2026-08-18 11:44:58
The current ransomware situation is a bit of a kludge (deep breath): a lot of ransomware (which often doesn't even involve "ware", it's just extortion) is carried out by kids who successfully make a truckload of money but can't spend it without getting caught and the companies they breach rapidly get piled onto by class action lawyers that keeps them busy fighting and being cautious not to say anyting to customers lest that then gets used against them in litigation. That's mostly it; more in this week's video:
2026-08-12 16:16:15
A little wind noise, a little connectivity flakiness, and a little lip-sync issues from YouTube, but look at that view! 🤩 Back to business, it's the Brinks Home FAQ I found most interesting this week. I mean, how do you write your own FAQ then fail to actually answer most of the questions?! Being conscious that they're the target of criminal extortion and are genuinely the victims here, I still struggle to grasp how simple incident response questions can be so lawyer-speaked as to remove all sensible meaning from the responses. But this is how these things tend to play out these days (speaking generically, yet to be seen fully for Brinks): hacker gets data by just calling up and asking for it (vishing -> OAuth), hacker demands money, hacker gets no money so dumps the data, company gets a gazillion class actions overnight and lawyers up to the hilt, customers get notified "where legally required" (which it usually isn't) 🤷♂️
2026-08-03 14:38:05
Today, we welcome the 47th government onboarded to Have I Been Pwned’s free gov service: Nepal. Their National Cyber Security Centre now has access to monitor Nepalese government domains against the data in HIBP. This gives the NCSC the ability to identify exposure across government email addresses and respond quickly when those accounts appear in a new data breach.
This is precisely what the HIBP government service was built for: helping national cyber teams strengthen threat monitoring and incident response capabilities by providing visibility into compromised credentials and breached accounts across their government domain space.
Nepal joins a growing list of governments and national cybersecurity teams using HIBP to better understand their exposure, protect government departments and public resources, and reduce the risk posed by compromised credentials before attackers can take advantage.
2026-08-03 08:07:14
Apparently, Aussies are so obsessed with coffee that it's referred to as the coffee capital of the world down here (some bits, at least). "But what about Italy?" people ask. Having spent a lot of time in a lot of Italy, no, it's just not the same. It's not the same ubiquity of high-quality coffee shops and passion for what many view as the art of making espresso-based drinks. There's comparably little tolerance for the likes of Starbucks (who have not fared well in Australia), and other mass-produced forms of the drink (I don't think I've ever seen diner-style filter coffee here). All that said, we may have gone just a little overboard with the new machine, but anything worth doing is worth doing to excess 😊
2026-07-26 17:14:51
The Origin Energy breach down here in Aus is all over the news this week, and as with many breaches, it's multi-faceted. You've got them leading with "don't worry, your credit card is fine", the hacker leading with "they didn't respond when I tried to report it", and now news that the two parties have "come to an agreement". Maybe money was paid, or maybe Origin made some promises to restrain the hounds if commitments about data deletion were made. But both outcomes, of course, provide no guarantee that data has been nuked, so now they get to spend perpetuity waiting for the data that maybe - just maybe - it leaks. And we all should be working on precisely that assumption, just like we did with Optus and Medibank and Latitude and Ticketek and Qantas...
2026-07-21 15:30:24
I reckon this week's video on how Claude is tying together info from UniFi, Home Assistant and the Pi-Hole is an absolute ripper. Or at least the concept is - if ever there was an actual value proposition for AI it's taking lots of noise and converting it into a useful signal. Or, sometimes, it's just helping you see the woods through the trees, and that's exactly what Claude helped me do last night when every Sonos unit in the house refused to connect to any music service. It only took Claude a moment to work out: "you know your Pi-Hole is dead, right?" Uh... I do now! Give it a go, it's pretty awesome (and the Pi-Hole came good with a power cycle on the PoE port).
