is the only time reasoning helps. Their weakest move is that abstraction is unfalsifiable and easy to dismiss, and it asks you to be frightened of a capability you cannot yet see.

The security tribe — my tribe — argues in the concrete and the present tense: this exploit, this connector, this leaked key, this incident last week. Our strongest move is evidence: we can show you the thing, reproduce it, and measure it. Our weakest move is that we are so busy with this quarter’s fire that we rarely lift our heads to ask where the curve goes.

Put the two together and you get something neither has alone. The safety people supply the trajectory; the security people supply the receipts. Coxon’s “systems that can hack anything” is a claim about the trajectory. My year of write-ups is a stack of receipts showing the trajectory is real and pointed the way he says. You do not have to accept his timeline or his p(doom) to notice that the leading indicators are not zero, and that they are getting stronger, not weaker.

The honest case against him

I promised the skeptics their due, and they have a real case — I would be a bad practitioner if I only steel-manned the alarm.

First, dramatic capability claims are not disinterested. “Our technology is so powerful it might end the world” is, awkwardly, also the greatest sales pitch and the strongest regulatory moat ever written. A lab that convinces governments only it can be trusted to handle world-ending power has argued itself into an incumbency no competitor can dislodge. Doom talk and market power point the same direction, and that should make you read every capability claim — including the scary ones — with one eyebrow raised. It is not a fringe objection: plenty of the reporters covering this very resignation noted that critics accuse the labs of hyping their products. Hyping the danger is a way of hyping the product.

Second, the honest members of the safety camp keep saying the quiet part: today’s models are low risk. Hubinger said it in the same breath as his ten-percent figure. The distance between “a chatbot that still miscounts letters” and “a system that can hack anything and seize resources” is not a rounding error; it is the entire disputed question, and confident extrapolation across it is exactly the move skeptics are right to challenge.

Third, there is an opportunity cost to apocalypse. Every hour the discourse spends on a hypothetical 2030 superintelligence is an hour it does not spend on the mundane harms that are here now and provably hurting people — fraud, non-consensual imagery, model-enabled crime, the concrete things I write about. A reasonable person can believe the far tail is overblown and that the near-term security reality is under-served. I am close to that person.

Where I actually land

So do I think a superintelligence kills us all by 2030? I don’t know, and — this is the point — I don’t need to, to do my job.

Here is the move I want to offer, because it is the one thing a security practitioner can contribute that a philosopher cannot: you can decouple the action from the eschatology. Whether p(doom) is one percent or thirty, the rational security posture in front of you is identical. Instrument the agent layer so you can see what these systems do. Treat model provenance as a supply-chain problem, because it is one. Assume the text your systems read is hostile, because it demonstrably is. Keep a human in the loop on irreversible actions. Design for least privilege as if the model will be turned against you, because this year it sometimes was. Every one of those is worth doing if Coxon is completely wrong. Every one of those is worth doing if he is completely right. That is what a good control looks like — it pays off across the whole range of the disagreement.

Coxon’s real contribution, for my community, is not the timeline. It is the reminder that the curve has a top, and that the people closest to the summit are frightened enough to walk away from a great deal of money and status to say so. You can discount their forecast and still take their fear as data. Insiders defecting is itself a signal, the same way I treat any credible insider warning about any system: not proof, but a reason to look harder.

And fear, on its own, is not a security control. It never has been. The useful response to a frightening trajectory is not to panic and not to look away — it is to build the instrumentation, the provenance checks, and the least-privilege boundaries that hold up whether the scary version arrives in three years or never. That is unglamorous, it does not trend on X, and it is the only part of this whole debate I can actually hand you on a Monday morning.

And there is a version of this future worth being optimistic about, which I do not want to lose in the alarm. The “superhuman” in Coxon’s sentence is a system that outgrows us. The superhuman I want is a person — an analyst, a defender, a builder — amplified by tools they own and understand, which is the case I made in AI Must Make Superhumans, Not Unemployed. You can hold that optimism and still log your agents; done right, the two are the same project.

Take the warning seriously. Take the skeptics seriously. Then go log your agents.

Stay paranoid. Ground the fear in evidence. Build the controls that pay off either way.

