This years RSAC was a strange experience. AI and Quantum saturated the expo floor, while talks ranged from IT to OT and everything in between. And weird political overtones stifled the environment.

Regardless of the weirdness, I decided to hit the expo floor and find the weird, the cool, and the special. And I was successful! Two different companies jumped out at me. One, Oasis offered an actual use case for quantum while Sepio offered a new endpoint security product.

Pharmacist accused of spying on women using work, home cams • The Register - Pharmacist spent nearly a decade installing malware on coworkers PCs, including remote web cam viewers and keyloggers. Pharmacist is currently employed at another healthcare system and is not jailed. While the employer is being sued for failing to protect their infrastructure and employees.

One of the last Bletchley Park’s heroes Betty Webb dies • The Register - Webb along with a number of other prominent women in the cryptography field worked at Bletchley Park to help decrypt some 10k German intercepts per day. Women have a long history in the Computer Science and Cryptography fields, I would highly recommend Invisible Women by Caroline Perez, Hidden Figures by Shetterly, BROAD band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet - Claire Evans,

We’ve all been there, a friend sends over a funny TikTok, or you want to share it in your Signal chat and you know people aren’t likely to click the link. Plus who wants all that tracking and hidden redirects in a TT link? So what’s to be done? If you’re like me, a quick long press, and “Save Video” and you’re off to the group chat to laugh with your friends.

US defense contractor settles whistleblower suit for $4.6M • The Register - Out of a possible 110 points, MORSE awarded itself 104. A third party assessment of the environment found a catastrophic score of (-)142, Yes, 246 points in the opposite (bad) direction. As part of the settlement, MORSE is handing back $4.6 million to the Feds, and $851,000 of that is going to the ex-employee who blew the whistle.

US POL

Federal judge blocks DOGE’s access to Social Security Administration’s banks of personal information | TechCrunch - Hollander said DOGE “never identified or articulated” a reason why it needs access to the “personal and private data of millions of Americans.”

CISA fires then rehires security crew, and puts them on hold • The Register - CISA employees are back, but benched. Placed on paid-leave, Red Teamers and other security staff are still in limbo.

Privacy

Amazon kills off on-device Alexa processing for Echo owners • The Register - “We are reaching out to let you know that the Alexa feature ‘Do Not Send Voice Recordings’ that you enabled on your supported Echo device(s) will no longer be available beginning March 28, 2025,” a copy of the email sent to Echo users relayed to El Reg read.

USCIS mulls policing social media of all would-be citizens • The Register - Social Media assessment that started under the Obama White House will be extended to all resident and documented aliens. Moves the social media scanning from before entry to all immigrants.

Badbox is back and a million Android devices were backdoored • The Register - Infected Android machines part of extensive botnet. Devices exploiting residential IP space to serve malicious ads.

China compromised GOP emails ahead of Republican convention • The Register - Notified in July of 2024, the Republic leadership opted to not notify the FBI or seek their assistance.

Hegseth orders suspension of Pentagon’s offensive cyberoperations against Russia | AP News - Hegseth can stop Pentagon, but not DHS:CISA or the CIA.

Notes, Quotes, and Paraphrases from On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century - Timothy Snyder

“You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case…As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes:

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