The Awareness Angle: Cyber Security Awareness and Human Risk

iPhone 18 Pro design files leaked, Aflac gets hit for the third time in a few years, and a bank robber in London gets away with £117,000 just by wearing the right uniform. This week's episode has a bit of everything. Hackers stole 630GB of unreleased iPhone 18 Pro design files from Apple's manufacturing partner Tata Electronics, proving that even Apple's secrets aren't safe once yo...

GTA 6 scams launched within hours of pre-orders going live. Scattered Spider's teenage hackers pleaded guilty for the TfL attack, and one of them was hacking US hospitals while on bail. And a fake AI plugin passed every security scanner because the malware only switched on after the check was done. This week on The Awareness Angle: why attackers are borrowing your trust instead of breaking it,...

This week the threats are getting bigger and the defences are getting stranger. A criminal gang hit a school system that holds records for eleven million kids, Americans lost a record three and a half billion dollars to imposter scams, and the FBI built an entire fake town just to train agents to fight cybercrime. Plus earbuds that could be listening in, malware hiding in Steam wallpapers, a nasty...

ShinyHunters breached the University of Nottingham using a critical Oracle PeopleSoft zero-day, leaking passport numbers, National Insurance numbers, disability data and financial records for 455,000 students. If you studied at Nottingham, check haveibeenpwned.com now. A hidden camera was found in a ceiling tile at 2 Marsham Street, London, the Home Office building that approved China's contro...

NHS patients are only now being notified about a breach that happened two years ago. Hackers brute-forced Dashlane's two-factor authentication. The FBI has already spotted over 30 fake FIFA websites and yes, fifa.beer is one of them. This week Ant and Luke cover why the two-year gap between the Synnovis ransomware attack and this week's notification letters is not unusual, and what it means for th...

Solo episode this week. A fake UK visa website left 100,000 passports in an open folder online. iPhone thieves in London are now threatening victims' families to get them to remove Activation Lock. California has sued the company formerly known as 23andMe, alleging they paid the hacker in secret while telling customers everything was fine. A ChatGPT vulnerability lets attackers hide phishing links...

CISA left admin passwords and AWS keys on a public GitHub repo called "Private-CISA" for six months. A new macOS stealer called Reaper fakes Apple security updates to steal everything on your machine. And the 2026 Verizon DBIR lands with 22,000 breaches across 145 countries. Chapters 00:00 Intro 01:30 Breach Watch: 7-Eleven / ShinyHunters 04:20 Breach Watch: Portugal postal service leak 07:12 CISA...

This week the Canvas story is back. Instructure has paid ShinyHunters and says the stolen student data has been destroyed, but nobody in the security industry believes them. A telehealth platform breach exposed over 700,000 patients from a company most of them have never heard of. Twin brothers got fired on a Teams call, forgot it was still recording, and deleted 96 government databases while talk...

Spirit Airlines shut down on May 2nd but nobody turned anything off. A security researcher discovered the entire booking system is still running, still taking personal details, and still attempting payment transactions for flights that will never exist. Google Chrome has been silently downloading a 4GB AI model onto your computer without consent, and if you delete it, it comes back. And a $5,000 r...

This week on The Awareness Angle, we hit 1.2 million views on a single video across TikTok and Instagram, which is pretty wild for an independent podcast. Thank you to everyone who watched and shared. ADT gets breached for the third time in under a year and it all started with a phone call. An AI coding agent wipes a startup's entire database and all its backups in nine seconds, then writes its ow...

Roblox cheats at work lead to a full corporate breach. Half a million people's health data listed for sale on Alibaba by the researchers trusted to protect it. A $5 Bluetooth tracker in a postcard tracks a NATO warship for 24 hours. The UK government officially says passkeys should replace passwords. In this episode we break down the Vercel breach, the UK Biobank scandal, a Bluetooth tracker that...

Nearly 800 Hungarian government passwords found in breach databases — including one from a colonel in charge of information security who used "FrankLampard". We break down how it happened, why it keeps happening, and what it means for anyone responsible for security culture at work. Also this week: Rockstar Games hacked for the second time in three years through a third-party supplier. Basic-Fit g...

