[Tricia Howard]: We created the internet and told people to click on things.
[Tricia Howard]: And then we created security and said, don't click on things.
[Tricia Howard]: What?
[Tricia Howard]: Obviously people are going to click on things.
[Tricia Howard]: So it's, no, anyway.
[SPEAKER_00]: As smashing security, episode 453, the Epstein files didn't hide this hacker very well, with Graham, clueless and special guest Trisha Howard.
[Graham Cluley]: Hello, hello, welcome to Smashing Security Episode 453, my name's Graham Pluelly.
[Tricia Howard]: And I'm Trisha Howard.
[Graham Cluley]: Trisha, welcome back to the show, lovely to have you here once again.
[Tricia Howard]: Oh my gosh, thanks for having me again.
[Tricia Howard]: Are you kidding me?
[Tricia Howard]: This is great.
[Graham Cluley]: Now, since we last spoke, you have changed jobs.
[Graham Cluley]: You've moved from one sub-security firm and you're helping set up a brand new one on you.
[Tricia Howard]: I am.
[Tricia Howard]: Yes, I just joined as head of marketing at a start-up focused on insider threat.
[Graham Cluley]: Oh, okay, it sounds interesting.
[Graham Cluley]: Well, more to come no doubt when you unveil yourselves to the world.
[Graham Cluley]: Yes.
[Graham Cluley]: And just to remind people, your head of marketing now, but what's your background in cybersecurity, where's your expertise been Trisha?
[Tricia Howard]: So, I started back as a theater major who ended up accidentally in sales and moved all the way.
[Tricia Howard]: who marketing and tried some security research, and I've kind of dabbled any and everywhere.
[Tricia Howard]: So where my heart lies is in the technical malware analysis, your zero day stuff, the really fun, and I try and make those stories sound very interesting and creative and musical most of the time.
[Graham Cluley]: It is so fascinating how people can come from a wide variety of backgrounds and end up in this ridiculous world of cybersecurity and people can bring so many capabilities and unique talents because of that.
[Graham Cluley]: It's good that we're not getting everyone from the same pool isn't it?
[Tricia Howard]: 100%.
[Tricia Howard]: Well, and who's more equipped than an actor to deal with something whenever something goes wrong?
[Tricia Howard]: Listen, let me tell you, there is no stress.
[Tricia Howard]: Like hopping on stage when you have a critical prop that is missing somehow, and now you have to make it out in front of hundreds of people who are expecting you to be perfect, by the way.
[Tricia Howard]: We are made for this.
[Tricia Howard]: We deal with failure all the time.
[Tricia Howard]: We are made for cybersecurity.
[Graham Cluley]: Well, before we kick off, let's thank this week's wonderful sponsors Mita Palswark and Vanta, we'll be here in more about them later on in the podcast.
[SPEAKER_00]: This week on smashing security.
[Graham Cluley]: We're not going to be talking about how no pad plus plus was hijacked by state sponsored hackers for months, pushing targeted users to malicious updates.
[Graham Cluley]: you'll hear no discussion of how an app designed to help you quit watching porn was found to be leaking intimate details about users' sexual urges and we won't even mention.
[Graham Cluley]: How cybersecurity firm micro world technologies the makers of ESCAN antivirus was hacked to push out malware to its customers.
[Graham Cluley]: So Trisha, what are you going to be talking about this week?
[Tricia Howard]: I'm going to be talking about learning the difference between public and private chatGBT, the hard way.
[Graham Cluley]: And I'm going to be here in accusations that Jeffrey Epstein, hired a hacker, and what that might mean for the rest of us.
[Graham Cluley]: All this and much more come up on this episode of smashing security.
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[Graham Cluley]: Now, Trisha, you know that when governments redact documents, they're gonna have a reason for it.
[Graham Cluley]: I mean, I'd hope so.
[Graham Cluley]: Yeah, they're doing it presumably because there's information they don't want to share.
[Graham Cluley]: There's something which they want to keep secret.
[Graham Cluley]: Which can be, unlike leap governments, I know our natural inclination is to think they're keeping the secret from malicious or malevolent purposes.
[Graham Cluley]: It can be for legitimate, justifiable reasons that they don't want certain information.
[Graham Cluley]: It may be that they're defending people, they're protecting people's privacy.
[Graham Cluley]: I mean, that's the whole point.
[Graham Cluley]: You get your black marker, you cross out the center to bits, and the public gets to see everything else.
