Episodes

I’ve had some truly amazing interviews this past year. For your listening enjoyment, I’ve curated a set of clips from some of the best shows, creating a sampler platter of stellar audio content from some amazing guests! If you’ve never listened to my podcast, this will give you a taste of what you’re missing! If you’re a regular listener, this will be a fun trip down memory lane, complete with new commentary. You’ll hear from Dr Paul Ashley (CEO/Founder of MySudo), Yael Grauer (Consumer Reports)...

Way before the world wide web, computer enthusiasts were sharing information via digital bulletin board systems (BBS). This amounted to attaching a modem to your home computer and allowing other people to dial in from their computers (one at a time) to download “textfiles” and share “warez” – or cracked software applications, often games. This scene gave rise to several electronic “zines” that published articles on hacking and phone phreaking techniques. One of the most popular zines, Phrack, wa...

With the holiday season come holiday scams – and honestly, just more scammer activity across the board, in general. People are busy and buying lots of stuff, and it’s a time when we’re more vulnerable to schemes to take our money and infect our devices. Today we’ll talk about a few current scams going around and give some solid advice to avoid becoming a victim. In the news: FCC scraps cybersecurity rules for telcos; WhatsApp flaw exposed 3.5B phone numbers; ClickFix scam update; Border Patrol ...

Holiday shopping season is here! And that must mean that it’s time again for my annual Best & Worst Gift Guide! But this time I’ve recruited some top minds from Consumer Reports to lend their expertise and enlighten us with their tech gift-giving strategies! Yael Grauer, Stacey Higginbotham and Jeff Landale join me for a round table discussion of how to give tech gifts that won’t ruin the security and privacy of your recipients! Interview Notes $10 off Consumer Reports!! https://www.consumerre...

Data brokers are amassing tons of our personal information, often from public sources. You can try to find all of these brokers and request your data be deleted, but it’s a lot easier to deputize a trustworthy and affordable service to do all that work for you – and to do so on a regular basis. I’ll give you my easy button solution for this. Also in the news: Meta will use your AI sessions to target ads; Google is rolling out agentic AI shopping tools; OpenTable is gathering and sharing your di...

In the US alone, there are tens of thousands of small organizations that are responsible for critical infrastructure and vital community services. Most of them don’t have an IT department let alone a cyber security expert on staff. And yet these organizations are being attacked by cyber criminal gangs with ransomware and are also being targeted by foreign adversaries who would like the ability to disrupt our very civilization. While the US federal cyber agencies have not properly responded to th...

Today we’ll wrap up my series of tips for enumerating all your old online accounts and deciding whether to delete them or just dumb down the personal data they have on you. There are several things to consider – we’ll go through them all! In other news: a study ranks the most private AI chatbots; LinkedIn is set to use your personal data to train their AI; ChatGPT has released an AI browser; new phishing scam for password manager creds; Gmail did not leak 183M passwords; man discovers his robot...

AI chatbots like ChatGPT have made quiet a splash. Companies are tripping all over themselves in a rush to add “AI” to everything, heedless of the security risks. But perhaps more insidious are the privacy risks. Most AI processing is done in the cloud, meaning that your queries and chats are subject to inspection, sharing, storing and monetizing. These AI systems are incredibly expensive to train and operate. And AI companies are desperate to feed them every scrap of data they can find. It’s a ...

Now that we’ve tracked down all our old online accounts, it’s time to make them more secure and review the data they contain. We should download a copy of that data for safe keeping before we ultimately delete or suspend the accounts. We’ll discuss this next step in our journey of reducing our online data footprint – our Data Diet. In the news: Windows 10 support has officially ended; seniors targeted with malware from Facebook groups; Tile trackers can also track you; massive Salesforce data l...

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 these systems. Groups like DEF CON Franklin are working to find cyber volunteers to bring our national cri...

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 discuss the implications of this growing problem and potential solutions with a passionate right-to-repair advocate and the founder of the Sec...

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 more popular apps that harvest our data, I like to call attention to them: in this case, Ente Photos. Toda...

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 news: Chat Control is up for a vote in the EU (time to contact your MEPs); Samsung to show ads on their smar...

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. In this AI gold rush, companies are making flawed and often harmful products. Companies are firing workers and trying to re...

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’s time to move to a real password manager. In other news: update your Android devices ASAP; Android malware...

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 something else, and authenticating to the network – even in Airplane Mode. Cell site simulators (aka Stingrays or IMSI...

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 privacy and security. In the news: millions of Dell laptops have critical security flaws you need to patch now...

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 House and Senate, the bill was ultimately vetoed by the governor and the Senate failed to override it. But along...

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 (DEF CON Franklin), Stacey Higginbotham (Consumer Reports), Cooper Quitin (EFF) and The Gibson (Veilid and hackers.town). In other news: Tea app users file ...

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 copyrighted works. Finally, we’ll discuss Cory’s novel proposal for how countries could respond to US tariffs by ripping up int...

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 several features that can significantly increase your device’s physical security and privacy. We’ll...

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 specialist. His job is to find and fix weaknesses in physical things… buildings, locks, safes, etc. And along the way he ...

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 this scam that’s better than the old-style account PIN codes. I’ll explain how it works. In the news: many Brother pr...

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 bind them to mandatory arbitration clauses, neutering their ability to seek legal redress for the inevitable violations. Today I’ll...