This week: attackers are sending fake missile alert emails exploiting real Iran-US-Israel tensions to steal Microsoft credentials via QR code. We also cover a massive leak of sensitive LAPD police documents, an AI model that autonomously finds and exploits thousands of zero-days, and a Windows exploit that went public after a researcher fell out with Microsoft. This week on The Awareness Angle: Ha...

Chinese hackers just broke into the system the FBI uses to track its own surveillance targets. The White House released an app that security researchers took apart and didn't like what they found. LinkedIn has been secretly scanning your browser extensions without telling you. And a Carnegie Mellon professor says app privacy labels are the nutrition labels of the internet — which tells you everyth...

Episode 81 of The Awareness Angle. This week: a hack at Ajax Amsterdam let attackers steal season tickets and quietly lift stadium bans. A security scanner got compromised and was used to backdoor LiteLLM, a tool downloaded 3.4 million times a day. OpenAI shuts down Sora and Disney walks away from its $1 billion deal. Meta launches new AI anti-scam features across WhatsApp, Facebook and Messenger....

This week's human cybersecurity news . A US general leaves classified military documents on a train, over 8 million anonymous crime tips are exposed in a major data breach, and a Chrome extension with a million users and Google's Featured badge was silently hijacking shopping commissions for months. This week's cyber news explained in plain English. Also covered this week: the FBI seiz...

This week it's a busy one. We've got stories about hackers targeting your phone, your bank account, and even your doctor's equipment. There's a nasty trick doing the rounds that looks just like a Google Meet update, a massive data leak from the US government, and some alarming news for anyone who banks with Lloyds, Halifax or Bank of Scotland. All that, plus why you really need to update your iPho...

A hacker didn't need a team of experts. They just needed to convince an AI chatbot they were a penetration tester. What followed was the systematic breach of ten Mexican government agencies, 150GB of stolen data, and records touching 195 million people — more than the entire population of Mexico. That's just one of the stories this week on The Awareness Angle — the weekly cyber news podcast that f...

This week on The Awareness Angle, attackers ditch malware and pick up the phone, fake QR codes hit real parking meters, and even your weather app might be quietly fingerprinting you. We start with Breach of the Week, as Optimizely confirms a data breach following a vishing attack. Impersonated IT support calls led to compromised internal systems and stolen CRM contact data. No ransomware, no explo...

This week on The Awareness Angle , Breach Watch is busy. We cover 73,000 patients hit in an Arizona healthcare breach, stolen Eurail traveller data now up for sale, a phishing led incident at fintech firm Figure , 600,000 Canada Goose customer records leaked, and fresh claims from ShinyHunters around CarGurus . In the news, we unpack the US plan for a freedom.gov portal designed to bypass content...

This week on The Awareness Angle, trust is stretched across platforms, partnerships, and AI powered systems. From 70,000 government ID images exposed in a Discord age verification breach, to staff data leaks at the European Commission and supplier fallout hitting Volvo Group, the pattern is clear. More data, more dependency, more risk. We start with Breach Watch, breaking down the Discord backlash...

This week on The Awareness Angle, trust keeps breaking in places it was assumed to be solid. From a state linked supply chain attack slipping malware into trusted software updates, to ransomware actors claiming access to airport systems, and even cybercrime forums being breached themselves, the pattern this week is confidence collapsing across the stack. We start with Breach Watch, unpacking how N...

This week on The Awareness Angle, trust keeps breaking in places people expect it to hold. From exposed AI agent infrastructure and phishing malware slipping into the Chrome Web Store, to sensitive government data being uploaded to ChatGPT, the theme this week is misplaced confidence. Tools designed to help, automate, and protect are being misused, misconfigured, or trusted too far. We start with...

This week on The Awareness Angle, security failures show how quickly everyday systems can tip from background noise into real world disruption. From ransomware knocking a major IT distributor offline, to schools closing after cyber attacks, and criminals selling voice phishing kits like a product, the theme this week is scale. Small failures, trusted platforms, and familiar channels being used to...

This week on The Awareness Angle , confusion, control, and credibility sit at the centre of the cyber news. From password reset emails triggering panic at global scale, to ransomware groups shaping the narrative without releasing data, the theme this week is trust, who controls it, and how quickly it can unravel. We start with Breach Watch , looking at ransomware claims against Nissan and how scre...