The Host Unknown Podcast by Host Unknown, Thom Langford, Andrew Agnes, Javvad Malik

June 10, 2024 Episode 195 - The Smashing Unknown Episode

This week in InfoSec (11:16)

With content liberated from the “today in infosec” twitter account and further afield

5th of June 1991, a mere 33 years ago, : Philip Zimmermann sent the first release of PGP to 2 friends, Allan Hoeltje and Kelly Goen, to upload to the Internet.

From the man himself,

First, I sent it to Allan Hoeltje, who posted it to Peacenet, an ISP that specialized in grassroots political organizations, mainly in the peace movement. Peacenet was accessible to political activists all over the world. Then, I uploaded it to Kelly Goen, who proceeded to upload it to a Usenet newsgroup that specialized in distributing source code. At my request, he marked the Usenet posting as "US only". Kelly also uploaded it to many BBS systems around the country. I don't recall if the postings to the Internet began on June 5th or 6th.

It may be surprising to some that back in 1991, I did not yet know enough about Usenet newsgroups to realize that a "US only" tag was merely an advisory tag that had little real effect on how Usenet propagated newsgroup postings. I thought it actually controlled how Usenet routed the posting. But back then, I had no clue how to post anything on a newsgroup, and didn't even have a clear idea what a newsgroup was.

After releasing PGP, I immediately diverted my attention back to consulting work, to try to get caught up on my mortgage payments. I thought I could just release PGP 1.0 for MSDOS, and leave it alone for awhile, and let people play with it. I thought I could get back to it later, at my leisure. Little did I realize what a feeding frenzy PGP would set off. Apparently, there was a lot of pent-up demand for a tool like this. Volunteers from around the world were clamoring to help me port it to other platforms, add enhancements, and generally promote it. I did have to go back to work on paying gigs, but PGP continued to demand my time, pulled along by public enthusiasm.

I assembled a team of volunteer engineers from around the world. They ported PGP to almost every platform (except for the Mac, which turned out to be harder). They translated PGP into foreign languages. And I started designing the PGP trust model, which I did not have time to finish in the first release. Fifteen months later, in September 1992, we released PGP 2.0, for MSDOS, several flavors of Unix, Commodore Amiga, Atari, and maybe a few other platforms, and in about ten foreign languages. PGP 2.0 had the now-famous PGP trust model, essentially in its present form.

It was shortly after PGP 2.0's release that US Customs took an interest in the case. Little did they realize that they would help propel PGP's popularity, helping to ignite a controversy that would eventually lead to the demise of the US export restrictions on strong cryptography.

7 June 2009. A mere 15 years ago. Sophos launched its (utterly shit) IT vigilante marketing campaign

Dress up a British man (who appears to have had a nervous breakdown over a corporate data breach incident) in an orange gimp suit – that will sell security software for sure!

At least, that was the plan made by Sophos’s marketing department for its “IT Vigilante” campaign.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gc6sDqofcI

https://grahamcluley.com/top-five-worst-videos-anti-virus/