The Host Unknown Podcast

17th June 1995: Spyglass goes public

World Wide Web software producer Spyglass Inc. went public, the year after it had begun distributing its Spyglass Mosaic software, an early browser for navigating the Web. With previous year's earnings at $7 million, Spyglass was founded by students at the Illinois Supercomputing Center, which also inspired Netscape Communications Corp.

https://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/june/27/#spyglass-goes-public  

26th June 1989: Robert Tappan Morris (who released the Morris worm in 1988) became the first person to be indicted under the US's Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), enacted by Congress 3 years earlier. He was later sentenced to three years of probation and fined $10,050

https://x.com/todayininfosec/status/1938292354965770278

Visiting students can't hide social media accounts from Uncle Sam anymore 

Meta’s AI training on copyrighted content is ‘fair use’, US judge says

https://x.com/filip_dragovic/status/1937932750415086010

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11th June 1986: Ferris Bueller's Day Off was released. https://x.com/todayininfosec/status/1932838235102716317

13th June 1994: A Russian hacker group led by Vladimir Levin stole $10.7 million from Citibank via X.25, in what was the first international bank robbery over a network to be made public. Levin was caught in London in 1995 and sentenced in the US to 3 years in prison in 1998. https://x.com/todayininfosec/status/1933504310643773697 

“Localhost tracking” explained. It could cost Meta 32 billion. 

Wanted: Junior cybersecurity staff with 10 years' experience and a PhD 

Industry News

#Infosec2025: Top Six Cyber Trends CISOs Need to Know

Half of Mobile Users Now Face Daily Scams

Researcher Finds Five Zero-Days and 20+ Misconfigurations in Salesforce Cloud

Hands-On Skills Now Key to Landing Your First Cyber Role

Phishing Alert as Erie Insurance Reveals Cyber “Event”

Europol Says Criminal Demand for Data is “Skyrocketing”

NIST Publishes New Zero Trust Implementation Guidance

Microsoft 365 Copilot: New Zero-Click AI Vulnerability Allows Corporate Data Theft

European Journalists Targeted by Paragon Spyware, Citizen Lab Confirms

Tweet of the week

https://bsky.app/profile/brianhonan.bsky.social/post/3lrilyd7rpk2m 

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1. 26th May 1995: Realizing his company had missed the boat in estimating the impact and popularity of the Internet, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates issues a memo titled, “The Internet Tidal Wave,” which signaled the company’s focus on the global network. In the memo, Gates declared that the Internet was the “most important single development” since the IBM personal computer — a development that he was assigning “the highest level of importance.” Still, it is curious why it took someone who was regarded as a technology “innovator” so long to realize this.

https://thisdayintechhistory.com/05/26/bill-gates-internet-tidal-wave/

1. 30th May 1996: AT&T Announces Video Phone Call System.  AT&T held a meeting to announce a system that would allow personal computers to make and receive video phone calls over standard telephone lines. In years of efforts by AT&T and others to find success in the technology, the AT&T system made use of Intel's Pentium processors and compression software to allow both video and audio information to share a phone line rather than a high-capacity ISDN, T-1, or T-3 line.

https://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/may/30/#att-announces-video-phone-call-system

Security outfit SentinelOne's services back online after lengthy outage

OpenAI model modifies shutdown script in apparent sabotage effort

https://bsky.app/profile/robmesure.bsky.social/post/3lqcn6kq5oc26 

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Irish privacy watchdog OKs Meta to train AI on EU folks' posts

Judge allows Delta's lawsuit against CrowdStrike to proceed with millions in damages on the line

https://x.com/fesshole/status/1925815219655233765?s=46&t=1-Sjo1Vy8SG7OdizJ3wVbg

And of course... can't NOT mention: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002d2lh/inside-the-high-street-cyberattacks 

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As always we will bring you today in infosec, a rant, admire a billy big ball move, talk about industry news, and bring you a tweet or alternatively suitable social media post of the week.

Hey, it's hard enough Thom being off that I have to edit and publish this, I need to find an AI to write the notes for me. Love you all, Javvad... now go an subscribe! 

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Episode 219 of the Host Unknown Podcast covers a wide range of humorous and insightful discussions relating to both technology and personal anecdotes. Key segments include a nostalgic look back at significant moments in InfoSec history, as well as a critique of a poorly-constructed analogy between casino strategies and cybersecurity. The hosts also discuss the misadventures of an AI app that wasn't really AI, cyber insurance claims, the fines against TikTok and NSO Group, and the importance of Cyber Essentials certification. The episode is peppered with casual banter about everyday life and observations, making for an entertaining yet informative listen. 

