The Host Unknown Podcast

This week in InfoSec  (10:01) With content liberated from the “today in infosec” twitter account and further afield 27th September 2001: Jan de Wit was sentenced to 150 hours of community service in the Netherlands for creating and spreading the Anna Kournikova virus. It was one of the first of the major viruses created from a virus toolkit - the dawn of cybercrime toolkits. https://twitter.com/to...

This week in InfoSec  (10:44) With content liberated from the “today in infosec” twitter account and further afield 18th September 2001: The Nimda worm was released. Utilising 5 different infection vectors, it became the most widespread virus/worm after only 22 minutes. https://twitter.com/todayininfosec/status/1836495262409175187    17th September 2014: Apple announced that the iOS 8 operating sy...

This week in InfoSec  (11:25) With content liberated from the “today in infosec” twitter account and further afield 12th September 2014: Stephane Chazelas contacted Bash maintainer Chet Ramey about a vulnerability he dubbed "Bashdoor", which later becoming known as Shellshock. It was publicly disclosed 12 days later. Shellshock was kind of a big deal - and the vuln had been in Bash for 25 years! h...

This week in InfoSec  (13:08)   With content liberated from the “today in infosec” twitter account and further afield 3rd September 2014: Twitter launched its bug bounty program via the HackerOne platform, stating it would award at least $140 for vulnerabilities found in http://x.com/ or its Android or iOS apps. $140? 140 was the max tweet length. $1.6 million has been paid out since inception. ht...

This week in InfoSec  (07:42) With content liberated from the “today in infosec” twitter account and further afield 29th August 1990: The UK's Computer Misuse Act 1990 went into effect, introducing 3 criminal offences related to unauthorised access and modification of "computer material". https://twitter.com/todayininfosec/status/1829252932178719161    27th August 1999: One of the first companies...

This week in InfoSec  (06:43) With content liberated from the “today in infosec” twitter account and further afield 18th August 2004: Text messages sent to promote the video game "Resident Evil: Outbreak" stated "Outbreak: I'm infecting you with t-virus". This scared recipients, who were only about 7% less technologically savvy than mobile phone users today. https://x.com/todayininfosec/status/182...

This week in InfoSec  (10:28) 10th July 1999 - Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc) member DilDog debuted the program Back Orifice 2000 (BO2k) at DEF CON 7. It was the successor to Back Orifice, released by cDc a year prior. DilDog proclaimed it "a remote administration tool for corporate America". https://twitter.com/todayininfosec/status/1811133606015983680 9th July 1981 - The game that launched two of th...

This week in InfoSec  (07:40) With content liberated from the “today in infosec” twitter account and further afield 3 July 1996 - a mere 28 years ago the movie Independence Day was released.  In it, Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith fly into an alien vessel in a 50-year-old space junker, then upload a computer virus in less than 5 minutes https://twitter.com/todayininfosec/status/1808464060972667170  ...

This Week in InfoSec (12:30) With content liberated from the “today in infosec” twitter account and further afield 24th June 1987: The movie Spaceballs was released. With a budget of $23 million, it grossed $38 million at the box office in North America. Though 37 years have passed, the secret code scene remains a reminder of why security is hard. Watch the secret code scene from Spaceballs and we...

This week in InfoSec  (11:16) With content liberated from the “today in infosec” twitter account and further afield 5th of June  1991, a mere 33 years ago, : Philip Zimmermann sent the first release of PGP to 2 friends, Allan Hoeltje and Kelly Goen, to upload to the Internet.  From the man himself,  First, I sent it to Allan Hoeltje, who posted it to Peacenet, an ISP that specialized in grassroots...

This week in InfoSec  (07:29) With content liberated from the “today in infosec” twitter account and further afield 28th May: 2014: LulzSec hacker Hector Monsegur, known as Sabu, was sentenced and released the same day on time served for his role in a slew of high-profile cyberattacks. He had served 7 months in prison after his arrest. https://x.com/todayininfosec/status/1795228730735886650 25th M...

This week in InfoSec  (11:36)  With content liberated from the “today in infosec” twitter account and further afield 17th May 2015: CNN published their article on a statement Cybersecurity Consultant, Chris Roberts had publicly made on Twitter a month earlier.  There were lots of accusations made regarding Chris Roberts' actions hacking into computer systems while a passenger on multiple airline f...