Further Reading:

Questions or feedback? Reach out via:

Contact: info@vulnex.com

Posted in AI, Business, Economics, Privacy, Security, Technology, Threat Modeling | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Tracking the Fleet of the Rich: Maritime OSINT, a Radio, and an AI Agent

Posted on September 3, 2026 by Simon Roses

Read Time: 14 minutes

TL;DR

A superyacht is one of the most private things money can buy, and one of the easiest things in the world to find. Every large vessel broadcasts its identity, position, course, and destination in the clear over VHF radio, because a collision-avoidance safety system — AIS — requires it. Four free websites — MarineTraffic, VesselFinder, ShipFinder, and Maritime Database — turn that firehose into a searchable map where a single anchorage off Mallorca becomes a labeled guest list of the world’s wealthy, each hull tagged with its past track, its next port, and a route forecast button. Owner directories close the last gap from hull to human. And you don’t even need the websites: a ~200€ PortaPack decodes AIS straight off the air, which means suppressing your boat online does nothing about the radio that is still transmitting it. Now add AI, and the game changes shape: an agent fuses AIS with ownership records, news, and social posts into a live dossier, learns a target’s pattern-of-life, predicts the next anchorage, and pings you the moment the vessel appears — unattended. This is a security piece, not a how-to. It is written for the people who own, run, and protect these vessels, because a predicted anchorage is a location for a person. Method at the threat-vector level, defenses at the end, no targets named.

Disclaimer. This is defense-oriented and kept at the threat-vector level. It uses only publicly available data and public tools, names no human target, and pairs every capability with a countermeasure. The goal is OPSEC and executive-protection awareness for the people who own, crew, or protect these vessels — not a manual for anyone with worse intentions. As with the rest of the SRF-IWS series, I lean on AI to help build realistic, defense-oriented scenarios, and every vessel name shown here is already public on the platforms in the screenshots.

I have spent this blog crawling networks, hardware, and now AI agents looking for the place where a system leaks more than its owner thinks. The sea turned out to be one of the most generous leaks I have ever looked at — and unlike a misconfigured server, this one leaks by law.

Let me show you what an afternoon, a browser, a cheap radio, and an AI agent can reconstruct about where the wealthy actually are.

The marina is a guest list

Point any of these tools at Puerto Portals or the bay off Palmanova on a summer evening and the map does something a little obscene: it labels the anchorage. Not “yacht.” The names. A screen full of them, each one a hull worth tens or hundreds of millions, each one clickable.

srf_maritime_shipfinder_portals

Figure 1. A free website turns a summer anchorage off Mallorca into a labeled guest list.

That is not a leak in the hacking sense. Nobody broke anything. That is the system working exactly as designed — which is the whole point, and the whole problem.

Why the sea has no privacy: AIS

The Automatic Identification System exists for a good reason: ships hitting each other in the dark is bad, so since the SOLAS convention, vessels above a certain size (and effectively every serious yacht) carry an AIS transponder that continuously broadcasts, over marine VHF, who they are and where they are. Identity (name, callsign, MMSI, IMO number), position, course, speed, navigational status, and often the destination they typed in — all in the clear, as often as every few seconds when a vessel is under way, to anyone listening.

There’s a size line worth knowing, because it decides who can’t opt out. Under SOLAS, a Class A transponder is mandatory for vessels over 300 gross tons and all passenger ships; smaller pleasure craft use the lighter, largely voluntary Class B, which can legally be switched off. Notice which side of that line the interesting boats fall on: essentially every superyacht in these screenshots is well over 300 GT, so the biggest, most-protected hulls on the water are precisely the ones the law forbids from going dark.

It is a safety beacon. It is also a tracking beacon. Those are the same signal. A technology built so a tanker doesn’t run down a fishing boat is, from the OSINT chair, a fleet of the world’s richest people voluntarily announcing their coordinates on an open channel.

srf_maritime_marinetraffic_med

Figure 2. The raw AIS firehose across the Mediterranean — thousands of vessels, all self-reporting.

At this zoom it is just noise. The tools exist to turn the noise into an address.

The toolkit: turning the firehose into a map

The aggregators all do the same core thing — ingest global AIS (from terrestrial receivers and satellites) and render it as a live, searchable map — and you use several of them precisely because they disagree at the edges, which is how you cross-verify. MarineTraffic, VesselFinder, and ShipFinder are the big three; Maritime Database is the reference layer that gives you baselines on ports and vessel classes. All freemium: the map is free, the deep history and the exact live coordinates sit behind a subscription. And because the feeds come from satellites as well as shore receivers, coverage isn’t only coastal — anchoring offshore, out of anyone’s VHF range, does not take a vessel off these maps.