[Graham Cluley]: But here is the thing with redaction.
[Graham Cluley]: It's not just a case of what you remove from view.
[Graham Cluley]: You've also got to think about,
[Graham Cluley]: what you leave behind, what you leave in the document which didn't get a great big spat of black marker all over it.
[Graham Cluley]: And this is in my mind right now because of course we've just in the U.S. Department of Justice.
[Graham Cluley]: They've released another massive batch of files related to Jeffrey Epstein.
[Graham Cluley]: And we're talking millions of pages.
[Graham Cluley]: Have you been following this at all?
[Tricia Howard]: Uh, I have seen it in headline.
[Tricia Howard]: I haven't like looked at anything yet, but man, when will it stop?
[Graham Cluley]: Well, yeah, exactly.
[Graham Cluley]: I mean, I'm there saying, of course, that there's a lot of information which hasn't been released still.
[Graham Cluley]: Yeah.
[Graham Cluley]: And if you go to the DOJ's website, it's kind of complicated to use because you've got to go through each individual, lean, and try and piece it together.
[Graham Cluley]: I actually came across earlier today.
[Graham Cluley]: there is an initiative to make it much, much easier to produce.
[Graham Cluley]: I found a website called jmail.world.
[Graham Cluley]: And what happens at jmail.world is they've completely replicated the Google Gmail experience.
[Graham Cluley]: You are now in Jeffrey Epstein's Gmail account.
[Graham Cluley]: So they've uploaded all of the emails, all of the images.
[Graham Cluley]: I've collected his flight plans, his Google Drive, and you can see everything through the Gmail platform.
[Graham Cluley]: So you can search just as easily as you can in Gmail.
[Graham Cluley]: You can look in his sent folder.
[Graham Cluley]: You can look for the names of certain public individuals.
[Graham Cluley]: And it will show you all of their emails.
[Tricia Howard]: Wow.
[Tricia Howard]: but a weird cosplay.
[Graham Cluley]: Okay, it's just J-Mail.world.
[Graham Cluley]: Anyway, that's one way which you can begin to peruse all this stuff if you are so interested.
[Graham Cluley]: But like I said, we're talking millions of pages.
[Graham Cluley]: And one of the documents in there has caused some ripples in recent days in the cyber-security industry because buried in the Epstein files is a document from 2017.
[Graham Cluley]: when an unnamed FBI informant made a claim.
[Graham Cluley]: They claimed that Epstein had his own personal hacker.
[Graham Cluley]: Now,
[Graham Cluley]: I don't know whether to be surprised by that or not, because I think a lot of people with a lot of money may well have a legitimate reason for hiring a hacker.
[Graham Cluley]: Yeah, sure.
[Graham Cluley]: I mean, it may be for the benefit of their own operational security.
[Graham Cluley]: They may want to hire a hacker just to say, you know, am I protected?
[Graham Cluley]: Is my information secure?
[Graham Cluley]: Can I prevent myself from being hacked?
[Graham Cluley]: Maybe Jeffrey Epstein was a quaint in himself with people who might have the methods for hacking into his organization and reading his emails and he may be slightly nervous about that.
[Graham Cluley]: You can easily understand.
[Tricia Howard]: I mean, it was all above board.
[Graham Cluley]: Oh, yeah.
[Graham Cluley]: Anyway, the thing is, this document came to light.
[Graham Cluley]: It has been dug out, but of course it's been redacted.
[Graham Cluley]: The name of the alleged hacker as well as the informant has been blacked out.
[Graham Cluley]: It's hidden from view.
[Graham Cluley]: But the document goes on to tell us various pieces of information about this alleged hacker.
[Graham Cluley]: who it claimed was in contact with Jeffrey Epstein, it says he's an Italian citizen, it says where he was born in Italy, it tells us that he was known for finding zero-day vulnerabilities in iOS and Blackberry and Firefox.
[Graham Cluley]: It tells us even that he sold his company to a major cyber security firm, which they name in the document.
[Graham Cluley]: It says he sold his company to them in 2017.
[Graham Cluley]: It tells us he became a vice president, adds that company following the acquisition.
[Graham Cluley]: So how long do you imagine it takes people to work out who this redacted individual
[Tricia Howard]: And now, it's honestly rather petty, isn't it?
[Tricia Howard]: Like, instead of just saying what it is, it's like, listen, we're gonna dangle these carrots around.
