The Art of Wasting Hackers’ Time: A Honeypot Experiment
What happens when you turn the tables on automated attackers? The Setup For the past few days, I’ve...
Rechnung Ausstehend
Sextortion, German-style It’s been a while since I saw a real, live sextortion email. But here’s one for...
(Another) Day in the Life of an OpenCanary Honeypot
🚨 My 3 OpenCanary honeypots are thriving! 🚨 These little traps are proving to be very popular—if Internet...
The Curious Case of my Email Address
Continued. Again. I know I mentioned the wonderful emails I get – not for me – once or...
It’s Still my Email Address
And definitely NOT YOURS! I’ve previously shared how various namesakes 🌍 around the world believe my Gmail account is really...
Leveraging Tailscale Certificates for Syncthing
The Synology version Syncthing is an excellent tool and is installed on all of my Synology units. For...
Caddy: Robots.txt and Secrets
Robots.txt and Fake “Files” In the process of checking Caddy logs, I realised two things. Firstly, I was...
Caddy is Fantastic
What did I do with Caddy today? Defence in depth is always important and having a reverse proxy...
It’s my Email Address, not yours!
Why do people think my 21-year-old Gmail address is theirs? It’s been a long time since I created...
Hi
More “Hello Pervert” sextortion email You may be here because you received something like this: From: Enzo McQueen...
The History of CVEs
The History of CVEs: From Foundation to the Security Explosion The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) system has...
Mastering Your Digital Experience: The Complete Guide to Web Content Control
Introduction The battle against unwanted internet content—particularly ads and malware—has evolved from simple browser solutions to sophisticated network-level...
They will know.
The next instalment in “Hello, my perverted friend.” Hello pervert, I’ve sent this messаge from your Microsoft аccount....
Outlook (new) Must Die
Fighting Microsoft’s Forced Install of Outlook (new) It’s now a “thing” that Microsoft shoe-horns the unwanted Outlook (new)...
You’ve been h4cked – 564
Here we go again….. Here we go again….. Hеllο thеrе,Lеt’ѕ ցеt ѕtrаіցht tο thе роіոt.Ԝе’ⅴе kոoԝո еасh οthеr...
Es gibt eine überfällige Zahlung auf Ihren Namen. Bitte begleichen Sie Ihre Schulden so schnell wie möglich.
That’s quite an email subject….!! Grüße Sie!Ich bin ein professioneller Hacker und habe erfolgreich Ihr Betriebssystem gehackt. Derzeit...
I RECORDED YOU
No more “Hello, My Perverted Friend”? Checking my spam, I found a wonderful email or two that are...
The Anatomy of a Homegate Scam
2025 Zürich Area Edition Homegate is the primary platform for advertising properties for sale and rent in Switzerland....
A new payment plan has been authorized.
Hello, I’m contacting you regarding an urgent matter that demands your immediate attention.You have an opportunity to address...
Your account is hacked. Your data is stolen. Learn how to regain access.
The Enshittification of Sextortion, because they can Another day, another email to an old, never-used email address of...
The Flipper Zero & Hotel Cardkeys
Copy your own hotel keys The Flipper Zero is able to copy many hotel room keys, depending on...
Initial Thoughts on the Flipper Zero
First Thoughts Out of personal interest, I decided to get a Flipper Zero and have been playing with...
rockyou2024 – it’s a mess
A collection of passwords with no context; it’s not even a decent rainbow table A lot of hype...
Fwd: (Sextortion email with great subject!)
Someone pressed Send without testing… Hello! I am a professional coder, and I hacked your device’s OS when...
I own very sensitive information about your web activities
Here we go again….. Greetings!<br> <br> Greetings <br> indeed! I will, however, remove the rest of your <br>...
Solving the BSOD on a Microsoft Surface Pro 7
And getting back some performance! Having had nearly 5 years with my Surface Pro 7, I believe I...
ICANN Steal Your Password
Phishing for Passwords using FUD Objects in my spam folder can often be interesting and worthy of investigation....
Decrapifying the Microsoft M365 Installation
Goodbye, Office365 Enshittification with OneNote Anyone who has Microsoft Office365 knows that the installation is not easily user-customisable...
Microsoft Recall: The Fall of the Keyboard?
Microsoft announced Copilot+ PCs and functionality at their Build 2024 developer conference. Once feature of Copilot+ is Recall,...
Your personal data has leaked due to suspected harmful activities.
The enshittification of sextortion emails continues.. This time, it needs calling out as a badly-formatted mail-merge. Outlook makes...