00:00 Introduction and Initial Banter 

00:57 Podcast Introduction and Missing Guest 

01:29 Wrestling Anecdotes and Technical Difficulties 

03:04 Travel Plans and Airport Preferences 

05:12 Manchester Trip and Quiet Carriage Etiquette 

08:58 InfoSec History: Banned from the Internet 

11:00 InfoSec History: The Love Letter Virus 

14:17 Rant of the Week: Casino Mindset in Security 

18:19 Understanding the Author's Perspective 

19:19 AI Shopping App Scandal 

24:30 Industry News Highlights 

26:00 TikTok's Data Transfer Fine 

29:08 Meta vs. NSO Group 31:40 Cyber Essentials Certification 

35:58 Tweet of the Week 

38:23 Conclusion and Farewell

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This week in InfoSec  (10:26)

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

1st April 1998: Hackers changed the MIT home page to read "Disney to Acquire MIT for $6.9 Billion".

https://x.com/todayininfosec/status/1907094503552336134     

1st April 2004: The now ubiquitous Gmail service is launched as an invitation-only beta service. At first met with skepticism due to it being launched on April Fool’s Day, the ease of use and speed that Gmail offered for a web-based e-mail service quickly won converts. The fact that Gmail was invitiation-only for a long time helped fueled a mystique that those who had a Gmail address were hip and uber-cool. Those of us who are actually hip and uber-cool didn’t mind, of course, as those types of things don’t bother hip and uber-cool people. 

https://thisdayintechhistory.com/04/01/gmail-launched/  

Rant of the Week (14:07)

Kink and LGBT dating apps exposed 1.5m private user images online

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c05m5m5v327o

Researchers have discovered nearly 1.5 million pictures from specialist dating apps – many of which are explicit – being stored online without password protection, leaving them vulnerable to hackers and extortionists.

Anyone with the link was able to view the private photos from five platforms developed by M.A.D Mobile: kink sites BDSM People and Chica, and LGBT apps Pink, Brish and Translove.

These services are used by an estimated 800,000 to 900,000 people.

M.A.D Mobile was first warned about the security flaw on 20 January but didn't take action until the BBC emailed on Friday.

They have since fixed it but not said how it happened or why they failed to protect the sensitive images.

Billy Big Balls of the Week (24:00)

Oracle's masterclass in breach comms: Deny, deflect, repeat

There have been some disclosure stinkers in the past. Back in 2016, The Reg discovered that Yahoo! had taken a few years to disclose security snafus that occured in 2013 and 2014, for example. These days we often see organizations simply choose not to publicly address their issues. A quick self-referral to the regulators and some letters sent directly to those affected pass as the bare minimum, and while these organizations won't get any Brownie points for transparency, the approach doesn't tend to invite too much in the way of long-lasting criticism either.

When Oracle issued its flat-out denial of the first breach allegations that surfaced from cybercrime forums, it seemed like it was yet another wannabe big-time scriptkiddie making false claims for clout.

To make matters worse, Oracle seemingly tried to swerve any flak with some careful semantics. Its original denial stated: "There has been no breach of Oracle Cloud. The published credentials are not for the Oracle Cloud. No Oracle Cloud customers experienced a breach or lost any data."

Infosec experts Kevin Beaumont and Jake Williams later both claimed that Oracle appears to have used the Internet Wayback Machine's archive exclusion process to remove evidence about the intrusion.

Industry News (33:25)

Google to Switch on E2EE for All Gmail Users

ICO Apologizes After Data Protection Response Snafu

North Korea's Fake IT Worker Scheme Sets Sights on Europe

Royal Mail Investigates Data Breach Affecting Supplier

Stripe API Skimming Campaign Unveils New Techniques for Theft

Over Half of Attacks on Electricity and Water Firms Are Destructive

Amateur Hacker Leverages Russian Bulletproof Hosting Server to Spread Malware

CrushFTP Vulnerability Exploited Following Disclosure Issues

Major Online Platform for Child Exploitation Dismantled

Tweet of the Week (41:25)

https://x.com/MalwareJake/status/1907416667052786110

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This week in InfoSec  (11:22)

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

27th February 2002: Timothy Allen Lloyd was sentenced to 41 months in prison for activating a logic bomb at Omega Engineering, 20 days after being fired as a network administrator.

https://x.com/todayininfosec/status/1895255588881474024    

18th February 2013: Burger King's Twitter account was compromised, had its name changed to McDonalds, and shared offensive tweets. The incident was a...well...Whopper! 

https://x.com/todayininfosec/status/1891999132866183322

Rant of the Week (17:34)

Army soldier suspected of AT&T heist Googled ‘can hacking be treason,’ ‘defecting to Russia’

The US Army soldier suspected of compromising AT&T and bragging about getting his hands on President Trump's call logs allegedly tried to sell stolen information to a foreign intel agent.

