On July 15, 2020, a remarkable hacking attack took place. The Twitter accounts of prominent public figures such as Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Joe Biden, Kanye West, and Bill Gates, amongst many others, started to transmit a message stating that if a person deposited some Bitcoin to a wallet, it Read more
I’ve been hacked! Or to be more accurate, someone used a compromised email and password combination to login to my Spotify account. No harm done so far, my credit card details are not visible, and nothing seems amiss other than a very strange collection of “Recently Played” music. I have Read more
I’ve just finished reading “Kill All Normies” by Angela Nagle, a thoroughly enjoyable experience for anyone who is interested in Internet culture wars and how politics is shaping and being shaped by various online tribes. The title comes from the name given to normal people in some online chatrooms, particularly Read more
The problem It seems like every week brings a new story about stolen passwords and hacked accounts. This week Twitter locked two million accounts after a password leak was detected, and more indicative, Mark Zuckerberg had his Twitter and Pinterest accounts hacked. All of these have accelerated concerns that passwords Read more
Depiction of computing and hacking in Hollywood has long been the subject of amusement for techies around the world. From the preposterous idea that you can hack into an alien computer, to increasingly unbelievable graphic user interfaces, film has been poisoning our perception of computing for years (and don’t get Read more
Back in July the infamous website Ashley Madison, which facilitates marital infidelity, was hacked by a group calling itself Impact Team, and the personal details of millions of subscribers around the world were compromised. The hackers demanded that the self-described “most famous name in infidelity and married dating” should be Read more
A few days ago I was hacked for the first time in my life. I keep telling me that everything is fine, that given the statistics this is nothing to be ashamed of. Even experts get hacked from time to time. It was meant to happen, for someone who spends Read more
The above xkcd cartoon should be required viewing for every IT professional making decisions about cybersecurity. We are now constantly faced with services that ask us to change passwords all the time, and these must meet certain requirements. The password must have a cap, a number, and increasingly, a special Read more
I am currently reading REAMDE, Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, and although I am still going through the initial pages (I am savouring it as I do most of Stephenson’s work), and it already has me thinking about new trends in literature. Cyberpunk is a well-defined post-modern sub-genre within science fiction, Read more
Scotland Yard has caught LulzSec’s Topiary, their biggest scalp to date. Topiary has been identified as Jake Davis, an 18 year-old from the Shetland Islands (pictured here looking like a poster child for teenage hackers, including Neo-wannabe shades). He appeared in court earlier today and was released on bail, under Read more