[Tricia Howard]: Knowing the community that they're talking to by the way, which is made up of a bunch of us who'd literally put the carrots together.
[Tricia Howard]: I mean, this is petty, that's petty.
[Graham Cluley]: I see what you mean.
[Graham Cluley]: I mean, I can totally see how you might imagine they're kinda dangling this for us as almost like a parlor game.
[Graham Cluley]: But the truth is, I think this was done through incompetence.
[Tricia Howard]: I think that- Oh, man, that's so much less fun.
[Graham Cluley]: It is less fun, I'm sorry.
[Graham Cluley]: But, you know, it took me about two minutes to work out the name of the only person this could be.
[Graham Cluley]: And judging by online discussions I've seen,
[Graham Cluley]: everyone else pretty much figured it out just as quickly and some people just took that information as to where he was born and what he did and the company that he went to work for they put it into an AI and it just spat out the answer immediately back to the home.
[Graham Cluley]: So you didn't have to be Sherlock Holmes.
[Graham Cluley]: This wasn't sophisticated detective work.
[Graham Cluley]: This is just the U.S. Department of Justice redact in a name while leaving in what amounted to a biographical fingerprint of something.
[Graham Cluley]: Is it like, if I said to you, look, I'm not going to tell you the name.
[Graham Cluley]: Right.
[Graham Cluley]: There's a famous physicist.
[Graham Cluley]: He's got wild white hair.
[Graham Cluley]: He's good.
[Graham Cluley]: Looks a bit crazy.
[Graham Cluley]: He stuck his tongue out in photographs.
[Graham Cluley]: Came up with E equals MC squared.
[Graham Cluley]: You know, you know who I'm talking about.
[Graham Cluley]: Or if I say, I'm not going to name the current US president, but he's a bit orange-yude.
[Graham Cluley]: He's a reality TV host.
[Graham Cluley]: He lives in Florida a lot.
[Graham Cluley]: Loves to big up his achievements and inflate the number of wars that he's fixed.
[Graham Cluley]: You know, you don't really hide anything at all if you do something about, are you true?
[Tricia Howard]: No.
[Tricia Howard]: In fact, this is exactly what we tell people not to do on social media, which is kind of funny.
[Tricia Howard]: Like being careful about putting out these little breadcrumbs in our digital presences, literally to avoid what happened.
[Tricia Howard]: I find it just so funny that it was so...
[Tricia Howard]: I guess in my mind, the reason I thought it was deliberate, and that's not entirely serious about that this is more for humor's sake, but it's just because it is so wild to me, some of these things you could get away with, right?
[Tricia Howard]: Like, some things could be a little bit more generalized, but you don't get any more specific than saying, hey, we sold this company and they became a VP of the company.
[Tricia Howard]: I mean,
[Tricia Howard]: What?
[Tricia Howard]: Like, anybody has LinkedIn configured this out?
[Graham Cluley]: Oh, yeah.
[Graham Cluley]: Yeah.
[Graham Cluley]: Absolutely.
[Graham Cluley]: And I can understand the challenge to those agents who are tasked with the job of going through millions of documents and overarching details.
[Tricia Howard]: Especially with the content of course.
[Tricia Howard]: Yes.
[Graham Cluley]: Yes.
[Graham Cluley]: Absolutely.
[Graham Cluley]: So I mean, it may be that they didn't pay enough attention to this.
[Graham Cluley]: Now, I want to be really clear.
[Graham Cluley]: This document contains allegations from a confidential FBI informant.
[Graham Cluley]: They're not proven facts.
[Graham Cluley]: This is just one source making claims.
[Graham Cluley]: We have no way of knowing how reliable that source was.
[Graham Cluley]: But what is clear if you look at places like jmail.world or DOJ's website?
[Graham Cluley]: Epstein and this particular individual were in contact.
[Graham Cluley]: There were emails, albeit fairly mundane communications, a range in meetings and things.
[Graham Cluley]: But where it gets interesting, I think, for the cybersecurity world, is that the informants claims, if you take them at face value, they paint quite an alarming picture.
[Graham Cluley]: So, they are ledge that this alleged hacker developed zero-day exploits, as we know.
[Graham Cluley]: Sold them to multiple governments, including the United States and the UK, and also allegedly to Hezbollah as well.
