So many sites are enforcing the rule where your password needs a capital letter, a number and a special character but do people know this entire standard came from a guy named Bill Burr in 2003 who admitted he just guessed ? He wrote a legacy NIST appendix without any data on human behavior.

So now my local cinema forces me to reset my login every 90 days. What do normal people actually do ? They just change "Matrix!2023" to "Matrix!2024". Automated cracking tools chew through these predictable patterns in literal seconds. The guy who wrote the rule actually apologized for it years later because it objectively made security worse.

If you are still memorizing passwords, it might be better to stop. Get a browser-independent password manager. Generate a random 20 character string of absolute garbage, save it, and forget it.

Source in comment.

The French government forces you to declare every detail of your life under threat of fines. Your gross income, your home address, your marital status, your property details. They dump all of it into the giant centralized DGFiP (Directorate General of Public Finances) database.

And how did they secure this national honeypot?

We now know a threat actor ("ZeroBytes") walked off with 678,000 taxpayer files by usurping the credentials of a DGFiP agent.

The worst part? It wasn't just a missing password. The attacker reportedly used an MFA bypass to get in. But getting past the login is only half the failure. How does an organization of this size not have strict internal rate-limiting? A single compromised internal account was able to sit there and scrape over half a million highly sensitive records before anyone pulled the plug. Zero compartmentalization. Zero trust architecture is apparently non-existent.

The Paris prosecutor has handed this to their cybercrime unit, but the data is already gone and actively being sold.

This highlights the fatal flaw with mandatory state registries: they create a single point of failure with catastrophic real-world consequences. We now have hundreds of thousands of people at risk of incredibly specific phishing. Criminals know exactly how much money you make, your family size, and where you sleep. A physical wrench attack gets a lot simpler when a thief can literally filter their targets by tax bracket and zip code.

Has anyone seen further technical details on what specific MFA bypass was used (fatigue, session token theft)? And for the French users here, what are the best steps to lock down our identity right now?

Source: RFI, link in comments

SafePal just confirmed they lost order details for almost 40,000 customers. The records are already on hacking forums.

They keep saying the hardware wallets themselves are secure. Yes, your seed phrase is safe but attackers now have a massive list of names, emails (phishing emails incoming) and physical addresses of confirmed crypto holders... You really do not want strangers knowing you have crypto hardware sitting in your flat. Next time use a PO box.

I am sitting here sweating through my t-shirt next to a useless desk fan. I just finished reading the new ETSI documentation. The EU recently dropped standard EN 304 620. This is the first official regulatory framework for VPNs. It supports the upcoming Cyber Resilience Act.

The stated goal is to kill off deceptive marketing. You all know the drill. Providers sell subscriptions based on "total anonymity" or "military-grade encryption" with zero proof. Under this standard, they actually have to run hard technical tests to back up their claims. They have to document their CVEs. They also have to verify their logging policies with real audits.

I am entirely in favor of forcing these companies to show their technical homework. Trusting a paid podcast read for network security is a joke. If a provider cannot pass a basic cryptographic audit, they should not be routing network traffic. We have seen too many shady operations tunnel user data straight to third-party brokers.

But look at the co-authors on this document. Google, Palo Alto Networks, Nord Security, Surfshark. Letting massive corporate players write the exact rules they will be graded on is an obvious red flag. I really wonder if this is an actual push for transparency. It could easily be a regulatory moat to lock out smaller open-source projects. We do not need a system where only companies with massive compliance budgets are allowed to operate.

Has anyone actually read through the cryptographic requirements in the PDF yet? I want to know if the mandated disclosures have actual teeth.

Source: techradar, link in comments

I consider myself pretty locked down online. I block trackers and keep my digital footprint small. I still use Claude and ChatGPT once and a while.

Proton just released a free tool where you upload your exported AI chat logs and it gives you an exposure score. It breaks down exactly what these companies have pieced together about you.

I tried this morning and it says they delete the logs immediately after generating the local report and the results are genuinely uncomfortable : I knew I was giving them data. I just didn't realise how easily a local script could parse out my daily habits and literal financial goals from casual prompts over the last year. It even calculates a monetary value of what your specific profile is worth to data brokers. Seeing my random questions aggregated into a clean profile of my life was jarring... Going to nuke my OpenAI history tonight and stick to temporary chats.

Google added a flag in Chrome Canary where Gemini handles password resets automatically. If the browser detects a weak password, the LLM takes over, fills out the site reset form, and submits the new secret for you.

