Tag: troy hunt

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Talking the VTech hack on Kinderling Radio

Kinderling logoWhile I’d heard of Kinderling, I hadn’t really known what it was about — until this Wednesday, when I did a spot on this new digital radio station in Sydney.

Kinderling grew from the Australian independent music and arts community with a vision to create contemporary children’s radio that is grounded in Australian culture, society and natural habitat.

With over a decade of radio experience (and ten kids!) between them, the Kinderling team has developed a program schedule that soundtracks your day with kids.

The trigger for this conversation was of course this week’s news of the VTech hack and data breach. Here’s my 10-minute conversation with Kinderling Conversation presenter Shevonne Hunt.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (5.7MB)

You can check to see if you were caught up in this data breach at Troy Hunt’s Have I Been Pwned.

The audio is ©2015 Kinderling. You can also listen at their website.

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Talking the Ashley Madison hack on ABC Gold Coast

ABC logoThe Ashley Madison hack returned to the news this week, because the 30-day deadline given by Impact Team, the hacker(s) who claimed responsibility, expired, and the site’s data started being dumped onto the internet.

While I’d spoken about this before on ABC 936 Hobart, this week I spoke about the then-latest developments on Friday with ABC Gold Coast. Here’s the full conversation with morning presenter Nicole Dyer.

The site I mentioned at the end, where you can check whether your email address appears in the Ashley Madison data dump, or in many of the larger data breaches of recent years, is haveibeenpwned.com, run by Australian security researcher Troy Hunt. Use it.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (7.0MB)

The audio is of course ©2015 Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

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Talking the alleged Apple iCloud hack on ABC Radio AM

ABC logoA few minutes after doing the live spot on Nova 100, I recorded an interview on the alleged Apple iCloud hack for ABC Radio’s national current affairs program AM.

Reporter Emily Bourke would have gone away with a disjointed mess of soundbites, but the disjointedness isn’t so important when it’ll be edited into a multi-voice report.

I think this one quote best summarises my view of the compromise we enter into when using cloud services:

The big problem with creating massive online cloud storage systems — which is now the way we do things on the internet, whether it’s Apple or Microsoft or Google or Amazon or whoever — is that you create a vast honey pot of a target for the attackers.

Once you find one way to get in, you can potentially get access to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people’s data.

The plus side is such concentrated services means they can hire some of the best security people they can find, putting brains onto the problem is obviously important. So at one level the cloud providers can, if they do it right, protect things far better than you or I could on computer systems under our own control.

The failures are therefore going to be far less frequent. It’s just that when the failures do happen they can be catastrophic.

Here’s the full story, served directly from the ABC website, where you can also read the transcript.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (1.7MB)

The audio is of course ©2014 Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

A few sentences of my comments were also used in a later report on The World Today at lunchtime, which featured security researcher Troy Hunt.