[Graham Cluley]: Apparently it was paid for with a trunk full of cash, and that he helped establish a Middle Eastern government's cyber surveillance program as well again, these are unverified claims from the single source.
[Graham Cluley]: We don't know if any of this is true, but if we look through the implications here.
[Graham Cluley]: What about this company that acquired this guy's startup back in 2017?
[Graham Cluley]: They are one of the biggest names in enterprise cybersecurity.
[Graham Cluley]: Their software runs on so many hundreds of thousands of endpoints across countless major organizations worldwide Their technology is trusted to protect
[Graham Cluley]: Sensitive systems, critical data, all over the planet, right?
[Graham Cluley]: Now imagine you are a CSO at a Fortune 500 company who's a client of that particular well-known cybersecurity firm which it appears hired this guy that the allegations were made about by this informant and you'll read in these headlines over your morning coffee.
[Graham Cluley]: What's going through your mind?
[Graham Cluley]: What would be go through your mind at that point?
[Tricia Howard]: Oh man, I think my initial reaction would just be like, woof, like that's rough.
[Tricia Howard]: Like I, like woof, I don't even know, because when you're thinking, oh man, that's such a different level of threat, I think, too.
[Tricia Howard]: It's when anytime you're dealing with anything governmental, I think the impact is just so much stronger.
[Tricia Howard]: And as in the private sector, don't, man, I don't know.
[Tricia Howard]: Well, that's, I honestly, I'll just be speechless.
[Graham Cluley]: Yeah, because even if the charts have been an actual problem, incredibly small, even if this is all just unsubstantiated rumor from a single informant that's leaked out because of the Epstein files being published.
[Graham Cluley]: You're now going to have to answer some questions your board might ask you, hang on, don't we use that company software, your security team's going to ask someone's going to want to know if there's any possibility, however remote that there could be vulnerabilities or backdoor in the software that your firm is now running.
[Graham Cluley]: And what are you going to tell them?
[Graham Cluley]: You don't know.
[Graham Cluley]: All you can do is say, well, you know, it's probably all right, but you haven't got total confidence there.
[Graham Cluley]: And this is the thing when it comes to trust, when it comes to cyber security, it's incredibly hard to build trust, but it's so, so easy to damage and fracture trust.
[Graham Cluley]: And so, this humongous security vendor who hired this guy who bought his
[Graham Cluley]: They haven't commented on any of this as far as I'm aware, and honestly, what are they going to say?
[Graham Cluley]: They're going to say, oh, we've vetted him when we acquired his company, and we're confident he didn't even he back doors behind when he left, and hopefully that's right.
[Graham Cluley]: but some people are still going to be nervous.
[Graham Cluley]: And that guy, meanwhile, set up his own identity security company.
[Graham Cluley]: What did their customers think?
[Graham Cluley]: If they've even the tenious, tiniest suspicion that their CEO might have engaged in some shady practices in the past?
[Graham Cluley]: It makes you nervous, doesn't it?
[Graham Cluley]: You may think it's a safer thing to do to go with someone else for which there aren't any people spreading rumors about.
[Tricia Howard]: I mean, that's the brand impact of this, right?
[Tricia Howard]: Like any time we talk about a major, a major incident like this, brand impact very closely follows.
[Tricia Howard]: And this is a terrible example of that.
[Tricia Howard]: I mean, because now not only do you have the potential technical issues, but now you have the social implications of this as well.
[Tricia Howard]: So we've seen this with some other vendors who have made decisions to keep certain hate speech things alive on their platforms, et cetera, and the way that the community and the rest of the world responds to that.
[Tricia Howard]: So now not only are you having to justify
[Tricia Howard]: that you need this product in the first place because often security is trying to fight for budget anyway.
[Tricia Howard]: Now you have this solution and they're like, yo man, we can't have anything that comes close to touching the website thing obviously.
[Tricia Howard]: So yeah, that's it.
[Tricia Howard]: That's just a whole other whole thing.
[Graham Cluley]: It's kind of scary, this whole grey market where researchers are finding un-patched vulnerabilities and selling them to governments and some people will be happy to sell them to Western governments, some people won't be happy about the idea of insult Western governments.
[Graham Cluley]: Some people will say selling to Israeli intelligence is fine, others will say no, it's not, some will say sell into his followers, fine, they're an acceptable customer, others will say no, they're not.
[Graham Cluley]: But what kicked all of this off is this reduction failure.
