Weekly update

I'm in Denmark! Well, just, I'm now at Copenhagen airport ready to begin the long trek home, with the final event at GOTO now done and going just perfectly. This week, there are two ShinyHunters arrests in the news: Pepijn in the Netherlands and then Saif in Jordon. It's an inevitable outcome, of course, and as I say this week, it was also the most likely one. Time will tell how many more join their ranks, but the seriousness of the crimes, the length of time they were perpetrated over, and the...

How's that view?! With NDC Oslo now done, it's a little bit of sightseeing before heading to Denmark for GOTO in Copenhagen for Scott's and my "Cyber-broken" talk. In the meantime, this week is mostly about the ShinyHunters trajectory targeting both Cl0p and the FBI, which does feel a little like a crescendo in their activities. Time will tell, but poking the feds in this way doesn't seem great for your longevity. In my disorganised travel state, I also forgot to touch on a brand new sponsor fo...

Heads up: the first 7 mins is a bit quiet until we worked out the external mic was misbehaving - sorry! But get through that and have a listen to Scott's experiences with how Report URI is identifying malware-infected machines within orgs, all due to CSP reporting. It's a super cool use of the technology, and I'm sure there's an awesome potential for it that neither of us has really thought about yet. Plus, the crazy rate of malicious browser extensions he's picking up with help from "Rory", his...

I think what really resonates with me this week is being able to completely turn the tables on perceptions around things like AI being the big bad hacking tool the news would have you believe. There's the stat I talk about where it's had literally 0% impact on insurance payouts, the Dutch bloke who's now being tracked down based on his voice and Scott's MAG breach teardown that ultimately pointed to exposed keys rather than anything sophisticated. Then the mention in there about the Aussie headl...

I've started playing around with YouTube's "create video thumbnail", which hopefully will give me back a bit of time in my day (it used to be a manual job in Photoshop) and be a bit more interesting. And on that note, the imagery it's chosen this week is spot on: that Lockwood ES2100 electric strike looks like the perfect solution for my first fully installed Ubiquiti Access door lock. Having the door position sensor built in really simplifies things, and hopefully Ubiquiti will later add suppor...

It does feel like I've bitten off too much and am now chewing like crazy this week. The 3D printing talk with Elle in Oslo, the "normal" NDC infosec talk, the cyber-broken talk with Scott in Copenhagen and then those ratbag hackers keep dumping more data too! Oh, and still finalising all the IoT door lock stuff, along with mapping out all the cameras, APs and door hubs in Ubiquiti's designer to make sure we don't miss anything there. It's ordered chaos... just....

I genuinely think I've nailed the IoT door lock situation! Well, Ubiquiti has, but I think I've worked out how to put it all into a residential house and have it make sense. There are a few basic tenets: 1. Main power (never have to rely on batteries) 2. Fail-secure (needs to remain locked on power outage) 3. Local control (no cloud latency to contend with) 4. Manual override ("the house is on fire, let me out") Which is exactly what we have here in this week's vid (and sorry about the sec...

The current ransomware situation is a bit of a kludge (deep breath): a lot of ransomware (which often doesn't even involve "ware", it's just extortion) is carried out by kids who successfully make a truckload of money but can't spend it without getting caught and the companies they breach rapidly get piled onto by class action lawyers that keeps them busy fighting and being cautious not to say anyting to customers lest that then gets used against them in litigation. That's mostly it; more in thi...

A little wind noise, a little connectivity flakiness, and a little lip-sync issues from YouTube, but look at that view! 🤩 Back to business, it's the Brinks Home FAQ I found most interesting this week. I mean, how do you write your own FAQ then fail to actually answer most of the questions?! Being conscious that they're the target of criminal extortion and are genuinely the victims here, I still struggle to grasp how simple incident response questions can be so lawyer-speaked as to remove all se...

Apparently, Aussies are so obsessed with coffee that it's referred to as the coffee capital of the world down here (some bits, at least). "But what about Italy?" people ask. Having spent a lot of time in a lot of Italy, no, it's just not the same. It's not the same ubiquity of high-quality coffee shops and passion for what many view as the art of making espresso-based drinks. There's comparably little tolerance for the likes of Starbucks (who have not fared well in Australia), and other mass-pro...