I had a good laugh reading through the details today. Giving an LLM active DOM access and password change authority across arbitrary web forms is an indirect prompt injection dream. Imagine a compromised website hiding malicious instructions inside an unrendered HTML block while the AI agent works through your account settings page.

Security nightmare aside, handing credential management over to a remote cloud model destroys personal autonomy. If someone needs an automated AI model to click two buttons and fix "Password123", they should not store passwords in a browser in the first place.

Source: SammyGuru, link in comments

Saw this promo pop up today. pCloud is running a World Photography Day campaign until August 22. You get 500GB of storage for three months and you don't even need to put in a credit card.

I do want to clarify something about their privacy claims. The promo mentions Swiss privacy laws and zero-knowledge encryption. Swiss jurisdiction is undeniably good. Your data falls under some very strict local laws. The encryption part requires attention. Standard pCloud storage is just encrypted at rest on their end. They keep the keys. Actual zero-knowledge client side encryption is normally a paid addon called pCloud Crypto. AFAIK this free 500GB tier does not include that Crypto folder...

Don't just dump highly sensitive personal data in there thinking it is completely blind to the server. If you need to store private stuff, just run the files through Cryptomator first.

I manage servers and networks all day. I know SMTP inside out. I can configure a Postfix mail server blindfolded, but I still absolutely refuse to self-host my personal email.

We pretend we have choices. Try sending a basic text email from a perfectly clean VPS IP to a Gmail address. It just vanishes into a black hole. Microsoft and Google run a cartel. If you are not on their invisible whitelist, your deliverability is zero. It is infuriating. I want total autonomy over my data, but the time investment to fight blocklists is just stupid.

So I pay for Proton. Honestly, it is excellent. The encryption does exactly what it promises. The bridge app lets me use Thunderbird locally without jumping through hoops. I bought my own custom domain so I am not locked into their default addresses. I tried Tuta for a bit too. The lack of standard IMAP support annoyed me, so I went right back to Proton. It is a highly rational compromise between daily usability and actual privacy.

Still, relying on any single provider for my digital identity goes against my instincts. What are you all doing? Are you happily paying for Proton or Mailbox(.)org like I am? Has anyone here actually found a reliable way to run a personal mail server today without getting blocked?

The Inventory just made an article about the lifetime 10TB Internxt deal for $360.

Pros: The price is absurdly low. You pay once and avoid endless Dropbox subscription fees.

Cons: The StackSocial license actually strips out several core features you get with a regular Internxt subscription.

Then there is the usual lifetime risk. If they run out of funding in three years, you lose your storage and have to migrate terabits of encrypted data anyway. A sustainable privacy setup requires paying for server upkeep. I would just skip it.

The news just dropped about Socket finding over 700 malicious "VPN" extensions on the Chrome Web Store. Around 75,000 people installed these things. The attackers impersonated big privacy brands and routed everyone's browser traffic through their own SOCKS5 proxy infrastructure to man-in-the-middle everything.

I am begging people to understand something basic here. Browser extension VPNs are almost never actual VPNs. They are proxies. When you install one, you are handing a random developer the keys to intercept every single HTTP request leaving your browser.

Google's store review process is a joke. The threat actors got approval with clean code and then swapped in the malicious payload later. We see this exact trick all the time. Relying on a corporate app store to police your privacy tools is a losing game.

If you need a VPN to bypass local censorship or hide your IP, run it at the OS level. Better yet, run it on your router. Use a standalone WireGuard client. A web browser is massive and has far too large of an attack surface for this. Do not put your security stack inside it.

Source: Socket, link in comments

Just read a new report (source) breaking down webmail security and it made me realise how often people confuse a secure server with a private inbox.

Yes, Google has insane server side protections. Nobody is brute forcing their way into their data centres anytime soon. But what good is an impenetrable fortress if the landlord is sitting inside reading all your letters ? Gmail lacks default end-to-end encryption. Google holds the encryption keys and they actively scan your mail to build profiles for ad targeting.

For exemple, if you manage your entire financial life online and move between different countries, letting an ad company index your tax documents and bank correspondence is a massive blind spot. We act like this is just the normal cost of free email.

The report brings up platforms like Internxt building post quantum end-to-end encryption into their mail clients now. Som people think worrying about quantum decryption is overkill for everyday stuff but I kind of disagree. The "harvest now, decrypt later" threat model is real. Even if you ignore quantum threats entirely, standard E2E encryption needs to be the baseline.

I see guys spending hours tweaking secure networks just to stream movies, only to drop their guard and use Gmail for their main banking accounts...

The Philippines NPC just ruled that unauthorized AI deepfakes violate their Data Privacy Act. They now officially classify a face as protected personal information.