Why I dumped Microsoft Edge
Let me start by explaining my requirements and the history of what I see I need from a...
Security status not satisfied
I was planning to say hello, but now I think greetings are unnecessary. Let me grab a seat....
Your Digital Drama Unfolds: A Tale of Temptations
Sextortion rewritten by ChatGPT 3.5 It seems there are many sextortion scams involving badly-written emails requesting “victims” transfer...
Familiarize yourself with the factual points of your case.
Hello, my perverted friend, <snigger> Unfortunately, the fact that our paths have crossed doesn’t mean anything good for...
101 Things to do with Tailscale
#1: Send 5.5 million webhooks to Splunk per month Things One, Two and Three log all events real-time...
A new payment schedule has been approved
It’s school vacation time again (my perverted friend)…. Hello pervert, I want to inform you about a very...
Operation Triangulation
Daisy-Chaining iOS Flaws Kaspersky reported recently of some attacks targeting researchers at the company. Specifically, the attack was...
Hello Pervert (again)
A new email: “Response for you’re doing.” Hello pervert, Erm, hello? I want to inform you about a...
OpenCanary 3.0: HowTo
Host and Operating System The basis for any OpenCanary installation is the operating system. Linux is preferred, it...
Extending OpenCanary Monitoring
Expect the Unexpected The unexpected can happen when running OpenCanary instances and this demands some adapting. It’s considerably...
Hello, my perverted friend
Hello, my perverted friend, We’ve actually known each other for a while, at least I know you. I...
OpenCanary: Login Banner Security
In the greater scheme of things, login warning banners exist to fulfil control requirements. They exist to support...
OpenCanary 3.0 – Evolution not Revolution
USA versus Germany versus Switzerland The OpenCanary trio have been running for some time but, looking at the...
(Yet) More: Solving the Microsoft Surface Pro 7 BSOD
No Blue Screen of Death for me…. It’s been quite some time since I experienced a BSOD on...
OpenCanary: The Tyranny of the Default
These are the credentials that the three OpenCanary instances have seen. Star Wars-style!
ConnectedDrive – sold but still connected
Naturally, as a security professional, I was interested to see what might happen if I kept the BMW...
OpenCanary Hacked!
My OpenCanarys run Samba shares in the Internet. Firstly, this was mainly with Canary Tokens left there for...
The LastPass Hack: Crypto Thefts
It seems since March 2023, the LastPass hack of 2022 has become real for some people. Brian Krebs...
ISC2 did a Whoopsie
As a security professional, I have a CISSP certification and get communications from the ISC2. It seems the...
And Then There Were Three
More OpenCanary Goodness To balance out having two US-hosted honeypots, the appeal of hosting one elsewhere appealed to...
Time Machine backups via PiVPN/Wireguard
Time Machine via Tailscale to Synology was not robust enough As a MacBook owner, I like to leverage...
Attack Surface Reduction, Home and Away
Winget (aka Windows Package Manager) was announced at Microsoft Build 2020. It’s fundamentally a command line interface like...
PiVPN – easy, packaged VPN
Goodbye OpenVPN, hello Wireguard! But I am keeping you, Tailscale! I’ve long been leveraging OpenVPN on a Synology...
Cool Scam, Bro’
Don’t pay Bitcoin to this wallet: bc1qgjzrz03j4uq7xjmhp04xnl8q6qudm23x23a0vd I was recently “contacted” by a scammer who seems to have...
The Race to the Bottom
OpenCanary, One versus One The joy of being a low-cost security researcher saw my Splunk Enterprise licence revert...
The pihole in the sky – now with Tailscale
Blocking Everywhere Building on the idea to have a pihole in the sky, having a Pihole that I...
Caddy + Tailscale + Synology = Happiness
The discovery during looking to make Lighttpd run over TLS led me to find Caddy. It’s a TLS-first...
Sony, Quad9 and Barbara Streisand
Everybody probably has heard of the Streisand Effect. Perhaps everyone except Sony Music Entertainment Germany, that is. A...
The pihole in the sky
Pihole. it‘s brilliant. It kills ads and tracking – dead. The server deploys in 5 minutes and offers...
OpenCanary and the Mirai Password List
Fighting the Tyranny of the Default (login) As the OpenCanary in the Cloud continues to sit with its...
OpenCanary: One week in Splunk
The OpenCanary has been feeding Splunk via WebHook for over a week now and the statistics are becoming...