[Graham Cluley]: And you know, you can black out names all you like, but if you leave in nationalities and regions of birth and vulnerabilities, they were known for research and all names of the companies there, quiet, you know, all this kind of information.
[Graham Cluley]: You haven't redacted anything mean in full at all, and I think what we all have to do now, just like you were saying, you know, when we post up on Facebook about our kids going to school or, you know, when our birthdays and things like that, and we hopefully are moderating ourselves and thinking, or could these all be little breadcrumbs which could reveal more about me than I wanted?
[Graham Cluley]: organizations need to think about this too, because in this age of Google and LinkedIn and AI, a collection of specific biographical facts is an identity.
[Graham Cluley]: It is a way of identifying somebody, and it appears that the Department of Justice didn't learn that.
[Graham Cluley]: So it's not a technical failure, the redaction itself that was properly implemented on this occasion, they're having other times
[Graham Cluley]: and we can undo it, but this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to anonymise someone in 2026.
[Graham Cluley]: And like I said, you know, I think as organisations we all need to think about what a good reduction process is today, because how many supposedly anonymised documents are out there right now with the same problem names removed, but identities completely obvious.
[Graham Cluley]: to anyone who spends two minutes thinking about it, or asking an AI to help them think about it.
[Graham Cluley]: It's probably more common these days.
[Tricia Howard]: And we're at what speed, right?
[Graham Cluley]: Well, let's take a moment now to thank one of this week's sponsors, META.
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[Graham Cluley]: Trisha, what have you got for us this week?
[Tricia Howard]: Oh boy, well, it's also governmental.
[Tricia Howard]: So I'm glad we're on a theme here.
[Tricia Howard]: So last time I was on, you talked about some amazing research that Anthropic had come out with and was showed that a lot of the LLM's are actually super chill with blackmailing and ordering murder as long as they stay intact.
[Tricia Howard]: And so I thought it might be funny to follow up with that with another story that came out very recently.
[Tricia Howard]: which is one of those that like is so funny because if you don't laugh, you're gonna cry sort of situations because the universe like really committed to the bit on this one.
[Tricia Howard]: The head of CISA, that's the cybersecurity infrastructure, you know, the government thing.
[Tricia Howard]: Uploaded sensitive government documents into the
[Tricia Howard]: public version of chatGPT.
[Tricia Howard]: So I want to take a second here if you're not familiar with like how LLM's work and all that stuff.
[Tricia Howard]: When you get in with OpenAI or Anthropica, etc, you have the potential to create your own hosted version of it.
[Tricia Howard]: Anything that goes through it, taste internal, it doesn't actually get used in any of the learning models.
[Tricia Howard]: It's truly your own thing.
[Tricia Howard]: That's not what we're talking about.
[Tricia Howard]: We're talking about like the one that everybody uses, like the one that you use to make sure that your emails aren't too aggressive or ask how to explain existentialism like you're five.
[Tricia Howard]: So these documents, I want to point out to, we were talking about like redaction and how do you decide what needs to be put out there and and whatever we have classifications in place for this exact thing and this one was called for official use only and last time I checked putting it into the public chat to be to get it's not exactly official use.
[Graham Cluley]: Yeah.
[Tricia Howard]: not recommended is that I would say that if you were looking at like good cyber security hygiene practices putting government sensitive documents into the public one is not like high on my list right but I don't know maybe I'm old fashion so here's why I find this story so freaking fascinating because as we get new technologies in like AI and all these other
[Tricia Howard]: wonderful digital connected things.
[Tricia Howard]: The easier it is for bad things to happen with significantly less technical barrier to entry.
[Tricia Howard]: So depending on what was in the documents, right, this could have been a potential massive breach that happened by the government head.
[Tricia Howard]: Okay, that's it.
[Graham Cluley]: And this is this is the head of the cyber security and infrastructure security agency.
[Graham Cluley]: Who you would think would understand about cyber security, you know, and the defense of data, right?
[Tricia Howard]: I mean, you'd think so.
[Tricia Howard]: Like, I thought that that was implied, but like, I don't know, it's 2026, maybe we should just throw it all out the window.
[Tricia Howard]: So, oh, whoa, it's so interesting to me that as technologists, as security people, we love to focus on the technical problem, right?
[Tricia Howard]: And what is amazing to me about that is that every technical problem was still created by a human.
[Tricia Howard]: even everything that comes out of CHATGPT, that was built off of a ton of human interactions that are now collated, right?
