Weekly update

And so ends a long period of back-to-back weeks of conferences and talks. It's funny how these things seem to cluster together at times and whilst the last 6 or 8 weeks (I honestly lose track!) have been chaotic, I've now got a few weeks of much less pressure which will give me time to finally push out some HIBP stuff that's been in the wings for ages. I've just got to get through this weekend first, stay tuned for pics on social for that, it's going to be pretty epic 😎 References 1. The ga...

This week's update is dominated by my experience with "Lena", the scammer from Gumtree who tried to fleece my wife of $800. There's a blow-by-blow rundown of how it all happened in this video and it's fascinating to think that these things can actually be successful given all the red flags. But they are, and in Australia alone innocent victims are stung to the tune of more than 3 billion dollars every year by fraudsters which is a staggering number. Understanding how these scams work and sharing...

I feel like the .zip TLD debate is one of those cases where it's very easy for the purest security view to overwhelm the practical human reality. I'm yet to see a single good argument that is likely to have real world consequences as far as phishing goes and whilst I understand the sentiment surrounding the confusion new TLDs with common file types, all "the sky is falling" commentary I've seen is speculative at best. But hey, there's no rolling it back now, we can start judging by what actually...

A late one this week as I cover from the non-stop conferencing that was the Azure user group in Perth, followed by the Cyber West keynote, then the social drinks that night, the flight back home straight into the AusCERT gala dinner, the panel on data governance that morning then wrapping up with the speed debate Friday arvo. I think that's all... Anyway, better later than never and nothing too serious in this week's update. Personally, I'm finding the house works the most fun to talk about so I...

It's a bit of a mixed bag this week with a very light-hearted look at the death of the browser padlock icon (which has been replaced by an icon that looks like a sex act), and a much more serious discussion about divorce. It took a long time to write and be ready to publish that blog post, many years in fact, but I'm so glad I did. You don't have to scroll far through the responses to the launch tweet or the comments on the blog itself to get a sense of how it's impacted people, and as I said in...

I stand by my expression in the image above. It's a perfectly accurate representation of how I looked after receiving the CityJerks breach, clicking on the link to the website then seeing what it actually was 😳 Fortunately, the published email address on their site did go through to someone at TruckerSucker (😳😳) so they're aware of the breach and that it's circulating broadly via a public hacking website. That segment is last up in this week's video and I do give fair warning just in case you...

I feel like a significant portion of this week's video went to discussing "the Coinbase breach that wasn't a Coinbase breach". There are various services out there that are used by the likes of password managers to alert their customers to new breaches (including HIBP in 1Password) and whoever Dashlane is using frankly, royally cocked up the attribution. What was a garden variety list of email addresses someone had just chucked the "Coinbase" name on had absolutely nothing to do with a breach of...

A bit late this week as I've prioritised time out with the family doing as many New Zealand adventure things as we can. And we've seriously maxed out the time, as you can see via the FB link below. But that hasn't stopped a couple of new data breaches flowing into HIBP nor me having some pretty direct thoughts on the premise that the vast bulk of IT pros are being told not to report data breaches. I hope you enjoy this impromptu vid from a faraway location at an odd time, I'll be back to normal...

Next time I post a poll about something as simple as "when is next Friday", I don't expect I'll get as much interest. Of course "next time" will be whatever poll follows the last one, not the poll that falls after that one! But more seriously, I cannot think of a better example of ambiguous language that's open to interpretation and so easily avoided (hello MM-DD people!) Also, Genesis Market and Operation Cookie Monster. This is just amazing stuff and a testament to a coalition of law enforcem...

Most of this week's video went on talking about the UniFi Dream Wall. What a unit! I mean it's big, but then it wraps a lot of stuff up in the one device too. If you watch this and have thoughts on how I can integrate it into the new garage such that it doesn't clash with the dark theme, I'd love to hear about it. I'll share more once I set it up in the coming weeks but for now, enjoy this week's video 🙂 References 1. The UniFi Dream Wall is an impressive unit (that's a link to the video I...