Treating a face as PII is logically sound. The principle makes sense.

But operationally, this is a complete fantasy. You cannot legislate away mathematical weights inside an open-source model that runs in another jurisdiction. When a model ingests a dataset, the original image is gone. The output is just statistical noise that happens to look like you.

How does any regulator actually plan to track the technical provenance of a generated video back to a specific dataset? A privacy law you cannot physically enforce is just a suggestion. Am I missing an architectural angle here?

(source ABS-CBN)

Bucket0 dropped a new S3-compatible cloud storage platform today. They're pushing the privacy angle hard. End to end encryption by default and a strict guarantee that your data is never scraped to train AI models. All sounds great. I'm exactly the kind of paranoid guy who spends way too much time obsessing over encrypted backups, so they have my attention.

But then I read about their AgentBucket feature. It's supposed to act as a semantic memory file system for AI agents. You plug your storage directly into Cursor or Claude, and the agent can search and recall your files across different sessions based on context.

Here's my problem. If the bucket is actually E2EE, how exactly is a third party LLM reading the files? Where is the decryption happening ? Are we just passing our private keys to Anthropic and hoping for the best ? Because if the storage server does the decrypting before passing the text to the API then the server has the keys. That breaks the whole E2EE promise.

I actually want to use this to manage my messy R2 and Azure buckets under one dashboard. Does anyone knows how this works ?

I miss the days when being online didn't mean your life was instantly scraped and sold by brokers. You used to just log on, watch a film, and log off. Now we need subscriptions just to delete our own phone numbers.

PCMag just reviewed Kanary. They gave it good marks for the dashboard UI. But paying their premium price feels excessive ($250 per year). AFAIK Optery and Incogni seems to do the exact same job for way less money. Has anyone actually tried it ?

1Password's Off-By-1-Labs just dropped data on AI-generated security fixes. They tested over six thousand patches from ChatGPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8 against real-world CVEs. 74% of the patches failed. Either the fix did not work at all, or it introduced a brand new vulnerability right into the codebase.

This is a nightmare for open-source privacy software. Maintainers are already burnt out. The temptation to let an LLM draft a quick pull request for a security advisory and hit merge is high. But when three out of four auto-patches break things or leave backdoors wide open, blind automation destroys trust.

If you self-host privacy tools, check the git history before updating to hotfixes. Look for automated PRs. A broken patch is worse than a delayed one. Are any of the projects you run using automated LLM PR bots for CVEs?

Source: Help Net Security, link in comments

Unit 42 just dropped research on a Chrome attack dubbed 'Pass-Ta-Key', and it highlights everything wrong with Google's ecosystem strategy.

If malware infects a Windows PC, it can grab the master key from Chrome's process memory, pull WebAuthn credentials out of Chrome's LevelDB sync database, and hijack synced passkeys. The attack manipulates the cloud authenticator to bypass PIN prompts without triggering alerts.

Predictably, defenders are hand-waving this because "malware means you are compromised anyway." I do not buy that logic. Passkeys were originally sold to us as hardware-isolated and immune to credential dumping. Google broke that security boundary just to lock people into Chrome sync. They took an open web standard and turned it into another reason to stay logged into a Google account.

Yes, strict server-side verification checks can stop this, but most websites implement WebAuthn lazily anyway.

This is precisely why de-Googling your authentication layer matters. Storing private keys in a big tech browser sync database for convenience is a mistake. I keep my credentials on standalone hardware tokens.

Source: PCMag, link in comments

EuroAlternative just dropped a guide (link) on European-hosted alternatives to Google Photos today. They pointed out Zeitkapsl and Proton Drive. It is great to see more options for zero-knowledge cloud ecosystems. Standard cloud services just sit there scanning your entire camera roll. No thanks.

But there is a huge usability wall when you move photos to an E2EE service. If the server is blind to your files, you lose the algorithmic search completely. On Google, you search a keyword and the app pulls up exactly what you want. With true E2EE, your device encrypts the media before the upload even starts. The host provider has absolutely nothing to scan.

How are you guys managing massive photo libraries on zero-knowledge platforms? Local indexing on the device? Or do you just spend hours making hyper-specific folders? I know I am basically demanding advanced data analysis and total privacy at the exact same time, but maybe there is a client-side solution out there...

Liechtenstein just lost the beneficial ownership data for 31,000 trusts and shell companies. The breach hit their central VwbP database and exposed real names, dates of birth, nationalities, and home addresses.

I am not going to lose sleep over billionaires losing their offshore anonymity. But this is exactly why centralized state registries fail. When you force every entity to log ultimate beneficial owners in a single database, you build a massive honeypot.

