Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons Podcast

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Time to Upgrade Windows Jan 06, 2020

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It's not too late! You can still snag a free upgrade to Windows 10 from Microsoft. If you're still running Windows 7, it's time to avail yourself of this offer. Microsoft is ending support for Windows 7 on January 24, 2020. That means that you will no longer get software updates - in particular, security fixes. The official offer to upgrade to Windows 10 at no cost supposedly ended in July 2016, but Microsoft still offers a legitimate way to upgrade for free. I'll tell you how. In other news, cybersecurity experts are on the alert following our lethal attack on a senior Iranian military figure, Facebook was again caught using your two-factor authentication mobile number for non-security purposes, there's another massive leak of Facebook user data, Amazon blames its customers for Ring device hacks, a bug in GPS watches allows anyone to track your location, and the new California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) goes into effect. Further Info: Spread the Word: https://firewallsdontstopdragons.com/spread-the-word/ New Year's Resolutions: https://firewallsdontstopdragons.com/2020-new-years-resolutions/ Upgrade to Win10 for free: https://www.zdnet.com/article/heres-how-you-can-still-get-a-free-windows-10-upgrade/ Protect Your Privacy on Windows 10: https://spreadprivacy.com/windows-10-privacy-tips/

2020 New Year’s Resolutions Dec 30, 2019

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2019 has come and gone, and 2020 is upon us! You know what that means: New Years Resolutions! I've put together a Top Ten list of suggestions that will significantly improve your computer security and online privacy! Some of these are easy and some are going to require some effort... but you have a whole year to do them! This will also be a great episode to forward to friends and family, introduce them to the show and help build up our "herd immunity". Further Info 2020 New Years Resolutions blog: https://firewallsdontstopdragons.com/2020-new-year's-resolutions/Give Thanks and Donate: https://firewallsdontstopdragons.com/give-thanks-donate/Key resources: https://firewallsdontstopdragons.com/resources/Terms and Conditions May Apply: http://tacma.net/tacma.php Support me! https://www.patreon.com/FirewallsDontStopDragons

Behind the One-Way Mirror (part 2) Dec 23, 2019

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We know that we're tracked, but what remains largely invisible is the massive economy working behind the scenes (or "mirror") to buy, sell, trade and bid on you and your data. I've seen estimates that claim there are up to 4000 data brokers in the US alone. And what's worse is that they are largely unregulated, making the data market a total free-for-all. What can you do to curb this tracking and selling of data? We'll discuss that in the conclusion of my interview with the EFF's Bennett Cyphers. Bennett Cyphers is a staff technologist on the Tech Projects team at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). He contributes to a variety of different projects within EFF, most of them tied to privacy and competition. In the past year, he's worked on the tracker-blocking browser extension Privacy Badger, provided technical advice to lawyers and activists, and read and re-read the California Consumer Privacy Act. Before coming to EFF, he was a policy intern at Access Now and earned a Master's degree for work on privacy-preserving machine learning. In his spare time he designs t-shirts for fake punk rock bands. Further Info EFF’s Behind the One-Way Mirror: https://www.eff.org/wp/behind-the-one-way-mirror Setting Apple ID to zero (“limit ad tracking”): https://blog.tenjin.com/idfa-sends-all-zeros-on-ios-10-devices-2/Best & Worst Gifts for 2019: https://firewallsdontstopdragons.com/best-worst-gifts-2019/ The Scoring of America: https://www.worldprivacyforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/WPF_Scoring_of_America_April2014_fs.pdfCorporate Surveillance in Everyday Life: https://crackedlabs.org/en/corporate-surveillance

Behind the One-Way Mirror (part 1) Dec 16, 2019

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If you've listened to even a handful of my shows, you are well aware that you're being tracked around the web. But even I was surprised by some of the things I learned in the recent white paper from the Electronic Frontier Foundation entitled "Behind the One-Way Mirror: A Deep Dive Into the Technology of Corporate Surveillance". One of the prime authors of this report, Bennett Cyphers, came on my show to walk us through the myriad and shocking ways that ad tech companies have found to identity us as we surf the web, use our smartphones, and even walk around the real world. Bennett Cyphers is a staff technologist on the Tech Projects team at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). He contributes to a variety of different projects within EFF, most of them tied to privacy and competition. In the past year, he's worked on the tracker-blocking browser extension Privacy Badger, provided technical advice to lawyers and activists, and read and re-read the California Consumer Privacy Act. Before coming to EFF, he was a policy intern at Access Now and earned a Master's degree for work on privacy-preserving machine learning. In his spare time he designs t-shirts for fake punk rock bands. Further Info EFF’s Behind the One-Way Mirror: https://www.eff.org/wp/behind-the-one-way-mirror Setting Apple ID to zero (“limit ad tracking”): https://blog.tenjin.com/idfa-sends-all-zeros-on-ios-10-devices-2/Best & Worst Gifts for 2019: https://firewallsdontstopdragons.com/best-worst-gifts-2019/

Snail Mail Identity Theft Dec 09, 2019

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We don't often think about the security and privacy of our regular old "snail mail", but we need to. According to recent activity observed by researchers of the dark web, the bad guys have been regaining interest in identity theft schemes involving physical letters. And in many cases, they can steal your mail without ever opening your mailbox. I'll tell you what you can do to reduce your risk. In other news, thousands of Disney+ accounts were hacked on the first day, a massive data breach exposed over a billion user records, PayPal is set to acquire shopping platform Honey for $4B, and Avast and AVG browser extensions are spying on Chrome and Firefox users.

