Breach Events

About 540 homes are broken into every day in Australia, yet you’ll never hear about them on the news. It just doesn’t warrant the media’s attention, and people honestly aren’t interested in it. This breach is the digital equivalent of that. It happens all the time and nobody gives a toss. You’ve probably never heard of Calida Projects, I know I hadn’t. They are a small business in Sydney that does commercial construction services. Somehow they got on Akira’s radar and breached.
This one started last year, but is still in the final stages of being dealt with. On the 5th of December 2023, the ransomware group Akira hacked one or more internal systems at Nissan Oceana and copied out 100+GB of data. This took some of their systems offline for up to a month and exposed 100,000 individual’s personal data.
blackbasta has hacked 12 Australian companies that (presumably) share the same Hosted Virtual Desktop (HVD) provider.

Posts

Thoughts on the cybersecurity industry, the failings of organisations to secure data and the government’s piss poor effort to provide adequate governance and legislation.

Here’s my first piece of advice for tech teams trying to build secure technology. Specifically, for the exec, business owners out there. If you can’t afford it, don’t do it. Instead of writing a long boring document, I thought I’d try a comic narrative for this post 🙂
While ranting about shit IT security is a little cathartic and raises awareness, it doesn’t solve any immediate issues. And let’s face it, nobody likes hearing about problems. So to be more positive, I’m going to share some solutions you won’t like instead. I want to focus on advice for tech teams and execs, but there is one thing that everyone can do to improve cybersecurity, across every aspect of the tech industry. It’s even free.
Absolutists are annoying, smug, pain’s in the ass. They piss everybody off and make them uncomfortable. I should know, I’m an absolutist. I got feedback from someone I respect about one of my recent posts. It was along the lines of: “I get what you’re saying, but…”. Then they explained how I am describing/proposing things that can’t always be done in the real world. Practical limitations, politics, personalities etc get in the way of the goal. While I’ve heard it before, and made me cringe with an “ah fuck, I’ve done that thing again…”