Day 1 of #infoseceurope down and boy what a weird fever dream it was.

As a Neurodiverse embodiment of millennial “hacker” culture it’s so stuffy and corporate and WEIRD!
Vendors like “blinkentrace” selling shiny lights and dubious platforms, Startups with a business plan straight out of ChatGPT…

#Blackhat #defcon TAKE ME BACK!

@Jayson Great talk! Thanks for bringing a bit of DefCon spirit to what’s otherwise a very dry event!

@Jayson @defcon @defcongroups
It’s so SALES SALES SALES at #Infosec2025

Been doing 2 days in the office for the past 2 months and I’ve had enough. This isn’t for me. It doesn’t work, it’s a waste of time.

I get less done and it’s just a painful excruciating experience.

@markvos I keep spares at relatives houses in their respective fire safes. Not the best, but it’s at least a layer of abstraction

So now I’ve handed in my resignation, I can finally say something; The American Healthcare system is MENTAL.
I have spent 5 years working for a Healthcare adjacent org and it’s opened my eyes into just how insanely broken the entire system is.

I worry for all my fellow #InfoSec folks in the US, look after yourselves and your bodies.

@gobsmacked @toddtyrtle I just have two yubikeys, I replicated onto the second then store it at a relatives in a safe, that way I have a guaranteed backup

@j_opdenakker don’t shame me like that. I haven’t been out on my bike in almost a month. Winter is the worst 😭

@jerry absolutely crazy what can happen in the space of a few weeks when an absolute moon fruit takes over a major social network and finally educates people about the #fediverse

@j_opdenakker but I just changed mine to hunter2023

@neil I’ve seen a few folks talk about Bitwarden but never had the gumption to move everything over to it.
I hastily abandoned lastpass when they changed their pricing model and I thought “I’ll use Microsoft Authenticator” as a stopgap and I have, but I am endlessly frustrated by it and I hate having all my eggs in one basket like that.

Sounds like a nice weekend project for me!

The Christmas wind down is in full effect, which means my infosec paranoia is up.
Experience has taught me this is the time of year to be on guard. Attackers know we all want to stop working and relax at this time of year.
Stay vigilant friends!

What drove the internet in the 90s and 00s was that it was so cool to be doing good shit with it. Social media was like a giant manure dump all over that culture. We've never recovered.

The Fediverse and the death of Twitter promise a rebirth of that culture, if we don't let the cool kids and a lazy press bury the public in vapid bullshit again.

We wasted 16 goddamn years enduring Facebook and Twitter. In the end, they were both toxic and regressive. Can we please not go back there? Please?

@verovaleros yes, this has been one of my big takeaways from #BlackHatEurope #blackhat let’s stop chastising our users for being human. WE should instead encourage them to be open and honest and WE as professionals should try to help them understand how to spot where they went askew (I don’t even really want to say ‘wrong’).
No more mandatory retraining, no more strongly worded letters from HR. Instead let’s try to find a better way to talk to everyone.

@j3j5 @AMS @alyssam_infosec @accidentalciso you forgot to mention that your emails to technical support are black holed because they have no other method of identity verification.

After two years of negotiations with Microsoft, the joint committee of the German federal data protection authority and 17 state regulators (DSK) published a devastating statement that essentially says that organizations currently cannot use MS365 in a lawful way under the GDPR.

@hacks4pancakes exactly! Their marketing is downright dangerous “a VPN protects your banking data from bad hacker men” or “our VPN protects your passwords” no it doesn’t…

Though I say this and I do have a subscription to one of these awful commercial ones because I sometimes need to avoid geoblocks. I find myself more and more having to explain to “joe public” in my life that these are not a security panacea and do not protect you in the ways they claim.

@davecook a long way from a questionable student flat in the South Side of Edinburgh 😂😂

@davecook for 20 years I’ve not been able to escape Dave Cook. Even on Mastodon!! Small world 😂

@siliconshecky I’ll be spending mine building and painting miniature models, nice to have some time away from “bad screens”