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 their computers (one at a time) to download “textfiles” and share “warez” – or cracked software applications, often games. This scene gave rise to several electronic “zines” that published articles on hacking and phone phreaking techniques. One of the most popular zines, Phrack, was started in 1985 and is still going strong forty years later. Today we’ll discuss the colorful and storied history of this pioneering zine with two Phrack editors, skyper and TMZ. Interview Notes Phrack magazine: https://phrack.org  Phrack Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrack  Hacker Manifesto: https://phrack.org/issues/7/3 Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit (Aleph One): https://phrack.org/issues/49/14 E911 Document Leak: https://phrack.org/issues/24/5 Texfiles archive: http://www.textfiles.com/  DEF CON: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW-D1I27E08  HOPE: https://www.youtube.com/live/7ZeN53mKhbE?t=26726s  WHY 2025 talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtyzTsOtx4A  WHYcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwY1q3aEFS0  Cap’N Crunch whistle: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3193749  Further Info My book: https://fdsd.me/book  My newsletter: https://fdsd.me/newsletter  Support the mission: https://fdsd.me/support  Give the gift of privacy and security: ht

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 our money and infect our devices. Today we’ll talk about a few current scams going around and give some solid advice to avoid becoming a victim. In the news: FCC scraps cybersecurity rules for telcos; WhatsApp flaw exposed 3.5B phone numbers; ClickFix scam update; Border Patrol is monitoring US drivers for ‘suspicious’ travel patterns; a tricky Apple Support scam; USPS and EZ-Pass scams; a cool new tool for monitoring your home network for rogue devices; state and local cyber grant program to be renewed; airlines shut down program that sold your flight records; CA court ends electricity surveillance program; also, a few more holiday gift ideas! Article Links Despite Chinese hacks, Trump’s FCC votes to scrap cybersecurity rules for phone and internet companies https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/21/despite-chinese-hacks-trumps-fcc-votes-to-scrap-cybersecurity-rules-for-phone-and-internet-companies/ A Simple WhatsApp Security Flaw Exposed 3.5 Billion Phone Numbers https://www.wired.com/story/a-simple-whatsapp-security-flaw-exposed-billions-phone-numbers/ ClickFix may be the biggest security threat your family has never heard of https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/11/clickfix-may-be-the-biggest-security-threat-your-family-has-never-heard-of/ Border Patrol is monitoring US drivers and detaining those with ‘suspicious’ travel patterns https://apnews.com/article/immigration-border-patrol-surveillance-drivers-ice-trump-9f5d05469ce8c629d6fecf32d32098cd ‘It made my blood run cold’: scammers are targeting Apple users with this devilishly clever trick – here’s how to s

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 with their tech gift-giving strategies! Yael Grauer, Stacey Higginbotham and Jeff Landale join me for a round table discussion of how to give tech gifts that won’t ruin the security and privacy of your recipients! Interview Notes $10 off Consumer Reports!! https://www.consumerreports.org/fdsd/  Consumer Reports: https://www.consumerreports.org/  Cyber Readiness Report: https://innovation.consumerreports.org/new-report-2025-consumer-cyber-readiness/  Security Planner: https://securityplanner.consumerreports.org/  Vulnerability Disclosure Programs: https://innovation.consumerreports.org/who-ya-gonna-call/  Give Dragon Coupons! https://firewallsdontstopdragons.com/give-the-gift-of-security-and-privacy/  Library Freedom Project: https://libraryfreedom.org/  Yael on spyware and iPhone 17: https://innovation.consumerreports.org/apples-new-iphone-memory-protections-safeguards-devices-against-sophisticated-attacks/  Yael interview (Security Planner): https://podcast.firewallsdontstopdragons.com/2025/02/17/security-planner/  Stacey interview (software tethering): https://podcast.firewallsdontstopdragons.com/2024/11/11/cutting-the-software-tether/  iVerify interview:

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 affordable service to do all that work...

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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 go through them all!

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.

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 suspend the accounts.

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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 to say,

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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 accounts so that we can upgrade their ...

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 wherever possible.

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 password manager. By its very nature,

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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? What data do they hold?

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,

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 phone,