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 wish I'd read this blog post years ago. I don't have any expertise whatsoever to be guiding others through this process so please don't look at this as a "how to". But what I do have is an audience, and I've found that each time I've opened up about the more personal aspects of my life and where I've struggled (such as my post a few years ago on dealing with stress), I've had a huge amount of feedback from people that have been helped by it. Just read this. Hugely helpful to me going through...

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...

I want to try something new here - bear with me here: Data breach processing is hard and the hardest part of all is getting in touch with organisations and disclosing the incident before I load anything into Have I Been Pwned (HIBP). It's also something I do almost entirely in isolation, sitting here on my own trying to put the pieces together to work out what happened. I don't want to just chuck data into HIBP and the first an organisation knows about it is angry customers smashing out their i...

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...