The method is a funnel. Start global, zoom to a region known for money, then to a specific marina.

srf_maritime_marinetraffic_balearic

Figure 3. Zoom to the Balearics and the pleasure-craft layer (purple) separates from commercial traffic.

srf_maritime_marinetraffic_portals

Figure 4. Three clicks from “somewhere in Europe” to a specific berth in Puerto Portals.

Three clicks from “somewhere in Europe” to “this specific berth.” Cross-check the same spot on VesselFinder and ShipFinder and the picture firms up.

srf_maritime_vesselfinder_global

Figure 5. VesselFinder — a second aggregator to cross-verify against.

srf_maritime_shipfinder_global

Figure 6. ShipFinder — a third, because where the tools disagree is where you learn something.

From a dot to a dossier

Click a single hull and the map stops being a map and becomes a file. Here is one vessel I pulled at random from the Mallorca anchorage — a 124-metre yacht flying the Qatari flag, name KATARA, sitting at anchor after an overnight hop from Barcelona to Palma.

srf_maritime_katara_card

Figure 7. One click on a hull: type, flag, Barcelona→Palma, reported ETA, “At Anchor,” and buttons for Past track and Route forecast.

The card alone gives you the voyage: where it left, when, where it is going, when it expects to arrive, and whether it is moving or parked. Open the full page and it deepens into something closer to an intelligence product.

srf_maritime_katara_details

Figure 8. The full file: IMO 9562805, MMSI 466066000, 124 m, and tabs for Port call log, Ownership and “In the news.” The exact latitude/longitude sits behind “upgrade to unlock” — a paywall, not a privacy control.

Read that detail page like an attacker and it is a gift: a permanent identifier (the IMO number never changes, even if the vessel is renamed or reflagged), a complete history of every port it has called at, an Ownership tab, and a route forecast. The only thing hidden is the precise lat/long — and that is hidden to sell you a subscription, not to protect anyone. VesselFinder shows the same hull with its own particulars and, tellingly, its neighbours.

srf_maritime_vesselfinder_katara

Figure 9. Not just one vessel — its neighbourhood. Who anchors near whom is its own kind of intelligence.

That last screenshot is the one that should worry a protection detail. You did not just find one vessel. You found its neighbourhood — who anchors near whom, which is its own kind of intelligence.

srf_maritime_katara_photo

Figure 10. And here it is. The trackers said a 124-metre yacht was off Mallorca; a walk to the shoreline and a phone camera confirmed it. The data was never abstract — it was a hull you could stand and watch.

A second hull, same result

None of this is cherry-picked. Point the same three tools at the next dark hull in the bay and the file assembles itself again. This one is KISMET — a 122-metre yacht under the Marshall Islands flag, built in 2024, at anchor off Portals after a run down from Port Vendres.

srf_maritime_kismet_details

Figure 11. A different hull, the same dossier: IMO 9881627, MMSI 538071476, callsign V7A2834, Marshall Islands flag, 122×17 m — voyage, draught, and at-anchor status, all from one page.

srf_maritime_kismet_map

Figure 12. And its neighbourhood — KISMET at anchor in a bay the map has labelled with the name of nearly everything around it.

srf_maritime_kismet_photo

Figure 13. Same ending as before: the data said a 122-metre yacht was off Mallorca, and there it was from the shoreline. The method doesn’t care which hull you point it at.

From vessel to person

Tracking a hull is easy. The real OSINT work is the last hop: hull to human. It is a chain, and every link is public.

The IMO number gives you a permanent handle on the hull — it survives renaming and reflagging — while the MMSI tracks the current registration, so if it changes, that itself is a tell. From there you walk the flag and registry to a registered owner, which for any serious yacht is a management company or a holding entity in a friendly jurisdiction — a deliberate curtain. But the curtain has holes: yacht-owner directories such as SuperYachtFan exist specifically to map hulls to the people behind them and do the deanonymization for you; the press names owners every time a yacht is bought, sold, or involved in anything; and the vessel’s own In the news tab often hands you the connection directly. Cross-reference three public sources and the holding company stops hiding anyone.

I am deliberately not going to close that loop on a named individual here. The point is that the loop closes, cheaply, and that the people who most need to understand it are the ones aboard.

The part that defeats “just turn it off”: the radio

Here is where my old world — wardriving and RF, the stuff I have been doing since before it was fashionable — walks back into the story.

