Weekly update

Light switches. How on earth is it so hard to find decent light switches?! It sounds ridiculous until you actually spend enough time looking for ones that meet two simple criteria: 1. Aren't stateful (switch is up or down, has to be push-button) 2. Looks good Now, I'm conscious that this is also very likely an Australian problem, more so than a European or North American one. We're pretty limited by what we get down here, and because it involves electricity, the switches here have to pass al...

1,000 breaches is one hell of a milestone. It's not just the process of getting data, verifying it, loading it, sending notifications etc, it's all the other stuff that goes into keeping the whole thing afloat. Legal docs. Trademarks. Accounting. Agreements. The most mind-numbingly boring stuff you can imagine happening in the background so that the stuff you see in the foreground can all work. And then there are those "other things" I had to deal with along the way, but more of that in this wee...

I'm finding it quite fascinating to watch the current spate of ShinyHunters breaches and dumps. There's the obvious criminality of it all, but then there's also the response from organisations (or lack thereof, as it relates to disclosure to victims), the appearance and disappearance of victims on their dark web site, the speculation around payments and so on and so forth. And it's seemingly endless - I mentioned DentaQuest during the video, and sure enough, the next day, a 233GB corpus allegedl...

Well, that didn't last long! Recording this on Saturday morning my time, I observed ShinyHunters having gone quiet since the massive haul that would have been the Instructure ransom. It was two weeks almost to the hour since I'd first heard rumour of payment being made, and I posited that groups like this often go quiet after they feel the heat, only to emerge shortly after, the drug that is hacking being too strong to ignore. Anyway, here we now are: 🚨🇺🇸 ShinyHunters Claims 3 New Victims...

It's a hot topic, the old "pay or don't pay" for hackers not to leak your data. Since recording this a few days ago, we've had Grafana go with the "no pay" approach, and I've seen a raft of commentary around other companies reaching "agreements", which is a much politer way of saying "we paid extortionists a ransom". I'm concerned about the normalisation of ransom payments, and using language that deflects from the criminal nature of it is a big part of that. Instructure's exact words were that...

Well, it's the day before the Instructure "pay or leak" deadline (at least by my Aussie watch), and the company remains removed from the ShinyHunters website. In its place sits a press statement that amounts to "we're not making any statements". So did they pay? And if so, what lofty figure would an incident of this scale command? The lawsuits are already being prepared (search for "instructure class action lawsuit"), so perhaps that will be the catalyst for transparency. What a crazy time....

It's a fascinating display of leverage: the ShinyHunters folks, with very limited resources and experience (their demographic will be teenagers to their early 20s), consistently gaining access to the data of massive brands. Not through technical ingenuity alone (although I'm sure there's a portion of that), but primarily through good ol' social engineering. That's coming through in the disclosure notices from the impacted companies, and Mandiant has a good write-up of it too: These operations p...

This is so "peak 2026" - writing an equality policy to ensure people treat our AI bot with the same respect as they do their human counterparts. It's intentionally a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it's there for a purpose: we simply don't have the capacity to deal with every request we get, and we need Bruce to be the coalface of support. I did wonder, when having ChatGPT create this, whether there's some deeper psychology behind the importance of interacting politely with bots, or indeed whether ther...

Looking back at this milestone video, it's the audience question towards the end I liked most: "are you happy"? Charlotte and I have chosen a path that's non-traditional, intense and at times, pretty stressful. There's no clear delineation of when work starts and ends, no holidays where we don't work, nor weekends, birthdays or Christmases. But we do so on our terms. It gives us a life of means and choices, one with excitement and adventure, and, above all, one with purpose, where we feel like w...

I'm starting to become pretty fond of Bruce. Actually, I've had a bit of an epiphany: an AI assistant like Bruce isn't just about auto-responding to tickets in an entirely autonomous manner; it's also pretty awesome at responding with just a little bit of human assistance. Charlotte and I both replied to some tickets today that were way too specific for Bruce to ever do on his own, but by feeding in just a little bit of additional info (such as the number of domains someone was presently monitor...