[Tricia Howard]: So, arguably, every threat is a human threat.
[Tricia Howard]: And especially when you're dealing with stuff like this, what's even scarier is they actually did have tools and things in place for DLP and all that stuff, which did fire, it did alert and nobody caught it, even still.
[Tricia Howard]: Oh yeah, not until after it had already happened!
[Tricia Howard]: Yay!
[Tricia Howard]: So this actually happened last summer, 2025, and they're only just now coming out with what has happened.
[Tricia Howard]: Yeah, big scary.
[Tricia Howard]: Huh?
[Graham Cluley]: Now, interference of this person who is the head of Caesar.
[Graham Cluley]: They're relatively new to the job, aren't they, because it's an interim.
[Graham Cluley]: Yeah, until fairly recently, it was Jenny Stallise, who was in charge of CISA, who I think was fairly beloved by the cybersecurity community, and she was fired by the Trump administration, and she's now heading up the RSA conference, which is going to be happening in San Francisco in a couple of months.
[Graham Cluley]: And I even heard that the U.S. government isn't going to be sending officials from C. So, too, the RSA conference, which, for anyone who doesn't aware, is probably the biggest cybersecurity conference, it's the biggest collection of minds and knowledge and the industry in the entirety of the United States, if not the world.
[Graham Cluley]: It's one of the biggest cybersecurity events, so they're boycotting it, because the former head of C. So is now in charge of it, which seems again, rather short-sighted.
[Graham Cluley]: I can't imagine that Jenny Stanley would have been uploading these documents to chat GPK.
[Tricia Howard]: Now, it's funny.
[Tricia Howard]: I don't think so either.
[Tricia Howard]: No.
[Tricia Howard]: That's so funny.
[Tricia Howard]: Yeah, I agree.
[Tricia Howard]: I'm with you on that.
[Tricia Howard]: I do want to take a second here.
[Tricia Howard]: Insider Thread is easy to do.
[Tricia Howard]: It is because, frankly, a lot of Insider Thread is not malicious.
[Tricia Howard]: Yeah.
[Tricia Howard]: We created the internet and told people to click on things.
[Tricia Howard]: And then we created security and said, don't click on things.
[Tricia Howard]: What?
[Tricia Howard]: Obviously people are going to click on things.
[Tricia Howard]: So it's...
[Tricia Howard]: No, anyway, I am a huge defender of users in a lot of ways because it is often an accident.
[Tricia Howard]: I don't necessarily think this was intentional obviously, but that's a big accident.
[Tricia Howard]: And I think when we're talking about the governmental level, and this was the head, right?
[Tricia Howard]: So that's the other issue.
[Tricia Howard]: It's not as if this was an underlying who did this.
[Tricia Howard]: So this was the head of the organization, who answers to that?
[Tricia Howard]: Who is there?
[Tricia Howard]: Like, what is the failback mechanism for whenever the person who is the leader is the one actually making the mistake?
[Tricia Howard]: It's a very interesting issue, and it's going to get even worse, the more that we integrate these AI tools, because again, the easier that something is to use for a non-technical person, the easier threats can happen, because you're just allowing people opportunities to upload very sensitive information, even things that may not seem like it's sensitive to you.
[Tricia Howard]: It might not be, but to your competitor, that might be exactly what you need.
[Tricia Howard]: So it's, oh, it's just such an interesting time that we are in.
[Tricia Howard]: I've always talked about the human threat in security.
[Tricia Howard]: I think it's huge.
[Tricia Howard]: I don't think that we focus on it enough, even though we talk about it a lot, we don't do it right.
[Tricia Howard]: And this is another example of how this can happen.
[Tricia Howard]: In a very real, very real scenario, government documents were now at risk, yay.
[Graham Cluley]: And I'm reading this article right now, which we've linked to in the show notes from political.
[Graham Cluley]: And it suggests that normally the Department of Homeland Security does have a policy of blocking access to AI tools.
[Graham Cluley]: It doesn't allow people normally to upload these kind of things.
[Graham Cluley]: And it sounds like...
[Graham Cluley]: the interim head they actually were given permission they requested permission to use it were given the permission and then the alarm bells went off and it's like whoa no it's the age-old story of the bosses think well those rules don't apply to me.
