Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons Podcast

We talk a lot about digital or online security. Today we’re going to focus on physical security and the general ethos of “be prepared”. There are many situations in life when you will find yourself wishing you had had the foresight to acquire certain things or establish certain professional relationships before you actually needed them. Deviant Ollam is a physical penetration spe...

Your cell phone number uniquely identifies you. Many companies rely on this 1-to-1 relationship to authenticate you to their systems. So if someone were to somehow manage to steal your mobile phone number – a hack called SIM swapping – they could use that to impersonate you and compromise any of your accounts that are validated via SMS or phone call. There’s a new tool to combat...

Privacy risks are bad enough for adults – but it’s much worse for our kids, particularly as students. Who provides notice and obtains consent for minors at school? In many cases it’s not the parents, let alone the students – it’s the school system. Not only are they opting the students into invasive data collection by profit-driven third parties, but they often also b...

Do you realize that you’re not always using your chosen mobile web browser or your network privacy features? Many mobile apps have their own in-app browser that can gather your data and even inject ads and trackers into any web links you click. I’ll explain how this works and what you can do about it. In the news: 23andMe bankruptcy ombudsman argues for user consent to data; Meta AI ap...

On January 12th, 2025, the ShmooCon hacker conference held it’s 20th and final gathering. I was lucky enough to be able to not only attend the final show but also to interview the founders, Heidi and Bruce Potter. We talk about how it all got started, what made this hacker con so special and beloved, and hear some hilarious stories from the past twenty years of hacker shenanigans in Washingt...

Artificial Intelligence is taking over. But I don’t mean that in a Skynet kinda way. It’s simply becoming ubiquitous because companies are insisting on inserting the technology into all their products, even if it’s not useful – or not even safe. Unfortunately, the breathless reporting on dangers of AI is also getting way out of hand, including stories of AI systems ‘b...

Debbie Reynolds (aka, The Data Diva) has been working in the privacy realm for many years, as a privacy consultant, speaker, advisor and podcaster. She and I have been running in the same circles on LinkedIn for a while now, and we finally decided it was time to be a guest on each other’s shows. Today Debbie and I will discuss the dangers of privacy in the realm of IoT devices (including her...

Tracking our faces and whereabouts is getting out of control. It’s a mass surveillance infrastructure that keeps growing in Borg-like fashion. Facial recognition and license plate readers are proliferating at a stupefying pace and companies like Flock are consolidating the collected data and packaging it up for sale to law enforcement agencies. Even if no human in these agencies were to abus...

VPNs were not invented for privacy, despite the name – they were invented for security. Nevertheless, in recent years, they have been touted as privacy tools to thwart rampant and fanatical data gathering. With a regular VPN, this really just means you’re shifting your trust from your internet service provider to your VPN provider. But what if your encrypted data traffic was actually d...

There are way too many messenger apps today. It’s a sad state of affairs and I don’t see it getting better anytime soon. But the real problem (for me) is that almost all of the popular messenger apps aren’t really that secure and private. Most do not have end-to-end encryption (E2EE) at all or it’s not turned on by default. And frankly even the apps with E2EE are run by com...

Almost exactly two years ago, “Five Eyes” intelligence agencies discovered a successful and ongoing cyber attack on critical US infrastructure by a state-sponsored actor based in China. This group, associated with the People’s Liberation Army and known as Volt Typhoon, was tasked with quietly gaining persistent remote access to critical systems including water, power, communicati...

As we learned last week from Zach Edwards, our smartphones have a globally unique mobile ad ID, or MAID, that is automatically associated with everything we do on our phones… unless we take explicit steps to turn this off. Today I’ll tell you how this works and why you should disable this insidious form of tracking. In other news: the FTC warns us about a new type of scam; dating app R...

Data brokers are out of control. While we think of them gathering data in order to target us with ads, they can actually use the targeted ad system (real-time bidding) to collect vast quantities of personal information. It’s a very shady business and the primary players are trying hard to obfuscate what they’re doing. Thankfully, we have people like my guest, Zach Edwards, whose invest...

Going through border security today – even just returning to your own country – is not at simple and stress-free as it should be. The likelihood of our digital devices being searched by a border agent has increased in recent years and political sensitivities today can be high. Our devices have access to a ridiculous amount of extremely personal information. How can we protect ourselves...

It’s easy to be a Monday morning quarterback, even with cybersecurity. But defending a business, of any size, against cyber threats today is hard. Like, really hard. Defenders have to succeed every single time; attackers only need to succeed once. And then your company makes the headlines. Today we’ll delve into the world of the “blue team” – the defenders who are cha...

When we collect a lot of personal data, say via the US Census, the goal is to glean important aggregate information and statistics, while somehow preserving the anonymity and privacy of the individual respondents. There’s a rigorous mathematical process for doing this – that’s actually not that hard to understand – called Differential Privacy. I’ll explain how it work...

We’ve been installing apps on our smartphones for almost two decades now. The iPhone and Android app stores kicked off in 2008 and we still, to this day, have no real way to know what’s in them. It turns out that most apps are an amalgamation of software libraries and development kits from various third party vendors, so often even the makers of apps don’t fully understand the ma...

Tax time is once again upon us here in the USA, which means that the tax scammers are coming out of the woodwork. Many will claim to be representing the IRS, claiming that there is an urgent need to fix a problem with your return, threatening penalties if you don’t pay them money. Others will simply try to file fake returns in your name, but send the massive false refund checks to themselves...

Josh Summers lived in China for many years and learned a lot about privacy and security. Since he left, he’s made it his mission to share this knowledge through his website and YouTube channel called All Things Secured – helping regular, everyday people like you and me to protect our data and devices. Today we’ll talk specifically about improving your security and privacy on iPho...

Google’s Chrome browser is rolling out changes that will hamstring ad blockers – so there’s never been a better time to try a better browser. There are a handful of good options, but I’m going to recommend that you try Firefox with a fantastic ad blocker called uBlock Origin. If you’ve never tried this powerful combination, you won’t believe what you’ve be...

Today, we travel back in time and back to The L0pht with one of the original founders of L0pht Heavy Industries, Weld Pond (aka Chris Wysopal). We’ll talk about how hacker culture has impacted modern technology, cybersecurity practices and digital rights, while sprinkling in some classic and hilarious stories from hacker history by someone who lived them. Interview Notes Veracode: https://ww...

Not all Privacy Enhancing Technologies are new – but this one is probably new to you. Onion routing was developing in the 1990’s by the US government and is the basis for the Tor Network. Onion routing does one thing very well: it masks your actual IP address. While you can use a VPN for this purpose, onion routing adds a different layer of anonymity – and it’s just a cool...

Generic security advice is good, but tailored advice is much better. Everyone’s situation is a little different. What are you trying to protect? Who or what are you trying to protect it from? What are the consequences of failure? This is called threat modeling. And thankfully, the wonderful folks at Consumer Reports have a free, easy-to-use Security Planner tool that will help anyone do this...

Privacy is a human right – and you don’t have to justify rights, you just have them. That’s kinda the whole point. But you do need to exercise them and defend them sometimes. It has been leaked that the UK is telling Apple to reveal the encrypted data of every single one of their users to the UK government under the auspices of the Investigatory Powers Act (and its recent controv...

In the real world, we present different aspects of ourselves in different environments: home, work, family, friends, school, etc. Why can’t we do this in the virtual world, as well? While marketers love to identify us with unique identifiers so they can track us mercilessly, there are tools we can use that will allow us to compartmentalize our digital lives just like we can in the real world...