Everything above used websites. You don’t need them. AIS is just VHF radio on two channels (161.975 MHz and 162.025 MHz), and a PortaPack running the open-source Mayhem firmware decodes it passively, straight off the air — AIS Boats shows the MMSI, name, and the latest position each vessel transmits, with no account, no subscription, and no internet connection at all. A pocket device and an antenna, sitting quietly in a marina car park.

srf_maritime_portapack_menu

Figure 14. A HackRF One + PortaPack H2 running the open-source Mayhem firmware. AIS Boats is a built-in receive app — no PC, no internet.

srf_maritime_portapack_list

Figure 15. The same hulls, received passively off VHF — and there, highlighted, is KATARA (MMSI 466066000): the exact yacht we pulled off MarineTraffic a moment ago, now heard straight off the air. No account, no subscription.

srf_maritime_portapack_detail

Figure 16. KATARA decoded straight off VHF: name, Qatari flag, MMSI 466066000, at anchor — and its exact position, 39.51°N 2.57°E, the very latitude/longitude MarineTraffic charged a subscription to hide.

And it isn’t a one-hull trick. Leave the receiver running and the bay fills itself in. There, in the live list of everything the antenna is hearing, is KISMET — the same 122-metre hull we pulled off VesselFinder a few sections ago, arriving now straight off the air, sitting in a car-park’s worth of its neighbours.

srf_maritime_kismet_portapack_list

Figure 17. The live receive list on Channel 87B — and there, highlighted, is KISMET (MMSI 538071476), heard passively alongside QATAR 2, CALLISTO III, and a dozen other hulls the antenna plucked out of the air.

srf_maritime_kismet_portapack_detail

Figure 18. KISMET decoded straight off VHF: MMSI 538071476, callsign V7A2834, Marshall Islands, destination ESPMI (Palma), at anchor — and the exact position, 39.52°N 2.59°E, matching the VesselFinder page to the decimal.

srf_maritime_kismet_portapack_map

Figure 19. No website anywhere in the loop: the PortaPack takes the position it just decoded and plots KISMET on its own map. RF in, a dot on a chart out — offline, from a device that fits in a pocket.

This is the point that matters most for defense, so I will say it plainly: suppressing your vessel online is not radio silence. The aggregators offer opt-outs and privacy filters, and owners pay for them — but those only affect what the websites display. SOLAS still requires the transponder to transmit. Anyone within VHF range — a few miles, more from a hill or a drone — still receives the broadcast the website is politely hiding. You can pay MarineTraffic to stop showing you. You cannot pay physics to stop propagating you. And notice the twist in Figure 16: the precise position MarineTraffic put behind a paywall, the radio gives away for free. Paywall is not privacy, and opt-out is not silence.

One honest caveat, because it cuts both ways: AIS has no authentication. The same openness that lets you receive it lets anyone forge it — spoofed MMSIs, ghost positions, and vessels that simply switch off and go dark are a routine feature of sanctions-evasion “dark fleets.” For the tracker, that means the signal can lie. For the defender, it means deception is on the table too: where the law of your flag and waters allows it, a decoy track is a legitimate protective option.

Where AI changes the shape of the problem

Everything so far is 2016 OSINT with a 2026 coat of paint. Here is what actually makes this a new problem, and it is the thread that runs through everything else I write on this blog: the hard part of OSINT was never finding the data. It was correlating it. That is exactly the labor AI collapses.

Fusion into a live dossier. The manual version of this article is an analyst spending a week stitching AIS positions to an owner directory to news archives to a management-company filing to a crew member’s public Instagram. An agent does it in a prompt: give it a vessel name and it queries the trackers, pulls the owner directory, scrapes the news tab, correlates the social posts, and hands back a single profile. The week becomes a minute.

Pattern-of-life and prediction. The trackers already ship a route forecast button for a single voyage. Feed a model a season of historical AIS and it generalizes: this vessel summers in the Balearics and the Tyrrhenian, favours these three anchorages, moves on weekends, and — given the current track — is most likely headed here next. Tracking that used to report now predicts. A predicted anchorage, forty-eight hours out, is a place to position a camera, a boat, or something worse.

Deanonymization at scale. The hull-to-human chain I walked by hand is a cross-referencing task, which is what these models are unreasonably good at: point one at the registries, the leaks, the directories, and the news, and it bridges shell to owner faster than any curtain can be redrawn.

