The more a company can tell me about their assets the better their security is, and the more comprehensive and realtime the inventory is, the more mature they are. This has been true for me over 15 years of consulting across hundreds of organizations. But just try—either as an internal employee or as a consultant—to get a dedicated…
Announcing the Launch of HELIOS
For a number of years I’ve been waiting to launch a project of mine called HELIOS. HELIOS actively monitors a company’s external attack surface in near-realtime and notifies you when it finds anything dangerous. I’m super excited about it, and I think it’s going to help a lot of companies. Ping me with any questions! [ HELIOS: Know…
Facebook’s Failure is a Reflection of American Ignorance
Facebook didn’t fail anyone. We failed ourselves. Sure, they could have been a bit more careful with some settings, but it’s not like they accidentally shared data with a third party. The way Cambridge Analytica accessed the data was completely authorized—it was just what they did with the data that was bad. Facebook’s entire business model is sharing…
My Postmortem Summary of The Sam Harris & Ezra Klein Podcast
If you’re a fan of Sam Harris or Ezra Klein you know that they’ve been engaged in a year-long online skirmish that recently culminated in a direct face-off in the format of a podcast. Listening to the podcast first would be helpful, but not necessary, to appreciate this analysis. I’ve been waiting to hear this interaction finally play…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 120
This week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning is now available. Subscribe below and get this episode’s podcast and newsletter. This week’s topics: It’s 2 billion users now, Liinux beep, Digital Shadows finds fail files, cloud misconfiguration, AlterEgo, AI applications, Alexa sending payments, Tech, Ideas, Recommendation, Aphorism, and more… Listen to this week’s Podcast Become a Member to Get This…
Online Education May Be Poised to Replace Dying Universities
Higher education is in the middle of an elaborate suicide ritual. It’s implements are: skyrocketing costs to students financial failure outdated content (often by decades) an academic infrastructure that seeks tenure rather than excellence an extreme-left attack on freedom of speech These are all combining to put traditional universities at risk. It’s hard impossible to predict the future,…
The Definition of Security is “Without Worry”
A lot of people in Information Security think security means “stopping bad things from happening”. It’s understandable, given that we’ve been practicing it that way for decades now. Basically, security has been synonymous with prevention for as long as most can remember, and that’s the way the entire industry is configured and oriented. But there’s another, far deeper…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 119
This week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning is now available. Subscribe below and get this episode’s podcast and newsletter. This week’s topics: Atlanta disabled, MyFitnessPal hacked, Cambridge Analytica election tampering, Drupal, Saks, DARPA drones, Cloudflare 1.1.1.1, Slack bosses, Democratic Chinese AIs, Georgia facepalm, tech, humans, ideas, and more… Listen to this week’s Podcast Read this week’s Newsletter
Why I Switched from Patreon to Memberful
Like many people I’ve been soured on ads and sponsors for my podcast and newsletter: Unsupervised Learning. If you hav a decent following it’s actually possible to make a significant living off of both sponsors and ads—and especially sponsors. At one point I was getting a couple thousand a month from just a couple of sponsors, and I…
DevOps as the Art and Science of Deliberate Practice
The best definition I’ve ever heard for DevOps is the ability to practice frequently and well. I prefer DevOps to DevSecOps because I feel security should be part of both development and operations, but I also see the merit in calling it out where this isn’t regular practice. I think there is a powerful analog here to professional…
Analysis of the 2018 F5 Threat Intel Report
F5 just released a threat intel report that covered 433 breach cases spanning 12 years, 37 industries, and 27 countries. When companies release reports like these I go through them and extract nuggets for those who don’t have time to look at the full report. You will find the extraction for this report below. Applications were the initial…
Learn the Difference Between Real and Fake Machine Learning
There are few technologies as misunderstood right now as Machine Learning. Some think it’s 100% hype, sales, and marketing, and others think it’s humanity’s Messiah in the form of math and code. Unfortunately, there’s currently not a lot of space between those two extremes. Here’s how I think about it. Machine Learning is much like Love and Sex.…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 116
This week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning is now available. Subscribe below and get this episode’s podcast and newsletter. This week’s topics: Chinese at CanSecWest, Applebees POS, Palantir, Poisoning, TensorFlow DoD, Amazon laughing, Google 72-qbits, Amazon FinTech, Android P, and more… Listen to this week’s Podcast Become a Member to Get This Week’s Newsletter
