Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons Podcast

Our critical infrastructure is vulnerable and under attack by nation state actors, either for profit or perhaps even to establish a beachhead for future cyber conflict. During the pandemic, many of our core systems were automated and connected to the internet for remote administration, but this just created a larger attack surface. The federal government hasn’t done nearly enough to protect...

There are literally billions of devices connected to the internet today – many of them cheap, insecure IoT devices… smart thermostats, doorbell cameras, webcams, cheap WiFi routers and other smart appliances. As we like to say, the “S” in “IoT” is for security. And when insecure devices are no longer supported, the security bugs will never be fixed. We’ll...

It’s rare these days to find a well-designed and useful application that was made to be private from the get-go. Too many apps today view your personal data as a cash cow to be mercilessly milked, claiming to value your privacy when they really value the extra revenue they can make off of your private data. When I find useful apps that are private by design, especially ones that can replace...

In our quest to clean up and secure our data, today I will give you several clever and useful techniques for uncovering old, forgotten online accounts. We’ll scrape the bottom of the barrel to complete our list of accounts so that we can upgrade their security, see what data they have, and remove anything we no longer want floating around out there, waiting to be stolen or abused. In the new...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the Big Tech buzzword of the day. Every company who wants investment (public or private) is scrambling to have an “AI story”, adding chatbots and ‘agentic’ features in their products wherever possible. The AI companies themselves are constantly expanding their models, ingesting as much data (including highly personal information) as possible....

The next step in reducing our digital footprint is to identify all of our online accounts, including the long forgotten and unused ones. The easiest place to start is by using the tool we should already have: our password manager. By its very nature, it contains a list of all our accounts. You may have used your browser to remember your passwords, or you may have some other method… but it&#8...

We take our cell phones with us everywhere – which makes them the perfect tracking device. Just walking around with your device will give your location away in multiple ways. But even if you had no apps on your phone, the cellular chips in our devices will constantly be interacting with every cell tower that’s in range, negotiating the best tower to talk to, whether to use 5G or someth...

The world wide web, as we know it today, has been around for over 30 years. In that time, most of us have created many dozens, perhaps hundreds, of online accounts. How many of those accounts are still alive somewhere? What data do they hold? And how good are the passwords you used? Today we’re going to start on the path to finding all those accounts which could drastically improve our priva...

Why don’t we have meaningful privacy laws in the US? While we haven’t been able to pass federal privacy legislation, many states have managed to pass laws protecting our data and establishing some basic privacy rights. Vermont House Representative Monique Priestley led a Herculean effort to pass privacy legislation in her state last year. While managing to get a solid bill through the...

It’s early August, which means it’s time for BSides Las Vegas and DEF CON, part of the trio of conferences that make up “hacker summer camp” (the other being Black Hat, which I don’t attend). It’s been a crazy, chaotic week – as usual – but in almost completely good ways. After the regular news, I’ve got some mini interviews with Jake Braun (DE...

Cory Doctorow has garnered a lot of needed attention to the decline of modern online platforms, including Google Search, Facebook and Twitter. Much of this is a result of coining the now-viral term Enshittification. Today we’ll talk about how the internet was broken and who’s to blame. We’ll also discuss the lack of privacy laws and the threats of AI to tech workers and copyright...

We take our phones with us everywhere. And they contain, or have cloud access to, pretty much all of our personal information and online accounts. While phone makers have made it difficult for thieves to resell a stolen phone, anyone with physical access to your device may be able to extract its data or access all your accounts. Thankfully, Apple (iOS) and Google (Android) have recently introduced...

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...