You Have an Obligation to Fight for Privacy

Authored by: Joe Basirico

Published on June 19, 2020
Reading time: 6 minutes

Note: The header image was created by Visual Cinnamon for The New York Times on an opinion piece on digital trackers.

By now everyone is familiar and desensitized to cookie popups that bombard us on our first visit to almost every. These cookie consent alerts are there for a reason, they are required by new legislation such as GDPR and the California CPA. This legislation has been introduced to try to protect consumers from boundless data collection policies , which is a laudable goal. I’m not certain how much of a difference it’s made though as most users accept the terms as quickly as a EULA or a Windows Security Warning popup. Recently Senator Sherrod Brown has realized this and is trying to shift the burden of privacy from consumers onto the companies that hold the data. No longer will it be enough for a company to fall back on the “but you clicked on the Privacy Policy button” defense:

A Hacker’s Manifesto and 2TB Data Breach From Cayman National Bank and Trust

Authored by: Joe Basirico

Published on November 19, 2019
Reading time: 5 minutes

On Saturday a transparency collective named “Distributed Denial of Secrets” tweeted that they have released a massive data set from a recent breach. Over 2 terabytes of data has been released and is hosted by DDoS and on Torrents. In addition to the data that was released the hacker published a manifesto and hacking guide called “HackBack - A DIY Guide to rob banks" alongside the data dump. The hacker, who goes by Phineas Fisher, originally wrote the HackBack guide in Spanish, however, this morning I found a translated copy. Unfortunately it’s been removed from PasteBin as of this writing, but the Spanish version is still available on DDoS’s site.