The military man even Google searched for "can hacking be treason," and "US military personnel defecting to Russia," according to prosecutors who argue he poses a serious flight risk and should be detained.

Cameron John Wagenius, 21, was arrested in Texas in December, and last week told a federal court judge he intends to plead guilty to unlawfully posting and transferring confidential phone records. 

Prosecutors have also linked Wagenius to two other men accused of stealing data from more than 150 Snowflake cloud accounts in April 2024, and then demanding payment to keep a lid on that info.

After admitting his crimes in court, and showing a willingness to enter a guilty plea, "Wagenius should be detained as both a danger to the community — given his ability to access sensitive datasets — and a serious risk of flight," Uncle Sam's attorneys argued.

"While engaged in these criminal activities, Wagenius conducted online searches about how to defect to countries that do not extradite to the United States and that he previously attempted to sell hacked information to at least one foreign intelligence service," the documents allege. 

Billy Big Balls of the Week (24:32)

100-plus spies fired after NSA internal chat board used for kinky sex talk

More than 100 US spies have been fired, and their security clearance revoked, after an internal NSA messaging system was used by staff to chat about their sex lives.

After the NSA – the National Security Agency, that is, not the other meaning – confirmed on state media it was "aware of posts that appear to show inappropriate discussions" by intelligence community employees and that "investigations to address this misuse of government systems are ongoing," Trump's Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced more than 100 people had since been terminated.

The messaging app in question is the NSA's Intelink, a secure intranet service used by various American military and intelligence teams to share information, including top secret and classified threat intel.

Federal workers said to have been involved in the NSFW Intelink chatter included personnel at the NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and US Naval Intelligence.

"There are over 100 people from across the intelligence community that contributed to and participated in … what is really just an egregious violation of trust," Gabbard told Fox News commentator Jesse Watters Tuesday. "What to speak of, like basic rules and standards around professionalism."

Industry News (32:54)

Chinese-Backed Silver Fox Plants Backdoors in Healthcare Networks

Ransomware Gang Publishes Stolen Genea IVF Patient Data

HaveIBeenPwned Adds 244 Million Passwords Stolen By Infostealers

Signal May Exit Sweden If Government Imposes Encryption Backdoor

DISA Global Solutions Confirms Data Breach Affecting 3.3M People

FBI Confirms North Korea’s Lazarus Group as Bybit Crypto Hackers

OpenSSF Publishes Security Framework for Open Source Software

Software Vulnerabilities Take Almost Nine Months to Patch

DragonForce Ransomware Hits Saudi Firm, 6TB Data Stolen

Tweet of the Week (42:59)

https://x.com/roytait/status/1895224942565970354

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This week in InfoSec  (11:10)

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

4th December 2013: Troy Hunt launched the free-to-search site "Have I Been Pwned? (HIBP)". At launch, passwords from the Adobe, Stratfor, Gawker, Yahoo! Voices, and Sony Pictures breaches were indexed. Today? Billions of  compromised records from hundreds of breaches.

https://twitter.com/todayininfosec/status/1864299155583127739    

5th December 1996: Julian Assange pleaded guilty to 25 of 31 hacking charges and related charges and was ordered to repay $2,100 to Australian National University. He had been arrested in 1994 for hacking crimes committed in 1991. The court case details weren't released until 2011.

https://twitter.com/todayininfosec/status/1864664694243434977

Rant of the Week (17:21)

Severity of the risk facing the UK is widely underestimated, NCSC annual review warns

The number of security threats in the UK that hit the country's National Cyber Security Centre's (NCSC) maximum severity threshold has tripled compared to the previous 12 months.

Published Tuesday 3rd December, GCHQ's tech offshoot's 2024 review reveals that 12 incidents topped the NCSC's severity classification system out of a total 430 cases that required support from its Incident Management (IM) team between September 2023 and August 2024. The finding represents a 16 percent increase year-over-year.

The number of nationally significant incidents also rose from 62 last year to 89 in the latest data, six of which were caused by exploiting two Palo Alto and Cisco zero-days. This number includes the 12 deemed maximally severe and an undetermined number of attacks on the UK's central government.

Billy Big Balls of the Week (25:50)

Badass Russian techie outsmarts FSB, flees Putinland all while being tracked with spyware

A Russian programmer defied the Federal Security Service (FSB) by publicizing the fact his phone was infected with spyware after being confiscated by authorities.

Kirill Parubets was detained in Russia for 15 days after being accused of sending money to Ukraine, during which time the man was beaten and subjected to aggressive efforts to recruit him as an FSB informant on his contacts in Ukraine.

