NotAwful.Security

Today, Cloudflare's CEO Mathew Prince made a decision to stop serving The Daily Stormer, a neo-nazi website. Gizmodo's reporting on this leads with an odd sentiment: Internet companies typically take a hands-off approach to offensive content on their networks, erring on the side of maintaining an open internet. I find this to be an odd statement because it is categorically false. This decision by Mathew Prince follows decisions by other companies to stop serving neo-nazi and white supremacist customers. Google and GoDaddy recently refused domain services to The Daily Stormer over the past couple of days. Paypal has been closing the accounts of neo-nazis and white supremacists for some time, according to CNN . This has sparked many conversations about whether or not internet companies should police the content on their platform, or whether the internet should remain 'content-neutral.' This debate is a surprise to me because all companies already police the conte...

UPDATE 2017-07-29 This post previously stated that @BretMattingly was a member of the leadership of @InfosecN00bs. Just before Defcon BretMattingly stepped away from @InfosecN00bs for unstated reasons. After this blog post was originally published, he took the concerns to @Hacksforsnacks_ and @K_5m00th, who did not want to return funds raised, issue a statement regarding the matter, or take any corrective actions. The fundraiser was done under @Bretmattingly's name because he was being set up to be the fall guy for when everything toppled over. Original Post The twitter account @InfosecN00bs  has posted an official statement regarding their failed crowdfunding campaign after a few people publicly questioned where the money was being used.  The @InfosecN00bs group is run by @Hacksforsnacks_ , @K_5m00th . Official Statement: Part 1 Official Statement: Part 2 To be perfectly clear: This is a press release statement playing damage control. @InfosecN00bs...

When I am passionate about something I am almost always very loud about it. There are a lot of conversations about people "panhandling" for money to travel to BlackHatUSA 2017 and DEFCON 25. Most of the conversations I've seen are dominated by people being very vocal against people crowdfunding any part of their trip, right down to someone who paid travel, lodgings, and tickets out of pocket and couldn't afford food while in Vegas. " How dare they ask if anyone wants to give him some money so they eat? " - Aristocrats, probably I am going to talk about conference travel, barriers, and elitism. A Quick Note On Elitism I wrote a thread on twitter, here , regarding high-priced certificates being used as arbitrary barriers to entry into the field of information security. Halfway through that thread I talked about networking, here , and how the combination of high-barrier to entry and side-stepping traditional hiring processes through networking created...

I begin this blog post with an acknowledgment of the irony of the situation. But I'm taking the opportunity use this chance to highlight the social media snowball and how to use your momentum responsibly. This post is in no way an indictment of MalwareTechBlog, nor am I implying that they did anything wrong here . If I come across as petty it is intentional and not sincere. On May 26th, 2017, I tweeted about a bug with Microsoft Office in which a background task would flicker a command prompt briefly due to it being mistakenly registered as a user-context task. First! Thirty-seven hours later the Savior of the Internet, Slayer of Wcry, MalwareTechBlog posted a tweet that said basically the same thing . With no significant additional information. Second, more popular mouse gets the cheese Social media is all about visibility. After MalwareTech posted their tweet SwiftonSecurity retweeted it, and between both of their substantial platforms a very visible conversation ...