[Tricia Howard]: I mean I can't imagine where they got that idea I mean it's not like our it's not like that's happening in everywhere else in the government too so I guess you know my with the situation you're saying
[Graham Cluley]: You know I'll get complaints.
[Tricia Howard]: Oh, sorry, cut that out there.
[Graham Cluley]: I get all the feedback, you know.
[Graham Cluley]: I never ever say anything bad like that, but you've gone ahead and you've upset a percentage of our, um, to be honest, most of them are probably lent to really, but anyway, sorry.
[Tricia Howard]: Sorry.
[Graham Cluley]: Okay, before we go any further, we've got time to check quickly about one of our sponsors today, Vanta.
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[Graham Cluley]: Pick of the week is the part of the show where everyone chews sunlight, could be a funny story, a book that they read a TV show, a movie or record a podcast or a website or an app.
[Graham Cluley]: Whatever they wish it doesn't have to be security-related necessarily.
[Graham Cluley]: Well, last week, my pick of the week was the movie Plight Society, which I greatly enjoyed, and watching that sent me down a rabbit hole to find other things that the writer and director of that movie had done, which brought me to a place I'd never been before,
[Graham Cluley]: I give you, we are Lady Parts.
[Graham Cluley]: Are you familiar with Lady Parts at all, Trisha?
[Graham Cluley]: I should not ask such a indelicant question.
[Tricia Howard]: I see.
[Tricia Howard]: How do you want to answer this, Grant?
[Graham Cluley]: So, anyway, I'll save your blushes.
[Graham Cluley]: We are Lady Parts.
[Graham Cluley]: is a sharp, funny, punk-powered TV sitcom from Channel 4 here in the UK about an all-female Muslim punk band trying to survive friendship and find their way in the world all seems through the eyes of a geeky microbiology PhD student.
[Graham Cluley]: She's on the lookout for love and she finds herself recruited to be the band's unlikely lead guitarist.
[Graham Cluley]: and it's great.
[Graham Cluley]: It's really fun.
[Graham Cluley]: It's properly funny, great characters, cracking dialogue, and it's got a super soundtrack.
[Graham Cluley]: They have songs like Bashir with a good beard and my personal favourite, Voldemort under my head scarf.
[Graham Cluley]: It's an awful lot of fun.
[Graham Cluley]: It came out a few years ago.
[Graham Cluley]: I think it may still be going.
[Graham Cluley]: There's been at least two series of it so far.
[Graham Cluley]: Oh wow, that's great.
[Graham Cluley]: But it's smart, it's not smug, it's political without being preachy, it's refreshingly free of all those normal cliches you get in sitcoms.
[Graham Cluley]: The episodes are bite sized, it's well worth your time, each episode's about I don't know, 20 or 25 minutes.
[Graham Cluley]: Really entertaining, really enjoyed it, and it is.
[Graham Cluley]: We are Lady Parts, and that is my pick of the week.
[Tricia Howard]: Amazing.
[Tricia Howard]: I hope that it's on Britbox.
[Tricia Howard]: Oh, I hope so.
[Graham Cluley]: I'm sure we're better to find somewhere you can watch it.
[Tricia Howard]: That's sure.
[Tricia Howard]: I'm sure.
[Tricia Howard]: Trisha, what's your pick of the week?
[Tricia Howard]: My pick of the week, Graham, is the Shakespeare notebooks Doctor Who Edition.
[Tricia Howard]: Oh.
[Tricia Howard]: So this is a very silly little book that takes the original quote unquote Hamlet and wrote it with how it was actually intended, which was as if Doctor Who found it and was involved with the actual story.
[Tricia Howard]: Harper Collins, I believe, is the publisher.
[Tricia Howard]: And the whole book is written in Shakespeare type dialogue.
[Tricia Howard]: And it introduces, I mean, it actually reads like the real Shakespearean play, but with Dr. Who dialogue and characters.
[Graham Cluley]: Oh my goodness, are these stories which have been interspersed with zygons and ice warriors and Doctor Who Baddies like that?
[Tricia Howard]: Oh yeah, oh yeah, I mean, there's a doll like and a Cyberman right on the cover?
[Graham Cluley]: Well, they have to do that, don't they?
[Tricia Howard]: They got an X-Towermanite and you can't have anything, Doctor Who that doesn't have a doll like involved.
[Tricia Howard]: Is it just Hamlet or are there other shakes this, there are others in fact, Romeo and Juliet makes an appearance, let's see what else they have here.
