shift change 2024-02-01

Welcome to your shift change, reports from the off-going watch to the oncoming on anything interesting in privacy, security, or intelligence. 

1. I cannot believe this needs to be said in 2024—but do not take an attackers word for it that an attack has been successful. If bad actors want to chase clout, let them chase clout (defenders can always use fresh data points for attribution in a thinning field of actors), but do not let them send you chasing cars. If ransomware payments are falling, don’t help hype a dying industry as it passes. 

2. The Russians play with DNS and knock .ru offline for a bit, which is a fun chance to remind everyone that it is always DNS, and the Soviet Union existed when we started handing out TLDs: .su (its a loose connection but h/t to whoever reminded me during the CTI Summit).

3.  The Electronic Frontier Foundation recommends a family password to mitigate AI voice attacks targeting...well, families.

4. The Markup’s final entries in their “Gentle January” a.k.a the easy-to-implemenet privacy upgrades: lie about your birthday to get promotions (huh?), fake your answer to security questions (so people don’t guess them and rest your password (you should be using MFA anyway), and don’t click on strange links (where they bury the good advice all the way at the end—turn off automatic image or object loading or have any files from email loaded in a sandbox).

Ok, so the Markup went out on a low note for these last recommendations, but it was a good, and gentle, January while it lasted.

## The shift change is a collection of timely stories of interest in the security, privacy, and intelligence worlds. Thanks for reading, and feel free to reach out to will@signaltonoise.fyi for any questions, comments, or thoughts on items you’d like to see highlighted (especially if its free, virtual training or networking events that could help the community as a whole).