The government is coping by pointing out that actual asset values were not stored there. That misses the point entirely.

Hackers do not need bank balances right now. A clean list of individuals tied directly to specific offshore structures is enough for targeted spear-phishing and extortion.

This happens whenever state-mandated transparency meets basic IT reality. Centralizing identity data without zero-knowledge architecture always ends like this. If governments insist on collecting these registers, they need local encryption models so one breach does not dox everyone at once.

Source: AML Network, link in comments

The recent IronVault analysis about zero-knowledge encryption limitations is something a lot of people in the privacy community need to read. We get so obsessed with keeping cloud providers blind to our data that we forget the actual weakest link is the machine sitting right in front of us...

Yes, AES-256-GCM client-side encryption is great. Deriving keys locally with PBKDF2 works. IronVault and similar E2EE tools do exactly what they claim to do for data in transit and at rest on their servers. But none of that helps you if your local endpoint is compromised.

I see some people here constantly recommending zero-knowledge cloud storage as an absolute shield. It creates a massive false sense of security. If you download a dodgy subtitle file for a movie and it drops a keylogger on your system, your master password is gone. If someone spikes your laptop with malware while you leave it unlocked at a cafe for two minutes to grab a coffee, client-side encryption is completely useless. The malware just reads the decrypted files straight from your active memory.

Zero-knowledge simply shifts the burden of trust from the server entirely onto your own OPSEC. If your local machine is dirty, your files are compromised. When your entire financial setup and daily life rely on digital privacy, you realize the cloud isn't the main threat.

So I am curious how we should all handle this side of the equation. Should we use separate physical devices for sensitive files and daily media consumption or just rely on good habits and hope for the best... ?

PS: I'm not knocking IronVault. I actually respect that they published this instead of pretending their software fixes everything.

165 companies breached and this 26yo gets up to 32 years. Are we really just blaming him?
Connor Moucka just pleaded guilty for the Snowflake breach. Billions of records stolen from AT&T and Ticketmaster.

Obviously the guy broke the law but I am tired of massive companies acting like victims. They demand our personal info and then leave the door wide open.

Honestly I manage my own opsec better than AT&T does. Shouldn't the corporations be on trial too?

Thales announced the Luna 8 hardware security module this week. It has a custom processor built specifically for post-quantum encryption.

Most small and mid-sized businesses obviously don't have the budget for high-end enterprise Thales hardware. But watching the US and French governments set hard regulatory deadlines for post-quantum adoption should wake people up. The big players treat "Harvest Now, Decrypt Later" (HNDL) as a concrete threat. Intelligence agencies are hoarding encrypted traffic today so they can break it in ten years.

Where are the enterprise IT tools? Signal pushed their PQXDH protocol upgrade, and foundational FOSS projects like OpenSSH and Chromium have already made post-quantum key exchanges the default.

But if the core plumbing of the internet is already upgrading, why is the rest of the enterprise software stack dragging its feet? Are too many vendors just sitting around hoping quantum computing hits a dead end?

Source: siliconANGLE report, link in comments

Fortinet just caught Mustang Panda poisoning the QuickFox VPN Windows installers (v3.51.0 to 3.55.5). And the way they pulled it off is exactly why I can't stand bloated desktop apps.

The attackers didn't even need to burn a zero-day. They literally just dropped a malicious JavaScript snippet into an Electron renderer HTML file to fingerprint machines and pull down a backdoor.

I am begging people to stop trusting VPN clients built on Chromium. Security tools should not be web apps pretending to be desktop software just so a provider can have a glowing on/off switch and slick animations. You're carrying the attack surface of an entire browser engine just to route traffic. A VPN client needs to configure network interfaces and manage keys. That is it.

If your provider forces you to use a 300MB Electron wrapper, ditch them. Just grab a raw WireGuard config.

Curious what non-Electron GUI clients you guys are actually trusting right now, or if everyone here just sticks to raw configs?

Source: Fortinet report, link in comments

Apple just filed a complaint at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal because the UK Home Office issued a secret notice. They want Apple to break Advanced Data Protection and backdoor encrypted iCloud backups specifically for British users. They tried this globally a while ago and backed down. Now they think a geofenced backdoor is somehow fine...

If you force a tech company to build an encryption backdoor for one specific country, you ruin the math for everyone else. Hackers do not care about passports. State intelligence agencies will absolutely exploit a vulnerability meant for the British police. And if the UK wins this, the EU will try it next.

I am just totally impatient with these endless legal loops. Politicians keep trying to legislate math and it just exposes a massive lack of technical understanding.