This is the 400th time I've sat down in front of the camera and done one of these videos. Every single week since the 23rd of September in 2016 regardless of location, health, stress and all sorts of other crazy things that have gone on in my life for nearly the last 8 years now, I've done a video. As with so many of the things I create, these are as much for me as they are for you; doing these videos every week has given me a regular cadence amidst some pretty crazy times. I've written before a...

The Post Millennial breach in this week's video is an interesting one, most notably because of the presence of the mailing lists. Now, as I've said in every piece of communication I've put out on this incident, the lists are what whoever defaced the site said TPM had and they certainly posted that data in the defacement message, but we're yet to hear a statement from the company itself. Taking it at face value, where does their responsibility lie as it relates to individuals in this data set? I...

How many different angles can you have on one data breach? Facial recognition (which probably isn't actual biometrics), gambling, offshore developers, unpaid bills, extortion, sloppy password practices and now, an arrest. On pondering it more after today's livestream, it's the unfathomable stupidity of publishing this data publicly that really strikes me. By all means, have contractual disputes, get lawyers involved and showdown in the courts if you need to, but take data in this fashion and chu...

Banks. They screw us on interest rates, they screw us on fees and they screw us on passwords. Remember the old "bank grade security" adage? I took this saying to task almost a decade ago now but it seems that at least as far as password advice goes, they really haven't learned. This week, Commbank is telling people to use a password manager but just not for their bank password, and ANZ bank is forcing people to rotate their passwords once a year because, uh, hackers? Ah well, as I always end up...

"More Data Breaches Than You Can Shake a Stick At". That seems like a reasonable summary and I suggest there are two main reasons for this observation. Firstly, there are simply loads of breaches happening and you know this already because, well, you read my stuff! Secondly, There are a couple of Twitter accounts in particular that are taking incidents that appear across a combination of a popular clear web hacking forum and various dark web ransomware websites and "raising them to the surface",...

Data breach verification: that seems like a good place to start given the discussion in this week's video about Accor. Watch the vid for the whole thing but in summary, data allegedly taken from Accor was published to a popular hacking forum and the headlines inevitably followed. However, per that story: Cybernews couldn’t confirm the authenticity of the data. We reached out to Accor for clarification and are awaiting a response. I couldn't confirm the authenticity of the data either and I wro...

I suggest, based on my experiences with data breaches over the years, that AT&T is about to have a very bad time of it. Class actions following data breaches have become all too common and I've written before about how much I despise them. The trouble for AT&T (in my non-legal but "hey, I'm the data breach guy" opinion), will be their denial of a breach in 2021 and the subsequent years in which tens of millions of social security numbers were floating around. As much as it's hard for the victim...

A serious but not sombre intro this week: I mentioned at the start of the vid that I had the classic visor hat on as I'd had a mole removed from my forehead during the week, along with another on the back of my hand. Here in Australia, we have one of the highest rates of skin cancer in the world with apparently about two-thirds of us being diagnosed with it before turning 70. At present, the bits they cut off me were entirely unremarkable (small dot about an inch over my left eye if you're reall...

Let's get straight to the controversial bit: email address validation. A penny-drop moment during this week's video was that the native browser address validator rejects many otherwise RFC compliant forms. As an example, I asked ChatGTP about the validity of the pipe symbol during the live stream and according to the AI, it's permissible "when properly quoted": "john|doe"@example.com Give that a go and see how far you get in an input of type "email". Mind you, that example allows a pipe wh...

I hate having to use that word - "alleged" - because it's so inconclusive and I know it will leave people with many unanswered questions. (Edit: 12 days after publishing this blog post, it looks like the "alleged" caveat can be dropped, see the addition at the end of the post for more.) But sometimes, "alleged" is just where we need to begin and over the course of time, proper attribution is made and the dots are joined. We're here at "alleged" for two very simple reasons: one is that AT&T is sa...