Best & Worst Gifts for 2019 Dec 02, 2019

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It's that time of year again - time to see which popular gifts make my privacy/security Naughty and Nice lists! You want to make sure that when you're giving gifts to your loved ones that you're not also giving gifts to hackers and data miners! I'll also start to catch you up on several of the news stories from the past few weeks including Google's access to private medical info of tens of millions of people, a researcher finding 146 different Android bugs coming right out of the box, more creepy updates on the Ring Doorbell, and a very welcome federal court ruling about your rights at the US border.

Data vs. Democracy (Part 2) Nov 25, 2019

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Today in part 2 of my deeply insightful interview with author Kris Shaffer, we discuss how marketers and foreign powers have been capturing our attention and even manipulating our responses. We'll discuss how these techniques were used in the 2016 US presidential election and in other critical voting situations. In many cases, it's sufficient to make people stay home or to sow doubt in the election results. But we'll also discuss whether some of these sames tools and techniques can be used to expose manipulation and tip the scales back in our favor. Kris Shaffer, PhD (Yale University, 2011), is a data scientist and Senior Computational Disinformation Analyst for Yonder. He co-authored "The Tactics and Tropes of the Internet Research Agency", a report prepared for the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Kris has consulted for multiple U.S. government agencies, non-profits, and universities on matters related to digital disinformation, data ethics, and digital pedagogy. Kris is the author of Data versus Democracy: How Big Data Algorithms Shape Opinions and Alter the Course of History, published July 2019 by Apress. Further Info Data versus Democracy: https://www.apress.com/us/book/9781484245392 Kris Shaffer’s website: https://pushpullfork.com Weapons of Math Destruction: https://weaponsofmathdestructionbook.com/ Automating Inequality: https://virginia-eubanks.com/ The Great Hack: https://www.thegreathack.com/ Give Thanks and Donate: https://firewallsdontstopdragons.com/give-thanks-donate/

Data vs. Democracy (Part 1) Nov 18, 2019

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They say we are in the Information Age and that data is the new oil. But many (including my guest, Kris Shaffer) are saying that was is truly valuable today is attention, not information. Information is so plentiful now that it almost has no value. And because just about everything on the internet is free, we're paying for it with our attention. Marketers have gone to great lengths to study human behavior and they know exactly how to get and keep our attention. Unfortunately, these techniques can also be used to distract us and manipulate us. We'll discuss this and much more in today's interview (part 1 of 2). Kris Shaffer, PhD (Yale University, 2011), is a data scientist and Senior Computational Disinformation Analyst for Yonder. He co-authored "The Tactics and Tropes of the Internet Research Agency", a report prepared for the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Kris has consulted for multiple U.S. government agencies, non-profits, and universities on matters related to digital disinformation, data ethics, and digital pedagogy. Kris is the author of Data versus Democracy: How Big Data Algorithms Shape Opinions and Alter the Course of History, published July 2019 by Apress. Further Info Data versus Democracy: https://www.apress.com/us/book/9781484245392 Kris Shaffer’s website: https://pushpullfork.com Carey’s Best & Worst Gifts for 2019: https://firewallsdontstopdragons.com/best-worst-gifts-2019/

The Rise of Browser Fingerprinting Nov 11, 2019

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Marketing companies have come up with may clever ways to track our travels around the web, hoping to garner as much information about us as they can. At the same time, privacy-conscious organizations have given us tools to maintain our anonymity by countering these tracking technologies. It's the usual arms race - one that privacy advocates were mostly winning, with VPN's, blocking third party cookies, and privacy-enhancing browser plugins. But now we're faced with the nuclear option: browser fingerprinting. Our browsers cough up dozens of detailed bits of information about us: OS type and version, browser type and version, fonts and plugins installed, monitor resolution, and much more. When taken together, this information creates a fingerprint of our system - one that is often very unique. Preventing this sort of fingerprinting is extremely difficult, making most of the above privacy-enhancing techniques useless. I'll tell you how it works and what you can do to mitigate this. In other news: Facebook sues NSO Group for using WhatsApp to track people; Google buys FitBit (and all its data); Apple's privacy website is revamped; Microsoft Office is building in much-needed protections against infected files; and researchers figure out how to hack Siri, Alexa and Google Home from afar using lasers.

Preventing & Mitigating Identity Theft Nov 04, 2019

Show notes

How are our identities stolen? What happens to our identity information after its been stolen? Once we realize we've been hacked, what can we do to mitigate the damage and recover from the consequences? I'll discuss this and much more with Amyn Gilani from 4iQ - including why you shouldn't be participating in all those fun social media quizzes. Amyn Gilani leads strategy and product at 4iQ. Previously, he was a Chief Technologist at Booz Allen Hamilton where he provided expertise to federal and commercial clients focusing on incident response, red teaming, threat hunting, and cybersecurity operations engineering. Prior to joining Booz Allen, Amyn was a Vice President in Information Security at Goldman Sachs where he led Red Team Operations and emulated sophisticated attacks against securities trading platforms and payment systems. He began his career serving in the United States Air Force as an intelligence analyst and was on detail at National Security Agency and United States Cyber Command. Further Info: 4iQ: https://4iq.com/Report identity theft and other resources: https://www.identitytheft.gov/Defending Digital podcast: https://defendingdigital.com/carey-parker-firewalls-dont-stop-dragons/

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