serisec

Tag: weekly

  • Weekly Update 506

    Weekly Update 506 I’m finding it quite fascinating to watch the current spate of ShinyHunters breaches and dumps. There’s the obvious criminality of it all, but then there’s also the response from organisations (or lack thereof, as it relates to disclosure to victims), the appearance and disappearance of victims on their dark web site, the…

  • Weekly Update 505

    Weekly Update 505 Well, that didn’t last long! Recording this on Saturday morning my time, I observed ShinyHunters having gone quiet since the massive haul that would have been the Instructure ransom. It was two weeks almost to the hour since I’d first heard rumour of payment being made, and I posited that groups like…

  • Weekly Update 504

    Weekly Update 504 It’s a hot topic, the old “pay or don’t pay” for hackers not to leak your data. Since recording this a few days ago, we’ve had Grafana go with the “no pay” approach, and I’ve seen a raft of commentary around other companies reaching “agreements”, which is a much politer way of…

  • Weekly Update 503

    Weekly Update 503 Well, it’s the day before the Instructure “pay or leak” deadline (at least by my Aussie watch), and the company remains removed from the ShinyHunters website. In its place sits a press statement that amounts to “we’re not making any statements”. So did they pay? And if so, what lofty figure would…

  • Weekly Update 502

    Weekly Update 502 It’s a fascinating display of leverage: the ShinyHunters folks, with very limited resources and experience (their demographic will be teenagers to their early 20s), consistently gaining access to the data of massive brands. Not through technical ingenuity alone (although I’m sure there’s a portion of that), but primarily through good ol’ social…

  • Weekly Update 500

    Weekly Update 500 Looking back at this milestone video, it’s the audience question towards the end I liked most: “are you happy”? Charlotte and I have chosen a path that’s non-traditional, intense and at times, pretty stressful. There’s no clear delineation of when work starts and ends, no holidays where we don’t work, nor weekends,…

  • Weekly Update 498

    Weekly Update 498 This week, more time than I’d have liked to spend went on talking about the trials of chasing invoices. This is off the back of a customer (who, for now, will remain unnamed), who had invoices stacking back more than 6 months overdue and despite payment terms of 30 days, paid on…

  • Weekly Update 497

    Weekly Update 497 Day by day, I find we’re eeking more goodness out of OpenClaw and finding the sweet spot between what the humans do well and the agent can run off and do on its own. Significantly, we’re shifting more and more of the workload to the latter as all 3 of us at…

  • Weekly Update 496

    Weekly Update 496 Watching OpenClaw do its thing must be like watching the first plane take flight. It’s a bit rickety and stuck together with a lot of sticky tape, but squint and you can see the potential for agentic AI to change the world as we know it. And I don’t think that’s hyperbolic.…

  • Weekly Update 495

    Weekly Update 495 In the beginning, it was simple. A website, a database and 150M+ email addresses to search. Time has added serverless functions (which run on servers 🤷‍♂️), code on the edge, new data storage constructs and a completely different mechanism for even just querying a simple email address. HIBP is a continually evolving…

  • Weekly Update 494

    Weekly Update 494 Since starting HIBP a dozen and a bit years ago, I’ve loaded an average of one breach every 4.7 days. That’s 959 of them to date, but last week it was five in only two days. That’s a few weeks’ worth of breaches in only 48 and a half hours. And that’s…

  • Weekly Update 493

    Weekly Update 493 The Odido breach leaks were towards the beginning during this week’s update. I recorded it the day after the second dump of data had hit, with a third dump coming a few hours later, and a final dump of everything the day after that. From what I hear, it dominated the news…

  • Weekly Update 492

    Weekly Update 492 The recurring theme this week seems to be around the gap between breaches happening and individual victims finding out about them. It’s tempting to blame this on the corporate victim of the breach (the hacked company), but they’re simultaneously dealing with a criminal intrusion, a ransom demand, and class-action lawyers knocking down…

  • Weekly Update 491

    Weekly Update 491 Well, the ESP32 Bluetooth bridge experiment was a complete failure. Not the radios themselves, they’re actually pretty cool, but there’s just no way I could get the Yale locks to be reliably operated by them. At a guess, BLE is a bit too passive to detect state changes, and unless it was…

  • Weekly Update 490

    Weekly Update 490 A big “thank you” to everyone who helped me troubleshoot the problem with my “Print Screen” button on the new PC. Try as we all might, none of us could figure out why it refused to bind to SnagIt and instead insisted on dumping the entire collection of screens to a file…

  • Weekly Update 487

    Weekly Update 487 I thought Scott would cop it first when he posted about what his solar system really cost him last year. “You’re so gonna get that stupid AI-slop response from some people”, I joked. But no, he got other stupid responses instead! And I got the AI-slop responses! Draw your own conclusions on…

  • Weekly Update 486

    Weekly Update 486 I’m in Oslo! Flighty is telling me I’ve flown in or out of here 43 times since a visit in 2014 set me on a new path professionally and, many years later, personally. It’s special here, like a second home that just feels… right. This week, the business end of things is…