This week in InfoSec   With content liberated from the “today in infosec” twitter account and further afield 27th April 2012: The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) in the UK issued its first-ever data breach fine to an NHS (National Health Service) organisation, fining Aneurin Bevan Health Board in Wales £70,000.  https://www.digitalhealth.net/2012/04/first-nhs-fine-issued-by-ico/   Rant of...

This week in InfoSec  (07:04) With content liberated from the “today in infosec” twitter account and further afield 23rd April 2005 : The first video uploaded to YouTube , “ Me at the zoo ,” is posted on April 23, 2005 at 8:27 PM by co-founder Jawed Karim . For now being a piece of history, the video is actually pretty dumb. Note to future entrepreneurs: what you do may be for posterity. Choose wi...

This week in InfoSec  (08:49) With content liberated from the “today in infosec” twitter account and further afield 7th April 1969: Steve Crocker , a graduate student at UCLA and part of the team developing ARPANET, writes the first “ Request for Comments “. The ARPANET, a research project of the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), was the foundation of today’s modern...

This week in InfoSec  (06:10) With content liberated from the “today in infosec” twitter account and further afield 3rd April 2011: Email marketing and loyalty program management company Epsilon reported a data breach of names and email addresses of numerous companies' customers, totaling at least 60 million records. Dozens of companies were impacted, including Kroger, Walgreens, Verizon, and Chas...

This week in InfoSec   (07:32) With content liberated from the “today in infosec” twitter account and further afield 20th March 2007: Dragos Ruiu announced the first Pwn2Own contest, which was held that April in Vancouver, Canada. The contest is still being held today - and in fact Pwn2Own Vancouver 2024 started today. https://twitter.com/todayininfosec/status/1770592695255249038 16th March 1971:...

This week in InfoSec  (14:26) With content liberated from the “today in infosec” twitter account and further afield 7th March 2017: WikiLeaks began its new series of leaks on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Code-named Vault 7 by WikiLeaks, it was the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency. https://twitter.com/todayininfosec/status/1765828993713090565 14th Marc...

This week in InfoSec  (06:53) With content liberated from the “today in infosec” twitter account and further afield 1st March 1988: The MS-DOS boot sector virus "Ping-Pong" was discovered at the Politecnico di Torino (Turin Polytechnic University) in Italy. The virus would show a small ball bouncing around the screen in both text mode (ASCII character "•") and graphical mode. https://twitter.com/t...

This week in InfoSec  (06:25) With content liberated from the “today in infosec” twitter account and further afield 16th February 2010: Version 2.0 of the CWE/SANS Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Errors was released. Take a look and decide which of these weaknesses have been eradicated over the last 14 years. Web Archive https://twitter.com/todayininfosec/status/1758712418601971748 20th February 20...

This week in InfoSec  (08:40)  With content liberated from the “today in infosec” twitter account and further afield 14th February 2001: In a presentation at Black Hat Windows Security Conference 2001, Andrey Malyshev of ElcomSoft shared that Microsoft Excel uses a default encryption password of "VelvetSweatshop".   https://twitter.com/todayininfosec/status/1757782275406622835 16th February 2004:...

This week in InfoSec  (08:59) With content liberated from the “today in infosec” twitter account and further afield 8th February 2000: A 15-year-old Canadian identified at the time only by his handle  "MafiaBoy" launched a 4-hour DDoS attack against http://cnn.com . The attacks also targeted Yahoo, eBay, Amazon and other sites over a 3 day period. In 2001 a Canadian court sentenced him to 8 months...

This week in InfoSec  (08:19) With content liberated from the “today in infosec” twitter account and further afield 31st Jan 2011 (13 years ago): Chris Russo reported a vulnerability to dating website PlentyOfFish's CEO Markus Frind's wife. Yada yada yada Markus Frind then accused Russo of extortion and emailed Russo's mother.   https://techcrunch.com/2011/01/31/plentyoffish-ceo-we-were-hacked-alm...

This week in InfoSec  (04:51) With content liberated from the “today in infosec” twitter account and further afield 25th January 2003: The SQL Slammer worm was first observed. It relied on a vulnerability Microsoft reported a whopping 6 months earlier via security bulletin MS02-039. Despite the long-available patch,  75,000 systems were compromised within 10 minutes.. https://twitter.com/todayinin...

This week in InfoSec  (09:34) With content liberated from the “today in infosec” twitter account and further afield 11th January 2000: Newly declassified documents proved the existence of ECHELON, a global eavesdropping network run by the NSA. https://twitter.com/todayininfosec/status/1745518896495390826    13th January 2009: The domain name http://clintonemail.com was registered - the one used fo...