[Tricia Howard]: Mid-Summer Nightstream, and I just started reading it, so I'm only in the first part of it, but it is hysterical.
[Tricia Howard]: If you like theater or Shakespeare, or you just really enjoy a nice crossover, highly recommend.
[Tricia Howard]: They have a Star Wars one too, which is good.
[Graham Cluley]: Oh cool, and all these set out as plays, or are they set out as pros?
[Graham Cluley]: I mean, could you perform if you wanted to, the Doctor Who version of Mid-Summer Nightstream?
[Tricia Howard]: I would be insulted if someone didn't.
[Tricia Howard]: Yes, you can.
[Tricia Howard]: You can, in fact, it is actually set up like a play.
[Tricia Howard]: It's great.
[Graham Cluley]: So if I ever wanted to delight my doctor who love in friends with my particular bottom, I'd be able to go ahead and do that.
[Graham Cluley]: That's right.
[Graham Cluley]: Fantastic stuff.
[Graham Cluley]: Okay, the Shakespeare notebooks we will link to it in the show notes.
[Graham Cluley]: And that just about wraps up the show for this week.
[Graham Cluley]: Thank you so much, Trisha, for joining us.
[Graham Cluley]: I really appreciate it.
[Graham Cluley]: Where can people follow you online and find out what you're up to?
[Tricia Howard]: Oh, yes.
[Tricia Howard]: The best place to find me is on LinkedIn, believe it or not, under Trisha Kickstarter.
[Tricia Howard]: So that's SAAS.
[Tricia Howard]: If you just search Google for Trisha Kickstarter, that is the first one that comes up.
[Tricia Howard]: So that's about it.
[Tricia Howard]: And thank you so much.
[Tricia Howard]: It's such a joy to talk to you and be part of the show.
[Tricia Howard]: So thank you for having me again.
[Graham Cluley]: Uh, always a pleasure.
[Graham Cluley]: And of course, smashing skirties on social meters, well you can find me Grand Cluelly on LinkedIn or you can follow smashing security on blue sky or red it or Master done.
[Graham Cluley]: And don't forget to ensure you never miss another episode, follow smashing security in your favorite podcast apps such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Pocketcasts.
[Graham Cluley]: The episode show notes, sponsorship info, guest lists, and the entire back catalog of 453 episodes.
[Graham Cluley]: Check out smashingsecurity.com until next time.
[Graham Cluley]: Cheerio, bye-bye!
[Graham Cluley]: Sayonara!
[Graham Cluley]: Well, you've been listening to Svashin' Security with me, Graham Kluley, and thanks so much to Trisha Howard for joining us this week, and to this episode, Sponsors Mita, Vanta, and Passwork.
[Graham Cluley]: And, you know who else we've got to thank?
[Graham Cluley]: Yep, it's going to be our chums over on Svashin' Security Plus, our Patreon platform.
[Graham Cluley]: Let me dig into the hat right now, and pick out some names.
[Graham Cluley]: Who've we got here?
[Graham Cluley]: Okay, we're going to thank this week, Ryan Hall, Tepotastic.
[Graham Cluley]: Sounds less like a person and more like a limited edition.
[Graham Cluley]: Kitchen appliance, Adina Bogato-Brion, John W. 636B, still refusing to confirm whether they are a person or a software build, MJ Lee, who could easily be three consultants in a trench coat.
[Graham Cluley]: Steve B, who presumably is good friends, or arch enemies with John W, ask Leo, who arrives both with answers and an explanation mark.
[Graham Cluley]: And of course our latest privacy conscious recruit, example name, the patron saint of placeholder text everywhere.
[Graham Cluley]: Well, would you like the opportunity to have your name read out occasionally at the end of the show?
[Graham Cluley]: All you got to do is join smashing security plus.
[Graham Cluley]: For as little as $5 a month, you'll become part of our merry band and get early access to episodes without all of the annoying ads, just head over to smashinscurity.com slash plus, for more details of that, and you can support us in other ways, of course you can like, you can subscribe, you can leave a fide star review, or just tell your friends about the show, go on, spread the word, every little bit helps, and it really makes all the effort worth well.
[Graham Cluley]: I will be back next week and I hope you will too, I expect you to have your lug holes pressed firmly against your smartphones as I tell you the latest crazy stories of cybersecurity with a fabulous special guest until then.
[Graham Cluley]: Cheerio, bye-bye!