Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons Podcast

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!...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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?...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Do you realize that you’re not always using your chosen mobile web browser or your network privacy features? Many mobile apps have their own in-app browser that can gather your data and even inject ads and trackers into...