Tech Vulnerabilities and Online Threats

Last week, we all learned about a company called CrowdStrike that apparently has the capability to single-handedly bring multiple airlines, hospitals and other large companies to their knees in an instant. There are many lessons we should be learning from this incident, though I’m not going to hold my breath. I’ll tell you what happened and what I think we should be doing to avoid a repeat of this incident in the future.

In other news: Google finally throws in the towel on blocking third-party cookies; a private organization claims to have gained access to advertising-based location data on Trump’s shooter; Republican VP candidate JD Vance forgets to make his Venmo data private; leaked docs show what phones Cellebrite can and can’t hack; Meta takes down thousands of accounts related to sextortion ring; and for my Tip of the Week, we’ll tackle part 1 of my article on deleting your public data from the web.

Article Links

1. [AppleInsider] Google gives up on Chrome plan to ditch third-party cookies https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/07/23/google-gives-up-on-chrome-plan-to-ditch-third-party-cookies
2. [404media.co] Heritage Foundation Claims to Use Location Data to Track Trump Shooter’s Movements https://www.404media.co/heritage-foundation-claims-to-use-location-data-to-track-trump-shooters-movements/
3. [9to5Mac] J.D. Vance Venmo connections public, as privacy failing still in place six years later https://9to5mac.com/2024/07/19/jd-vance-venmo-connections-public/
4. [404media.co] Leaked Docs Show What Phones Cellebrite Can (and Can’t) Unlock https://www.404media.co/leaked-docs-show-what-phones-cellebrite-can-and-cant-unlock/
5. [The Washington Post] Meta takes down thousands of Facebook, Instagram accounts running sextortion scams from Nigeria https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/07/24/meta-nigeria-sextortion-scam-instagram-facebook/fce496c6-49b8-11ef-9149-c75da5dd9201_story.html
6. [Schneier Blog] The CrowdStrike Outage and Market-Driven Brittleness https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/07/the-crowdstrike-outage-and-market-driven-brittleness.html
7. Tip of the Week:OSINT Reconnaissance:  https://firewallsdontstopdragons.com/osint-reconnaissance/ 

Further Info

• Book surge results: https://fdsd.me/booksurge 
• Moxie Marlinspike (Signal) on Cellebrite vulnerabilities: https://signal.org/blog/cellebrite-vulnerabilities/ 
• Send me your questions! https://fdsd.me/qna 
• Check out my book, Firewalls Don’t Stop Dragons: https://fdsd.me/book 
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• Generate secure passphrases! https://d20key.com/#/ 

Table of Contents

Use these timestamps to jump to a particular section of the show.

• 0:00:51: AT&T breach update
• 0:01:44: News rundown
• 0:03:56: Google gives up on Chrome plan to ditch third-party cookies
• 0:08:28: Group Claims to Use Location Data to Track Trump Shooter’s Movements
• 0:13:42: J.D. Vance Venmo connections public
• 0:19:28: Leaked Docs Show What Phones Cellebrite Can (and Can’t) Unlock
• 0:27:35: Meta takes down thousands of accounts running sextortion scams
• 0:31:21: Lessons from the CrowdStrike Outage
• 0:44:52: Tip of the Week: OSINT Reconnaissance
• 0:55:20: Book surge report
• 0:57:06: More help will be needed
• 0:58:10: Looking ahead