According to his account of the story, published with his consent by Toronto University's Citizen Lab and First Department legal organization, he says he was threatened with life imprisonment if he failed to comply with the recruitment drive.

In order to secure release, he agreed but before he was indoctrinated he and his wife fled the country. Always keep a second passport, if possible. 

Industry News (32:21)

Crypto.com Launches Massive $2m Bug Bounty Program

German Police Shutter Country’s Largest Dark Web Market

ENISA Launches First State of EU Cybersecurity Report

Wirral Hospital Recovery Continues One Week After Cyber Incident

FBI Warns GenAI is Boosting Financial Fraud

Europol Dismantles Major Online Fraud Platform in Major Blow to Fraudsters

Deloitte Denies Breach, Claims Cyber-Attack Targeted Single Client

Romania Exposes TikTok Propaganda Campaign Supporting Pro-Russian Candidate

FCC Proposes Stricter Cybersecurity Rules for US Telecoms

Tweet of the Week  (43:43)

https://twitter.com/McGrewSecurity/status/1865050788369772974

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This week in InfoSec  

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

24th November 2014: The Washington Post published an article which included a photo of TSA master keys. A short time later functional keys were 3-d printed using the key patterns in the photo. Oops.

https://twitter.com/todayininfosec/status/1860803840620044356   

22nd November 2010: Matt Blaze published the PowerPoint slides he was contractually required to submit for his 2011 RSA Security Conference presentation. Matt hates PowerPoint. Take a moment to admire the slides he submitted.

https://twitter.com/todayininfosec/status/1860027850369519669

Rant of the Week (12:47)

https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/26/third_major_cyber_incident_declared/

A UK hospital is declaring a "major incident," cancelling all outpatient appointments due to "cybersecurity reasons."

The Wirral University Teaching Hospital NHS Trust, located in North West England, said the so-called "incident" affects the whole Trust, which oversees Wirral Women and Children's Hospital, Clatterbridge Hospital, and Arrowe Park Hospital.

Although the tech problems began on Monday, officials confirmed to The Register it is still dealing with the fallout as of Tuesday morning. 

All outpatient appointments were canceled on Monday and the same decision was made today, according to Arrowe Park and Clatterbridge's social media posting. All patients whose appointments were canceled will be contacted to rearrange them.

Billy Big Balls of the Week (20:48)

Put your usernames and passwords in your will, advises Japan's government

Japan's National Consumer Affairs Center on Wednesday suggested citizens start "digital end of life planning" and offered tips on how to do it.

The Center's somewhat maudlin advice is motivated by recent incidents in which citizens struggled to cancel subscriptions their loved ones signed up for before their demise, because they didn't know their usernames or passwords. The resulting "digital legacy" can be unpleasant to resolve, the agency warns, so suggested four steps to simplify ensure our digital legacies aren't complicated:

Ensuring family members can unlock your smartphone or computer in case of emergency;

Maintain a list of your subscriptions, user IDs and passwords;

Consider putting those details in a document intended to be made available when your life ends;

Use a service that allows you to designate someone to have access to your smartphone and other accounts once your time on Earth ends.

The Center suggests now is the time for it to make this suggestion because it is aware of struggles to discover and resolve ongoing expenses after death. With smartphones ubiquitous, the org fears more people will find themselves unable to resolve their loved ones' digital affairs – and powerless to stop their credit cards being charged for services the departed cannot consume.

Some entrepreneurs have already identified end of life services as an opportunity. "Dead Man's Switch" apps can be set to contact whomever you choose if you do not sign in to certain accounts after a period you select as a likely indicator of your departure from this world.

Meta also offers the chance to nominate a "legacy contact" who can manage your account.

Such services aren't just opportunistic: grieving people have a lot on their plate, and executing wills is not always straightforward. 

Industry News (31:08)

ICO Urges More Data Sharing to Tackle Fraud Epidemic

Over a Third of Firms Struggling With Shadow AI

Darknet Services Fuel Holiday Scams and E-Commerce Exploits

NHS Trust Declares Major Incident for “Cybersecurity Reasons”

Nuclear Decommissioning Authority Opens Sellafield Cyber Center

New EU Commission to Unveil Healthcare Cybersecurity Plan in First 100 Days

T-Mobile Claims Salt Typhoon Did Not Access Customer Data

Albanian Drug Smugglers Busted After Cops Decrypt Comms

UK Justice System Failing Cybercrime Victims, Cyber Helpline Finds

Tweet of the Week (39:43)

https://bsky.app/profile/mattpotteruk.bsky.social/post/3lbyu4dy3b22f

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