Organisations don't plan to fail. Probably the closest we get to that in the security space is password hashing, which for all intents and purposes is an acknowledgement that one day, you may well lose them. But organisations rarely plan for how they should handle data breaches and when an incident does happen (and that seems to be a near certainty these days), they're left unprepared; they're in unfamiliar territory, there's enormous stress and pressures on them and frankly, they usually react...

There's a seemingly endless flood of data breaches these days. Pretty much every day I get sent dumps from somewhere or other, usually websites I've never heard of and often dating back to compromises from years ago. They vary in size from thousands of accounts to many millions - and this is just the ones I've looked at. In short, there's way more data than I have time to process. Occasionally though, an incident floats to the top of the others which is what's happened over the last few days. T...

Y'know, for all the talk of jet skis, I'd never actually done a weekly update on it. Until today. It's autumn here and the weather is still beautiful so I went for a quick blast and recorded this one. This week, there's my Security Sense column on the futility of aiming for absolute security, a lot of talk on the whole Dun & Bradstreet spam list (let's just call it what it is) and also the Wishbone breach, among other things. Incidentally, checkout the underwater bit at the end, especially that...

Earlier this week, I read a really interesting piece on 3 things that need to be done to save the web [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/11/tim-berners-lee-web-inventor-save-internet] . The first observation was that "we’ve lost control of our personal data" and the author went on to observe the following: > As our data is then held in proprietary silos, out of sight to us, we lose out on the benefits we could realise if we had direct control over this data and chose when and with...

This isn't intentional, but I know these updates are starting to get a bit longer. Ok, last week was a bit mega with Cloudbleed and CloudPets, but this week, well, I just talked until I felt I was done. Let me know if you think this is too long, not long enough, not working well etc, I'm still playing with the formula and learning as I go here. Anyway, this week I talk about the wifi bits Ubiquiti kindly sent me and how I (totally unnecessarily) used them to increase the coverage I get on my je...

There are many challenging aspects about being an Australian. For example, being terrorised by kangaroos: Being terrorised by koalas: Or my own unique challenge: not having a decent wifi signal whilst my jet ski is moored on the jetty out the back of the house. This makes every day, normal activities like connecting to the home NAS to watch movies via Plex whilst sitting on the docked ski difficult and clearly, something had to be done. Ok, getting (a bit more) serious for a moment, a few mon...

Crikey, what a week! Between the two Cloud[thing] stories, most of the last 7 days has disappeared with research, writing, media and seeing the first Cloud[thing] turn into a bit of a non-event whilst recoiling in abject horror as the second Cloud[thing] continued to unfold. This ended up being a 35 minute "update" which is way longer than I'd normally do, but I really wanted to drill into those two stories in particular and try to express some views in a way that doesn't always come across in w...

One of the best things I do on trips away is walk. It's a combination of things really; it's great for getting over jet lag, a fantastic way a seeing new places and if you do enough of it, a good workout too. I'll regularly walk 20+ kilometres when I've got a full day off in a nice spot, just seeing the sights, meeting up with random Twitter followers and taking some time out in nice spots to get a bit of work done. Which brings me to the Lenovo angle. I've always been of the mindset that a ser...

Only a couple of weeks ago, there were a lot of news headlines about how Germany had banned an internet-connected doll called "Cayla" over fears hackers could target children [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/17/germany-bans-internet-connected-dolls-fears-hackers-could-target/] . One of their primary concerns was the potential risk to the privacy of children: > conversations between the child and others can be recorded and forwarded The Germans had a good point: kids' toys which record...

It has a cool name and a logo - this must be serious! Since Heartbleed [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed], bug branding has become a bit of a thing and more than anything, it points to the way vulnerabilities like these are represented by the press. It helps with headlines and I'm sure it does wonderful things for bug (brand?) recognition, but it also has a way of drumming up excitement and sensationalism in a way that isn't always commensurate with the actual risk. That said, the Cloud...