General

Vulnerability exploits now dominate intrusions • The Register - A functional proof-of-concept exploit for React2Shell began circulating online within 30 hours of disclosure, for example.

Fintech firm Marquis blames hack at firewall provider SonicWall for its data breach | TechCrunch - Marquis said it believes that its August 2025 ransomware attack happened because the company’s firewall service provider SonicWall had its own data breach that exposed critical security information about its customers’ firewalls.

ShinyHunters claims Okta customer breaches, leaks data • The Register - On Friday, the criminals leaked data allegedly stolen from market-intel broker Crunchbase, streaming platform SoundCloud, and financial-tech firm Betterment, and confirmed to The Register that they gained access to two of the three - Crunchbase and Betterment - by voice-phishing Okta single-sign-on codes.

DRAM shortage may drive firewall prices higher: analysts • The Register - Reports last week out of the Korea Economic Daily stated two of the country’s producers of DRAM are planning to raise prices by up to 70 percent this quarter. When combined with the 50 percent increase during 2025, the price of memory could double in cost year-over-year by mid-2026.

Resecurity traps cybercrim in honeypot • The Register - “In our scenario, our goal was to allow the threat actor to conduct activity and feed them with synthetic data to observe their attack path and infrastructure,” the Resecurity team wrote. It Worked.

Stalkerware maker pleads guilty to sale of snooping software • The Register - Fleming is due to be sentenced later this year, when he’ll be facing up to 15 years in prison, a fine of $250,000, forfeiture of all property that was involved in the offense, and additional penalties.

Crims punish Wired subscribers by publishing personal info • The Register - The current leak is centered around readers of Wired magazine. The miscreants published 2.3 million emails, which had the names of 285,000 subscribers, 108,000 home addresses, and 32,000 phone numbers.

Have I Been Pwned: Check if your email address has been exposed in a data breach - Use this. Sign up your family. Use unique passwords in a password manager.

Standard Con Presentation

Who Are You?

Give 3-5 sentences or bullets about who you are, how long you’ve been doing the relevant skill and a 1-2 sentence explanation of what you’re talking about.

What Problem Did You Solve?

Make this relatable. Tell a story, so the audience can connect with your problem. Ask a question, have you ever had X happen? Tell us /why/ we should care

Recently a friend pointed me to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract to help understand the idolatry/worship of Trump, MAGA, and the American government.

Its worth reading if you get a moment. Book 4, chapter 8 discusses the idea that a society requires a sort of idolatry called the “Civic Religion” to exist to hold people into a cohesive society.

For years, I’ve tried to come up with a normal and sane way to manage money that didn’t involve complicated technical solutions (usually with a high price tag…I’m trying to save money!). I’ve tried everything. YNAB, Mint, GNUCash and everything in between.

Finally I settled on the 3 Accounts Method of my own design.

Ransomware crooks search for ‘insurance’ ‘policy’ right away • The Register - Researchers reviewed 3 years of ransomware forensics and found threat actor SOPs usually involve searching for “insurance” in company documents. If found, ransoms are around 2.8x the average. If there’s a double extortion attempt, the ransom is around 5.5x’s higher.

Wyden: AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon weren’t notifying senators of surveillance requests | TechCrunch - In the letter, Wyden, a longstanding member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that an investigation by his staff found that carriers were not notifying senators of legal requests — including from the White House — to surveil their phones. A report last year by the Inspector General,  revealed that the Trump administration in 2017 and 2018 secretly obtained logs of calls and text messages of 43 congressional staffers and two serving House lawmakers, imposing gag orders on the phone companies that received the requests.