  • Weekly Update 485

    Weekly Update 485 15 mins and 40 seconds. That’s how long it took to troubleshoot the first tech problem of 2026, and that’s how far you’ll need to skip through this video to hear the audio at normal volume. The problem Scott and I had is analogous to the troubleshooting so many of us do…

  • Weekly Update 484

    Weekly Update 484 I think the start of this week’s video really nailed it for the techies amongst us: shit doesn’t work, you change something random and now shit works and yu have no idea why 🤷‍♂️ Such was my audio this week and apoligise to those of you watching the video below for the…

  • Weekly Update 482

    Weekly Update 482 Perhaps it’s just the time of year where we all start to wind down a bit, or maybe I’m just tired after another massive 12 months, but this week’s vid is way late. Ok, going away to the place that had just been breached (ironic!) didn’t help, but I think in general…

  • Weekly Update 481

    Weekly Update 481 Twelve years (and one day) since launching Have I Been Pwned, it’s now a service that Charlotte and I live and breathe every day. From the first thing every morning to the last thing each day, from holidays to birthdays, in sickness and in heal… wait a minute – did we marry…

  • Weekly Update 479

    Weekly Update 479 I gave up on the IoT water meter reader. Being technical and thinking you can solve everything with technology is both a blessing and a curse; dogged persistence has given me the life I have today, but it has also burned serious amounts of time because I never want to let a…

  • Weekly Update 473

    Weekly Update 473 This week’s video was recorded on Friday morning Aussie time, and as promised, hackers dumped data the following day. Listening back to parts of the video as I write this on a Sunday morning, pretty much what was predicted happened: data was dumped, it included Qantas, and the injunction did nothing to…

  • Weekly Update 469

    Weekly Update 469 So I had this idea around training a text-to-speech engine with my voice, then using that to speak over the Sonos at home to announce AI-driven events, such as people ringing the doorbell. A few hours’ worth of video from these weekly updates fed into ElevenLabs and wammo! Here you go: Oh…

  • Weekly Update 465

    Weekly Update 465 How much tech stuff do I have sitting there in progress, literally just within arm’s reach? I kick off this week’s video going through it, and it’s kinda nuts. Doing runeos and house build doesn’t help, but it means there’s just a constant distraction of “things” commanding my attention. I couldn’t even…

  • Weekly Update 458

    Weekly Update 458 I’m in Austria! Well, I was in Austria, I’m now somewhere over the Aussie desert as I try and end this trip on top of my “to-do” list. The Have I Been Pwned Alpine Grand Tour was a great success with loads of time spent with govs, public meetups and users of…

  • Weekly Update 456

    Weekly Update 456 It’s time to fly! It’s two months to the day since we came back from the last European trip, again spending the time with some of the agencies and partners we’ve fostered at HIBP over the years. This time, it’s the driving tour I talked about earlier last month, and we have…

  • Weekly Update 453

    Weekly Update 453 Well, the last few weeks of insane hours finally caught up with me 🤒 Not badly, but I evidently burned enough midnight oil to leave the immune system somewhat degraded and just after recording this video, I really didn’t feel like doing much at all. Some congestion and sniffles aside, it’s really…

  • Weekly Update 446

    Weekly Update 446 After an unusually long day of travelling from Iceland, we’ve finally made it to the land of Guinness, Leprechauns, and a tax haven for tech companies. This week, there are a few more lessons from the successful phish against me the previous week, and in happier news, there is some really solid…

  • Weekly Update 445

    Weekly Update 445 Well, this certainly isn’t what I expected to be talking about this week! But I think the fact it was someone most people didn’t expect to be on the receiving end of an attack like this makes it all the more consumable. I saw a lot of “if it can happen to…

  • Weekly Update 440

    Weekly Update 440 Wait – it’s Tuesday already?! When you listen to this week’s (ok, last week’s) video, you’ll probably get the sense I was a bit overloaded. Yeah, so that didn’t stop, and the stealer log processing and new feature building just absolutely swamped me. Plus, I spent from then until now in Sydney…

  • Weekly Update 436

    Weekly Update 436 We’re heading back to London! And making a trip to Reykjavik. And Dublin. I talked about us considering this in the video yesterday, and just before publishing this post, we pulled the trigger and booked the tickets. The plan is to pretty much repeat the US and Canada trip we did in…

  • Weekly Update 434

    Weekly Update 434 This week I’m giving a little teaser as to what’s coming with stealer logs in HIBP and in about 24 hours from the time of writing, you’ll be able to see the whole thing in action. This has been a huge amount of work trawling through vast volumes of data and trying…

  • Weekly Update 429

    Weekly Update 429 A super quick intro today as I rush off to do the next very Dubai thing: drive a Lambo through the desert to go dirt bike riding before jumping in a Can-Am off-roader and then heading to the kart track for a couple of afternoon sessions. I post lots of pics to…

  • Weekly Update 427

    Weekly Update 427 I was going to write about how much I’ve enjoyed “tinkering” with the HIBP API, but somehow, that term doesn’t really seem appropriate any more for a service of this scale. On the contrary, we’re putting in huge amounts of effort to get this thing fast, stable, and sustainable. We could do…