Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons Podcast

Russia has been hacking Ukraine for at least a decade now, but since the invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, the cyber war has changed. Instead of being a tactical element, cyber war is now a full-fledged strategic aspect of the conflict, on both sides. At the outset, Ukraine put out an official call to enlist cyber warriors from around the globe to their cause in what's been

Google's Chrome browser has dominated the planet - both on desktop computers and mobile devices. Furthermore, many other popular web browsers are actually based on the same Google-made Chromium browser engine, including Microsoft Edge and Brave Browser. This gives Google an inordinate amount of influence on web standards, in particular preventing better privacy protections. We need

AI has been grabbing all the tech headlines, but cryptocurrency is still innovating and changing. One of the primary goals of cryptocurrency was to be decentralized and therefore not controlled by governments like fiat currency. That is about to change. Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is a new type of cryptocurrency that is created and governed by nation states, which comes wi

You've heard people like me recommend this for years. It's time to just do it: freeze your credit report. There are really no downsides at this point. For example, it's now free everywhere in the US, by law. It's also free to temporarily "thaw" your credit. And it's gotten a lot easier to do, too. Freezing your credit is your main defense against financial identity theft. And with

There's a lot of nasty stuff online - things we would prefer our kids not see, at least not until they're mature enough to handle it. Our elected representatives have proposed various regulations to try to protect kids online, and while this is obviously a laudable goal, the devil is always in the details. Many of the proposed solutions have serious negative consequences for both k

Today I answer some of the most interesting listener questions from the past several months, including: how to do you get SMS 2FA codes while traveling abroad; should I periodically change all my passwords; how do hackers attack IoT devices inside my home network; can a website fingerprint me based on a hardware security key; can you recommend an email client that protects your pri

Today I talk with Justin and Jodi Daniels about that state of privacy today, how we can help consumers and companies better understand the importance of privacy and security, and how companies are dealing with these aspects internally. We talk about the state of privacy regulations (or the lack thereof), why companies are failing to protect their customers, and what we can do about

Passwords, two-factor authentication and even passkeys don't matter if you can access someone's account by answering three simple account recovery questions. Also, just about every account today has a way to reset your password, no matter how strong it is, if you can gain access to someone's email account. Until we can remove these weak links, it doesn't matter how secure our regul

The United States has no general data privacy laws. However, we do have some sector-specific regulations, including HIPAA for health data. But there are many misconceptions about HIPAA. For example, the "P" in HIPAA does not stand for Privacy - it stands for Portability. So, what information does HIPAA cover? Which healthcare and related service providers are governed by HIPAA? And

Two-factor authentication (2FA) is a fantastic way to improve the security of your online accounts. However, if you lose access to the device containing your authenticator app, you may lose access to your 2FA-protected accounts. You need to backup the seed codes used to set up each account. I'll give you several methods for doing this. In the news: FBI uses smartphone push notif