🌪️ Are you ready for the hurricane?

BONJOUR MES AMIS!
This week I’m coming to you live from France. Working hard, or hardly working, you make the call.

That doesn’t stop me from delivering the latest in Cybersecurity and Tech news, right to your digital doorstep.

So, are you ready for the… hurricane?

In this week's edition:
☎️ Def Con’t
📰 Bits & Bytes
❓ Disable User explains: Hacktivism
🔥 meme of the week

Reading time: 01:51

Def Con’t

While I’m typing this, Def Con 31 just closed it’s doors.

Those who don’t know about Def Con, let me sum it up:

• Big hacker conference

• Started in 1993

• Famous and dubbed “the OG” by many

• Lot’s of workshops, boots and live hackathons

• Goons, geeks and a big community of cyber loving criminals

The conference is split up in villages, with each village having a theme. This year, the big showrunner was the AI village.

2200 hackers performed a red team exercise on the 8 biggest AI models.
The intent? Seeing how easy or hard it is the use AI for bad.

There was a bomb threat, so that shook up the conference a bit (hehe) but I’ve been following posts on Twitter a bit and it looked awesome.

The name comes from DEFCON, a term used by the US military to indicate the likeliness of a nuclear attack happening.

Guess they wanted to make it sound cool.

Who you kidding, huh?

Def Con always had this mystical vibe for me.
Not sure if I’ll ever be attending though. It’s not the easiest (or cheapest) trip.

Maybe next year?

Bits & Bytes

• India Passes New Digital Personal Data Protection Bill (DPDPB), Putting Users' Privacy First - Good on you, India. Hopefully it’s less stressful than the GDPR though..

• Dell Compellent hardcoded key exposes VMware vCenter admin creds - “Dell advises to change your root password as mitigation” Yikes..

• India, the world’s largest smartwatch market, is getting new smart rings - Can’t wait for Toe rings to go back into style.

• Don’t Expect Quick Fixes in ‘Red-Teaming’ of AI Models. Security Was an Afterthought - the writer of this article clearly doesn’t like AI. BUT he’s not entirely wrong.

• Hacktivists claim 21 org attack over Fukushima wastewate - Hacktivism feels like a double edged blade to them. It’s good to ‘stick it to the man’ but be careful you’re not the judge, jury and executioner.

Hacktivism

The act of hacking, or breaking into a computer system, for politically or socially motivated purposes.

If they raise the price of beer again, I’ll be doing some hacktivism myself.

Meme of the week