Vision geolocation. A guest posts a sunset from the aft deck. A vision model places the coastline, the marina, the mountain profile — and cross-references AIS to confirm the vessel was there. The boat can be “dark” online and still get put on the map by a stranger’s holiday photo.

Cross-domain correlation. The wealthy rarely arrive by sea. They fly in — private jet to the island, helicopter to the deck — and aircraft broadcast their own cousin of AIS called ADS-B, on 1090 MHz, which the same PortaPack in Figure 14 decodes too. Correlate the ADS-B track of a known tail number with the AIS track of a hull and you stop tracking a boat and start tracking a person: the jet lands, the helicopter hops to the anchorage, the owner is aboard. Sea plus sky is the difference between “the yacht is here” and “the principal is here, right now.”

The autonomous agent. Wire the above into a loop that runs unattended: watch for a target MMSI to reappear anywhere on the global feed, enrich it, and alert. This is the same shift I wrote about in When the Model Is the Attacker and How to Weaponize AI Agent Skills, pointed at the ocean: the adversary is no longer a person watching a screen. It is an agent that never sleeps and pages a human only when the target surfaces.

And the version that removes the last trace: the PortaPack captures AIS off the air, a local open model running on your own hardware enriches the raw MMSI into an identity, and nothing you did ever touched a website or left a query log. RF in, dossier out, entirely offline.

Who actually cares

srf_maritime_kill_chain

Figure 20. The whole chain in one view — collect AIS (web or radio), resolve hull to person, enrich and predict with AI, act on the location. Every step uses public data and public tools; no step is “hacking.”

Name the threat model plainly, because “someone can see the boat” only lands when you attach it to intent. Kidnap-for-ransom crews and modern piracy plan around a known location. Stalkers and obsessives do not need much. Activists and paparazzi want the shot and the story. Business rivals want the meeting nobody announced — two yachts anchored together for a weekend is a signal. Sanctions and nation-state trackers do this at industrial scale already. In every case the output is the same: a place, a time, and a person who thought the sea made them unreachable.

The defensive playbook

None of this is an argument to panic. It is an argument to plan around reality, and the reality is that presence is knowable. Here is what I would tell a principal or a protection detail.

Treat AIS as an OPSEC decision, with a real safety trade-off. You can reduce transmission (silent/receive-only modes, or lawfully switching off in specific circumstances), but AIS exists to stop collisions — going dark trades a tracking risk for a safety risk, and in busy waters that is not a trade to make casually. Know the rules for your flag and your waters, and make it a deliberate decision, not a default.

Understand that obfuscation only half-works. Renaming, reflagging, and holding the vessel through a management company all raise the cost of attribution — but the IMO number is permanent, the directories catch up, and the press does the rest. Obfuscation buys time and friction, not invisibility. Budget accordingly.

The leak is usually a person, not the transponder. Crew and guest social media geolocates your vessel more reliably than AIS ever will. A published crew roster, a tagged sunset, a marina selfie — that is the exploit. OPSEC training for everyone aboard is worth more than any privacy subscription.

Turn the tools on yourself, first. Everything an adversary can build, you can build defensively. Run the fusion agent against your own vessel, geofence it, and alert yourself when your footprint becomes trackable or when the pattern-of-life gets too predictable. Vary the routine the model is trying to learn. Monitor your own exposure the way the other side monitors it.

Accept the physics and protect around it. You can suppress the website; you cannot suppress the VHF. Plan protection on the assumption that a motivated party can know when and roughly where the vessel is — because with a cheap radio and an AI agent, they can.

So what

The sea used to feel private because it was empty. It isn’t anymore. A safety beacon that vessels are required by law to transmit, four free websites, a two-hundred-euro radio, and an AI agent that never sleeps turn an ocean into an address book — and the entries are some of the most protected people on earth, publishing their coordinates on an open channel every thirty seconds.

The uncomfortable part is that there is no vulnerability to patch here. Nothing is broken. AIS is supposed to do this; the tools are legal; the data is public; the AI just makes the correlation instant. That is precisely why it belongs on a security blog and not in a headline about a hack. The exposure is structural, the mitigation is operational, and the people who need to understand it are the ones who assume that money and a hull between them and the shore add up to privacy.

srf_maritime_pipeline

Figure 21. Why it’s structural, not a bug — a broadcast the law requires, an opt-out that isn’t radio silence, and a public hull-to-human chain feed one pipeline, from a mandated safety signal to a person, place, and time.

