The phone rings from a concealed number and you pick up: Hello? Silence. More silence. Eventually a foreign voice enters: Hi, this is your bank, we need you to verify some details. This is the point where you should be disclosing absolutely nothing, at least nothing that is not known already which is probably just…

As regular readers will know by now, I’m not real fond of virus call centre scammers. You know, the ones who call you up while you’re making dinner or bathing and kids and tell you they’re from Microsoft and that your PC is infected with blah blah polymorphic blah? There’s a bunch of material on…

I’m frequently amused by the sort of stuff my Facebook friends “like”. For example: The more salacious content you find around Facebook often has a hidden agenda, for example the classic She did WHAT in school scam I wrote about last year. Snapchat allows you to take a pic or a video and set an…

Regular readers of this blog would have seen sagas such as Anatomy of a virus call centre scam, Scamming the scammers – catching the virus call centre scammers red-handed and my personal favourite, “Type www.” – “Ok, w-w-w-d-o-t”; antagonising call centre scammers. That’s not an exhaustive list, indeed there are more videos on this blog…

I’ve seen a few of these going around now, usually with different photos with some sort of mystique: The implied promise is of something interesting happening once you’ve clicked the like button and typed the number 1. There was one with an attractive girl and a square superimposed over her shoulder doing the rounds a…

This week’s post on Disassembling the Woolworths Facebook scam has had a pretty good run. In part, I suspect this is due to the approaching holiday shopping season and in part because I know this scam is really doing the rounds and being seen by a lot of people. Yesterday I had a chat with…

So someone sends you a link to the latest Gangnam parody / cat meme / man jumping on frozen pool video and the link looks something like this: http://bit.ly/10PMelv Nothing unusual about this, every second link shared these days uses a bit.ly or t.co (or comparable) URL shortener. Because you have an insatiable desire to…

The conundrum I refer to in the title of this post is the one faced by a breached organisation: disclose or suppress? And let me be even more specific: should they disclose to impacted individuals, or simply never let them know? I’m writing this after many recent such discussions with breached organisations where I’ve found…

I decided to write this post because there’s no concise way to explain the nuances of what’s being described as one of the largest data breaches ever. Usually, it’s easy to articulate a data breach; a service people provide their information to had someone snag it through an act of unauthorised access and publish a…

I’ve been harbouring some thoughts about the state of data breaches over recent months, and I feel they’ve finally manifested themselves into a cohesive enough story to write down. Parts of this story relate to very sensitive incidents and parts to criminal activity, not just on behalf of those executing data breaches but also very…