Posts in "infosec"

Current status:

“Hi $vendor, I confess that I’ve never seen a vendor explicitly state that their encryption-at-rest policy doesn’t cover servers. That’s a new one.”

For reasons, we use a sales tool called Apollo at work. To use it, your employees have to sign into a few of the scammiest websites anywhere, with fake privacy policies and Google App configs that scream “send my email to North Korea”.

That’s gross incompetence and I’m doing what I can to push us to find a better vendor.

Screenshot of a blatantly scammy website: "New way to analyze your emails Forget about bunch of tools to anaylize your emails. Harness all power of AI to reach best deliverability. Test Your Inbox" Screenshot of a Google App info panel for "email-deliverability-checker.com", owned by one "ndayecheikh98@gmail.com".

I’ve never seen a vendor brave enough to make this claim.

Screenshot of a company's security FAQ page: "ZoomInfo ensures that its database and portfolio of products is 100% safe to use. As a security-first organization, ZoomInfo is committed to developing secure and compliant go-to-market solutions for our customers."

I get invited to the most unexpected events. The more astonished I am that someone would want me at a thing, the more likely I am to accept. That’s how you open the tap to being invited to even more things later. Practice saying yes when you can.

Screenshot of an “AI Cybersecurity Buyer Pitch” online event where I’m one of the “buyers” providing feedback to seed startup founders.

I logged into one of our vendors for the first time to make some urgent changes. Every third time I tried to click on something, instead of going to that thing, I got an obnoxious full-screen onboarding screen with no way to close it:

Screenshot of a banner: "Thank you for being a valued customer,
Help us make sure you get the most out of your account by answering a few questions."

If I hit my browser’s back button, half the time I got a “submit this form again?” popup.

If you really want to thank me because you really value me as a customer, please stop asking me stupid questions and let me use the site I logged into.

That feeling when you get to the point where can tell what a company’s compliance regime is going to be like based on the layout of their trust center. “Oh, standard Vanta format. It’s probably fine.”

And then you realize that this is not an S-tier superpower.

Cloudflare Drop

Cloudflare Drop:

Drop a folder. Or a zip.

Summon your site - HTML, CSS, JS. See it live instantly.

Cloudflare announced their new Exfiltration as a Service app today. Admins, be sure to lock this jackassery down ASAP.

I saw a guy wearing a nylon shirt and matching cargo shorts, both clean but faded from too many washes, a plain non-matching ball cap, black sneakers, about 30 tools clipped to his belt, and a couple of ID badges. He was a phone lineman, maybe an electrician, perhaps a fiber optic engineer, with a broken in outfit he’d worn to work every day for months.

The perfection nearly caught my breath. Guy dressed like that, there’s not a room in the country where a security guard wouldn’t buzz him in.

AI prompt of the day:

You export an app’s user list and want to import it into Okta before you sync the 2. Okta gives you a CSV template to download, usually (always?) called okta-csv-template.csv, but its format varies per-application.

“Please rewrite employees-export.csv in the format of okta-csv-template.csv.”

This saves so much tedium.

I’ve recently seen a small flood of my personal and work emails (and group aliases) getting responses from many other companies’ support emails, as though someone were opening support tickets using my addresses. Is this some weird variant of push bombing? Or maybe someone getting me to train my spam filters to reject support emails so that Ill miss an important one (like “we’ve received your request to transfer your domain name; reply to cancel”) or such?