They don’t. Assume you’re broadcasting — because you are.

Stay paranoid. Watch your own signal. Vary the routine.

Further Reading:

Questions or feedback? Reach out via:

Contact: info@vulnex.com

Posted in AI, Business, Economics, Privacy, RF, Security, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Information Warfare Strategies (SRF-IWS): Spyware as Statecraft — How States Blackmail States

Posted on August 28, 2026 by Simon Roses

Read Time: 15 minutes

TL;DR

Commercial spyware collapsed the price of the oldest move in statecraft: know what the other side knows, and hold something over the people who decide. A mid-sized state can now rent zero-click capability that used to belong only to top-tier intelligence services, point it at another country’s prime minister, and turn the take — private messages, locations, contacts, negotiating positions, personal secrets — into leverage over a border, a vote, a recognition, a venue. This is the SRF-IWS entry on coercion by malware: how it works as a doctrine, and how a government defends against it. The public case study is the Pegasus affair in Spain — it is confirmed that the phones of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and Defence Minister Margarita Robles were infected with NSO Group’s Pegasus in 2021; it is alleged and under judicial investigation, and firmly denied by Rabat, that Morocco was behind it; and it is my analysis, not a proven fact, that the intrusion sits inside a broader pattern of Spanish concessions to Morocco. I keep those three tiers separate on purpose, because the mechanism matters more than the verdict — and the mechanism should terrify every government that still treats a minister’s personal phone as a personal matter. Method at the threat-vector level, defenses at the end.

Disclaimer, doubled — this one names names. This article is defense-oriented and kept at the threat-vector level. Where I state something as fact, it is publicly confirmed and sourced. Where attribution is contested, I say so and note the denial. Where I connect events into a pattern, I label it as my own reading, not a finding. Nothing here is an operational how-to; it is a doctrine-level analysis for the people who build and defend government security. As with the rest of the SRF-IWS series, the goal is Blue Team planning. I am a security practitioner, not a court; treat contested claims as contested.

There is a particular kind of intrusion that does not feel like hacking. No server is breached, no embassy is burgled, no document leaks. A phone — the one in a head of government’s pocket during every classified briefing — simply starts answering to someone else. It keeps ringing, keeps showing the right time, keeps looking exactly like it did yesterday. And somewhere outside the country, a case officer reads the prime minister’s messages before his own chief of staff does.

That is the weapon this post is about, and the uncomfortable part is that it is for rent.

What actually happened: the confirmed core

Let me start with what is not in dispute, because the rest only matters if the foundation is solid.

In May 2022, the Spanish government confirmed that the mobile phone of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez had been infected with Pegasus, the spyware built by the Israeli firm NSO Group. The Minister for the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, told the press the intrusion was “illicit” and “external” — from outside Spanish state organs, with no judicial authorization. According to the government’s May 2022 account, Sánchez’s phone was compromised twice in May 2021, and Defence Minister Margarita Robles’ device once in June 2021, with a significant volume of data exfiltrated. Days later the director of Spain’s intelligence service, the CNI, was dismissed. The later judicial investigation would put the numbers higher still — reporting five infections of the prime minister’s phone across 2020–2021 and four of Robles’, with more than 2.5 GB of data pulled from Sánchez’s device alone.

Pegasus is the reason this is a story about statecraft and not about phishing. It is a zero-click weapon: at its peak it could compromise a fully patched iPhone with no tap, no link, no mistake by the target — a silent message that installs, executes, and deletes its own trace. Citizen Lab and Amnesty International’s Security Lab documented the technique; the same toolset surfaced in “CatalanGate,” where researchers found at least 65 people in Catalan political and civil-society circles targeted with Pegasus and Candiru between 2017 and 2020 — an operation Citizen Lab tied by circumstantial evidence to a “strong nexus” with Spanish state entities, while explicitly declining to attribute it conclusively.

So the confirmed core is this: the two most security-relevant phones in the Spanish state were owned, for a while, by an outside party. That is not an embarrassment. That is a national-security event.

Who did it: the contested part

Here I slow down, because this is where careful language is not optional.