The Two Kinds of Privacy Loss
I like to think about our impending loss of privacy as two separate issues. The first type is against the will of the victim and is caused by malice and/or negligence on the part of the entity with your data. This is where you trust your data to a company, and they sell that data to a number…
How to Download the Data Facebook Has on You
People are becoming increasingly worried about the data that Facebook and other social media sites have on them. Luckily, the platforms make it fairly easy to download that data to see for yourself. For Facebook, here’s the process. 1. Go to any Facebook page and hit the down arrow in the corner. 3. Click “Download a Copy of…
The Reason Software Remains Insecure
There are myriad theories as to why software remains insecure after we’ve spend decades trying to solve the problem. Some say it’s the lack of will to secure things, the lack of vendor liability, the insecure languages we use, insufficient developer training, not enough security products—and the list continues… But there’s a far simpler and more powerful explanation,…
Apple’s Biggest Weakness is Siri, and It’s Becoming a Problem
Many think voice assistants are still in the toy category, but I’m convinced that they’ve recently become part of the underlying trust fabric for the Google, Apple, and Amazon brands. Apple is known for its product quality, and up until now Siri has not been considered part of that equation. I think that’s changing, though, and it’s changing…
Success in Life is Determined Most by Parental Culture, Not the Quality of Schools
I think one of the least know truths in liberal circles is that family culture determines educational and financial success far more than school quality. I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and we’ve been raised to believe that good schools have lots of resources—like new textbooks, better teachers, etc.—and that students in poor…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 115
This week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning is now available. Subscribe below and get this episode’s podcast and newsletter. This week’s topics: GitHub DDoS, Celebrite Attacks, AI warnings, Palantir in New Orleans, Grub Backspace, 4G attacks, Space Corps, Amazon wins Defense Department deal, tech news, human news, discovery, notes, recommendation, aphorism, and more… Listen to this week’s Podcast Read…
When Companies Stop Caring About Data Loss, Risk Will Be Resilience-based and Focused on Business Disruption and Human Safety
In 2013, I looked briefly at how being hacked affects a company’s stock price. More people are looking at this now, and the evidence seems to show that there is often a major dip, but after 6 to 12 months it’s hard to even notice it happened. I’ve been worried for a long time that we’re getting Breach…
Safe Schools Are the New Luxury Item Because Now Only the Rich Have Stable and Present Families
We just saw another school shooting—this time in Parkland, Florida. The shooter was some kind of foster kid with serious hate in his heart, obviously. The foster parents were devastated, and evidently tried to give him love, but the damage seems to have been too great. He had a history of violence problems, a fascination with guns and…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 113
This week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning is now available. Subscribe below and get this episode’s podcast and newsletter. This week’s topics: Parkland tampering, Avoid Huawei, Bongo S3, Facebook 2FA Spam, Android Cryptojacking, Spyware Hacking, Password Dating, Technology News, Human News, Trends, Ideas & Analysis, Data & Statistics, Discovery, Recommendations, Aphorism, and more… Listen to this week’s Podcast Read…
Expect Deep Learning to be Used By Schools to Predict Violence
Get ready for Palantir-style, AI-based violence prediction on school campuses. There are far too many situations where it happens and basically everyone knew that person would be the perpetrator. This should be used for social work as well, but the more people who get to use it the more people get the data. If the perpetrator is often…
Information Security Professionals Cannot Be Luddites
I'm starting to realize that many infosec people are luddites rather than technologists.Not a good look for us.We need to be the shepherds, not the crazy people belting out scripture at people on the street.— ᴅᴀɴɪᴇʟ ᴍɪᴇssʟᴇʀ (@DanielMiessler) February 18, 2018 I just posted this on Twitter after being frustrated again by how a lot of my fellow…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 112
This post contains the supplemental content for this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning. Some people prefer fewer stories in each show while others prefer more, so I’ve solved that problem by keeping the main show tightly curated and making all the extra stories and links available to members here. It’s basically an unabridged version of the newsletter for…
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