Weekly update

This week, more time than I'd have liked to spend went on talking about the trials of chasing invoices. This is off the back of a customer (who, for now, will remain unnamed), who had invoices stacking back more than 6 months overdue and despite payment terms of 30 days, paid on an average of 80 days. But as I say in this week's video, more than anything, it was the gall of the CEO to take issue with my frustrated tone rather than with their complete lack of respect for basic business etiquette...

Day by day, I find we're eeking more goodness out of OpenClaw and finding the sweet spot between what the humans do well and the agent can run off and do on its own. Significantly, we're shifting more and more of the workload to the latter as all 3 of us at HIBP HQ get better at assigning workloads to machines. In addition to my use of my "PwnedClaw" bot to help catalogue and process data breaches, Stefan and I are both using GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio extensively, and Charlotte is using he...

Watching OpenClaw do its thing must be like watching the first plane take flight. It's a bit rickety and stuck together with a lot of sticky tape, but squint and you can see the potential for agentic AI to change the world as we know it. And I don't think that's hyperbolic. A lot of what people claim to have done with it is hyperbolic, and as with all new tech, the challenge is to cut through the noise and find the value. Stay tuned for more on that, as I've already found some really useful appl...

In the beginning, it was simple. A website, a database and 150M+ email addresses to search. Time has added serverless functions (which run on servers 🤷‍♂️), code on the edge, new data storage constructs and a completely different mechanism for even just querying a simple email address. HIBP is a continually evolving beast, and barely a week goes by that we don't implement code of significance. You don't always see it out there in the public realm, but the tweaks - in including the major one I t...

Since starting HIBP a dozen and a bit years ago, I've loaded an average of one breach every 4.7 days. That's 959 of them to date, but last week it was five in only two days. That's a few weeks' worth of breaches in only 48 and a half hours. And that's the way it tends to be in this industry: flurries of activity followed by periods of silence. I obviously don't have any control over the cadence of breaches (nor when they begin circulating), which does make for some interesting scheduling challen...

The Odido breach leaks were towards the beginning during this week's update. I recorded it the day after the second dump of data had hit, with a third dump coming a few hours later, and a final dump of everything the day after that. From what I hear, it dominated the news in the Netherlands, and we sure saw that through the traffic stats. Clearly, the leak cadence was designed for maximum news impact, and it seems to have achieved that. It may not have put any cash in the extortionist's pockets,...

The recurring theme this week seems to be around the gap between breaches happening and individual victims finding out about them. It's tempting to blame this on the corporate victim of the breach (the hacked company), but they're simultaneously dealing with a criminal intrusion, a ransom demand, and class-action lawyers knocking down their doors. They're in a lose-lose position: pay the ransom and fuel the criminals whilst still failing to escape regulatory disclosure obligations. Disclose earl...

Well, the ESP32 Bluetooth bridge experiment was a complete failure. Not the radios themselves, they're actually pretty cool, but there's just no way I could get the Yale locks to be reliably operated by them. At a guess, BLE is a bit too passive to detect state changes, and unless it was awake and communicating, it just had no idea what was happening with the locks. So, I've now silenced all lock-related alerts and am focusing on making the wifi network as reliable as possible in the hope the lo...

A big "thank you" to everyone who helped me troubleshoot the problem with my "Print Screen" button on the new PC. Try as we all might, none of us could figure out why it refused to bind to SnagIt and instead insisted on dumping the entire collection of screens to a file on the desktop. But an especailly big thanks to the follower who later emailed me with an idea that didn't work, and followed up with an idea that finally did! So, yeah, thanks Logitech for making this a real pain in the arse 🤦...

This week I'm in Hong Kong, and the day after recording, I gave the talk shown in the image above at INTERPOL's Cybercrime Expert Group. I posted a little about this on Facebook and LinkedIn, but thought I'd expand on what really stuck with me after watching other speakers: the effort agencies are putting into cybercrime prevention. It's very easy for folks to judge law enforcement solely on what they see from the outside, and that's mostly going after offenders and taking down criminal infrastr...