The Spanish government did not, in 2022, name the author. Since then, the investigation at the Audiencia Nacional has — according to Spanish press reporting — increasingly pointed toward Morocco, and has drawn on judicial cooperation from France, where Pegasus targeting of officials was also alleged. Reporting in 2026 has gone further, tying the May 2021 migration surge at Ceuta — when thousands of people crossed into the Spanish enclave after Moroccan border control abruptly relaxed — to Moroccan retaliation against Spain, and framing the Pegasus operation as part of the same pressure campaign.

Morocco denies all of it. No court has issued a final attribution as I write this — and in January 2026 the investigating judge at the Audiencia Nacional shelved the probe, not for lack of a trail but for lack of cooperation, after Israel ignored five formal requests to help identify who operated the Pegasus licence. The case is suspended, not solved. That outcome is itself the thesis in miniature: this weapon works partly because attribution reliably stalls — the deniability is designed in, and the courts run out of road before the operator is ever named.

So the honest state of play is: the intrusion is confirmed; the author is alleged. I am going to write the rest of this analyzing the pattern — because the pattern is instructive regardless of which state, in the end, is proven to have held the remote. If it turns out not to be Morocco, every word about the mechanism still stands, pointed at whoever it was.

And the conflict is not a closed 2021 file — it is live as I write this. In late August 2026, a hacktivist group calling itself Jabaroot claimed to have leaked personal data on tens of thousands of alleged Moroccan security and intelligence personnel, framing the dump, in its own words, as a message aimed at Spain and tied to the 2026 Ceuta crisis — the largest migrant surge in the enclave’s history, when more than 60,000 people crossed into the Spanish city in a matter of days at the end of July, a breakdown widely reported to have come with a green light from the Moroccan side. The claim is unverified, I am deliberately not reproducing any of that data, and hack-and-leak doxxing is a different instrument from the silent phone implant this article is about. But it belongs here as context: the Spain–Morocco intelligence relationship is an open, two-way covert conflict, and spyware is one tool in a much larger kit. And as of 26 August the leaker has begun gesturing directly at this article’s subject — publicly dangling supposed Pegasus material tied to Sánchez — with no evidence yet that the data is real or in hand.

The mechanism: how a phone becomes leverage

Strip the geopolitics and coercion-by-spyware is a clean, repeatable chain. This is the SRF-IWS core, at doctrine level.

Target selection. You do not need the principal’s phone if you can have the people around it. Chiefs of staff, private secretaries, advisers, spouses, drivers, the journalist the minister trusts — the entourage is the soft edge of a hard target, and each one is a window onto the same room. The principal is the prize; the circle is the way in.

Delivery. Commercial spyware turned capability into a purchase order. Zero-click chains mean the operation does not depend on the target’s mistakes, only on the vendor’s inventory of exploits. A state that could never build this can now license it, aim it, and deny it — the plausible-deniability layer is part of the product.

Collection. Once resident, the implant is not a wiretap; it is the device. Messages before and after encryption, live microphone and camera, location history, contacts, calendars, photos, password vaults. Two distinct kinds of gold come out: kompromat — the private material that makes a person coerceable — and positional intelligence — what the other government actually thinks, fears, and will settle for.

Exploitation. This is where intelligence becomes coercion, and it runs on two rails. The first is blackmail: leverage over an individual, quiet pressure to act, to soften, to look away. The second is subtler and often more valuable: foreknowledge. A state that has read your prime minister’s phone does not have to win the negotiation — it already knows your red lines, your fallback, and the date you will fold. It sits down at the table having read the other side’s notes.

Effect. The output is not data. It is a decision that goes the other way: a border that opens or closes on cue, a vote withheld, a position reversed, a venue awarded. The malware is upstream of foreign policy.

srf_spyware_coercion_kill_chain

Figure 1. The doctrine as an attack tree. The chain is AND across all five phases — you need targeting and delivery and collection and exploitation and effect — with OR inside each, because any single target, route, or payoff will do. Break any one phase and the chain breaks, which is exactly where the defensive playbook aims.

My reading: from intrusion to concession

Now the part I am explicitly flagging as analysis, not fact.

Look at the Spanish timeline the way I look at an attack chain, and a pattern is hard to unsee. The Ceuta surge (May 2021) as raw pressure. The compromise of the prime minister’s phone (May 2021). And then, in March 2022, Spain’s abrupt reversal on Western Sahara — Sánchez backing Morocco’s autonomy plan and ending decades of studied neutrality, a shift that blindsided his own coalition and Algeria alike. Since then, a warming across migration cooperation and the shared 2030 World Cup, down to the pointed dispute over which country hosts the final.