A breakdown of a Homegate scam
Property scams and fake adverts are a nuisance on Homegate; learn how to spot a fake advert, avoid being scammed and leverage Homegate to your advantage.
Improving OpenCanary Logging
The Loggly solution I’ve been using is basic and limited, basically being able to give an overview of...
The Domain Registration Renewal Scam
One of the domains we own and use received the following notification – actually through the Contact Us...
Enhancing the OpenCanary: Samba writes and malware submissions
After finding that someone, somewhere was dumping malware .exe files into my OpenCanary, I had a long thing...
OpenCanary in the Cloud: Unintended Consequences
My OpenCanary in the Cloud was not logging SMB requests properly and I finally made time to look...
Stupid Password Requirements
Or lack thereof Some recent experience has resulted in the creation of some accounts on certain SaaS HR...
Best Browser Configuration
Introduction For any user, there are functional requirements of a browser as well as certain privacy and tracking...
The Canary in the Cloud
OpenCanary 2.0 in Oracle Cloud continues to flourish. The main reporting mechanism is a webhook into Loggly from...
The LastPass Hack
Background LastPass revealed in December 2022 and in August 2022 that they had been hacked. The two incidents...
DHL Phishing Campaigns
As reported by Check Point in October 2022, DHL is the brand most imitated by criminals attempting to...
Fiction: Sarah’s Security Incident
A ChatGPT Story It was a typical Wednesday morning when Sarah, the IT manager at a small energy...
My First Security Incident
It would have been 1993, most likely the summer. There I was, working my first job which was...
Finding a Brother MFD Password
We have a well-equipped home office and of course, in that office, we have a combi-device – printer,...
Data Loss Prevention – according to ChatGPT
With ChatGPT being released to public beta recently, I decided to engage with it on the topic of...
My Network
As a security guy, you can imagine my network setup is “interesting”. I’ve been through times where I’ve...
“Friday night….”
Court Attendance Notice I received a very interesting email from Richmond Highway Patrol in Australia. Apparently, some guy...
OpenCanary 2.0: More Ports, More Protocols….
Putting an OpenCanary into the Cloud is a free and fun way to see what the Internet background...
OpenCanary: 197 Days in the Wilderness
In May 2022, I experimented with putting OpenCanary into an Oracle Cloud Ubuntu VM. It was a quick...
AI images – Swiss Results
It’s not all perfect – yet Having been looking at Wonder AI on the iPhone and then going...
Tailscale pushing an update
Being a big fan and user of Tailscale, I got this email and have been updating my agents...
Browser Isolation: Running a browser as another user
The notion of separating the user context from the browser (and possibly the email client) is not new;...
A Beginners Guide to CPEs (the easy way)
Many security professionals attain certifications because it proves their capabilities and the letters look nice – especially to...
The Failure of FTX
Blockchain this, Bitcoin that. Since 2010, the world has gone crazy about distributed ledger currencies and assets, much...
Under Pressure; ohnoesivebeenhacked 🤣
A very important email arrived in my mail account – marked as spam by Gmail. Maybe it is...
Information Technology 1.0: The risks that stick with us
If we look at Information Technology generations, I would say we are presently in Information Technology 4.0 and...
Hyper-V, sounds like Free
After running for years with the free Oracle VM VirtualBox, I branched into using Hyper-V as it offers...
Solving the BSOD on a Microsoft Surface Pro 7, Part 2
Because Part 1 did not solve it! It’s been years since the BSODs started on my Surface. It...
EvilProxy – Phishing as a Service
EvilProxy has just hit the news; it’s nothing so new but has been commercialised which means that phishing...
Solving the BSOD on a Microsoft Surface Pro 7
I’ve been the happy owner of a Microsoft Surface Pro 7 for 3 years now and, due to...
Just Enough Security to Perform
Living near a lake where people can go and sunbathe is nice, especially in the summer. At my...
Time Machine network backups via Tailscale
Every good security guy or gal likes his or her backups. Being the proud owner of an M1...
Virtualisation Discovery
For many years, I’ve been looking for the best solution to virtualise my setup. It’s not overly-complicated but...
OpenCanary in the Cloud
I guess it is not a typical deployment of OpenCanary but as an interesting research topic, one of...
WordPress on Google Cloud Platform. For free.
Almost all Cloud computing platforms have a free tier with different value propositions to different users. I have...
Bridging your networks
So I have two locations that I want connecting and, in this mobile world (COVID notwithstanding), I need...
Introduction
Security is hard. Security is only as strong as the weakest link in the chain. Welcome to CISO.pm...