I want to be precise about what I am and am not saying. I am not asserting that spyware caused those decisions; that is not proven and may never be. I am saying that this is exactly what the mechanism above would look like from the outside, and that a government which discovers its leader’s phone was owned during the run-up to a major concession owes its citizens a harder question than it has publicly asked. The value of the case is not a verdict. It is that it makes the doctrine concrete.

This is a category, not a one-off

It would be a mistake — and frankly a less honest article — to treat this as a Morocco story. Commercial spyware as an instrument of statecraft is now a global market, and Europe is both customer and casualty.

The European Parliament stood up an entire committee, PEGA, precisely because member states were caught using this class of tool against journalists, opposition figures, and each other. Poland used Pegasus against opposition politicians. Hungary against journalists. Greece’s “Predatorgate” put the Predator spyware (from the Intellexa/Cytrox alliance) at the center of a scandal reaching the prime minister’s own circle. Beyond Europe, Mexico was among NSO’s largest clients and turned the tool on journalists and activists; the toolset appeared around associates of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi; targets surfaced in Jordan, the Gulf, and beyond. The through-line is not one villain. It is that a capability which used to require a Fort Meade now requires a contract, and the guardrails are mostly aspirational.

That is the real warning in the Spain case: not that one neighbor may have crossed a line, but that the line is cheap to cross and almost everyone with a budget is standing near it.

The defensive playbook

None of this is a counsel of despair. It is a counsel of treating the principal’s phone as the contested national-security terrain it now is. Here is what I would put in front of any government protection detail or CISO of state.

Harden the principal’s devices as if they are already targeted — because they are. Locked-down, minimally-provisioned handsets; Apple’s Lockdown Mode (or the platform equivalent) for high-risk principals; aggressive device rotation; and — critically — no personal phone in classified spaces. The convenience device is the attack surface.

Defend the circle, not just the crown. The entourage is the way in. Aides, family, and close staff need the same briefing, the same hardened devices, and the same discipline as the principal. A protection program that stops at one person is theater.

Assume the phone is hostile and design comms around that. Segregate sensitive discussion onto controlled, ephemeral, ideally air-gapped channels. The rule for anything that would be leverage in a foreign capital: it does not happen on a device you carry through an airport.

Instrument for detection. Zero-click implants are quiet, not invisible. Routine forensic acquisition of high-risk devices (the kind of methodology behind Amnesty’s Mobile Verification Toolkit), mobile threat defense, and a standing relationship with a lab that can do real forensics turn “we’ll never know” into “we caught it in the logs.”

Treat a confirmed head-of-state infection as an incident, not an embarrassment. The worst response to owning up that the PM’s phone was compromised is to bury it to avoid the domestic politics. Attribution, consequences, and public accounting are themselves deterrents; silence is an invitation to do it again.

Make it a policy and procurement problem, too. National controls and EU-level regulation on commercial spyware, export controls on the vendors, and hard limits on your own services’ use of these tools — because a state that normalizes buying this capability has no standing to complain when it is used against its own cabinet. The PEGA committee wrote the recommendations; the gap is enforcement.

So what

For most of history, reading another government’s mind required a spy in the room, a mole in the ministry, or a break-in at the embassy — expensive, slow, and dangerous. Commercial spyware turned all of that into a licensing agreement and a phone number. The consequence is that sovereignty now runs through a consumer device: a state that can read your prime minister’s phone does not need to out-argue you, out-maneuver you, or out-wait you. It already knows how you will argue, where you will maneuver, and how long you will wait.

srf_spyware_coercion_convergence

Figure 2. The same thing as a straight line: a sponsoring state acquires deniable capability, compromises the phone, collects everything, converts the take into leverage, and cashes it as a concession. The “weaknesses” it rides — zero-click delivery, rentable spyware-as-a-service, a personal device carried into classified rooms — are structural properties, not software bugs, which is why there is no patch, only a posture.

The Spain–Pegasus affair is the clearest public window we have into that world — a confirmed intrusion, a contested author, and a pattern that should make any government look hard at the device in its leader’s pocket. Whether or not the courts ever name the hand on the remote, the lesson does not wait for the verdict: the phone is not personal, the entourage is the perimeter, and a leader’s private life is now a national attack surface.

Treat it that way before someone else does.

Stay paranoid. Harden the principal. Assume the phone is listening.

Further Reading:

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