This transcript was generated automatically, and has not been manually verified. It may contain errors and omissions. In particular, speaker labels, proper nouns, and attributions may be incorrect. Treat it as a helpful guide rather than a verbatim record — for the real thing, give the episode a listen.

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UNKNOWN. I think it was Twitter I logged out of, and I got a message along the lines of, thanks for logging out. You can log back in again later if you like. And I'm just going, I would never have known if you hadn't told me. You made me create an account. It took quite a while. I got to think up a password and give you my phone number. Not anymore. They don't do phone numbers, but, you know, for two-factor authentication. I would never have occurred to me that because I had to log in in the first place to use the account, that I might ever want to log in again.

Smashing Security, Episode 341: Another T-Mobile Breach, Theme Bleed, and Farewell Naked Security, with Carole Theriault and Graham Cluley. Hello, hello, and welcome to Smashing Security, Episode 341. My name's Graham Cluley.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. And I'm Carole Theriault.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. And Carole, this week we're joined by a blast from the past, someone who's been on the podcast since some of its very earliest episodes and someone we've both worked with for many, many years.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. Mr. Paul Ducklin. Hi, Duck.

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PAUL DUCKLIN. Hello, folks. Thanks for having me.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. Of course.

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PAUL DUCKLIN. Strange circumstances, I must admit.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. But what are these strange circumstances you refer to? Enlighten our listeners.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. What's going on, Duck?

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PAUL DUCKLIN. Well, unfortunately, on the very day we're recording, visitors who know me with my Naked Security persona, who visit nakedsecurity.sophos.com, will notice that the site's being archived to the Sophos news site. And I'm— I hope I don't tear up now. I think I'll be all right. And I'm leaving the company at the end of this very week.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. Crikey.

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PAUL DUCKLIN. So it's sort of the end of one era. But as my wife said, actually, it's the beginning of the next great adventure.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. And you've been there quite a long time at Sophos, haven't you?

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PAUL DUCKLIN. Yes, I was hoping to make 30 years, but I didn't quite get there. 28.5.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. Wow. 28 years. Graham, you and I did a long time. How long did you do there?

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GRAHAM CLULEY. I think I did about 13 or 14 years, which is nothing compared to Duck, is it?

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CAROLE THERIAULT. I did 15. So yeah, I'm half Duck. So you're twice as good. We sound like ex-cons.

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PAUL DUCKLIN. Disgusting.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. Well, well, pretty much.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. Yeah, that's pretty much it.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. Yeah, you'll understand. You're just still in shock. Just give it a bit of time. But before we kick off, let's thank this week's wonderful sponsors: Gigamon, Kolide, and Dorata. It's their support that helps us give you this show for free. Now, coming up in today's show, Graham, what do you got?

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GRAHAM CLULEY. I'm going to be discussing how sometimes being hacked can actually look better than the alternative.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. Okay, and what about you, Duck?

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PAUL DUCKLIN. I am going to be talking about theme bleed, as it was perhaps slightly inaccurately called. And there are lots of lessons we can learn.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. Mm-hmm.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. And I have a warning for all those who brunch with besties. All this and much more coming up on this episode of Smashing Security.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. Now, chums, chums. Last week, users of the T-Mobile mobile app— that's not me stuttering there— the T-Mobile mobile app for T-Mobile, they started complaining online about something they're experiencing. So they're going into their mobile phone app to check their account details. And when they did that, they found they weren't actually accessing their own bills and their own account information. They could see other people's details instead.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. You're kidding.

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PAUL DUCKLIN. Oh dear.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. So what? So I could go in and I'd be looking for my stuff to make sure I have enough data for the train or something. And I can see Duck's, Duck's bill.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. Potentially, it may have been Duck. Or whoever. Yeah. So you could see other people's names, their home addresses, their credit balance, their contact numbers, their device IDs, their credit card information.

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PAUL DUCKLIN. Wow. Did that include expiry and stuff?

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GRAHAM CLULEY. I'm not sure if it did. I'm not sure if it included all of that. And maybe some of it was redacted as well, I'm not sure. But certainly, it wouldn't make you feel very comfortable about how well T-Mobile was looking after your own data, of course, because if they're showing you other people's, the next logical thing you should be thinking is, could it be that my data is also being shown to other people?

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CAROLE THERIAULT. Right.

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PAUL DUCKLIN. I think, Graham, you'd be more likely to think, what's the chance that my data isn't being shown to people?

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GRAHAM CLULEY. Right. Right.

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PAUL DUCKLIN. In a way that I can't predict.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. Yeah.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. So people were posting up on this on Twitter, for instance, you know, with screenshots of people's account information saying, whoa, why am I seeing this? My name's not Claudia. They were saying, well, yeah, they didn't have all of the sensitive information there, but enough to show that it wasn't them. Or Android users were showing information suggesting that they had iPhones connected to their account.

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PAUL DUCKLIN. Oh, that would cause a ruction, wouldn't it? That's almost worse than people knowing your home address. If you're an Android fan and they think you've gone to the dark side, oh dear.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. So T-Mobile, they were replying to some of these users on social media. They're saying, well, thank you. Thank you for reaching out with your question about your account security. Could you send us a DM? We want to ensure your privacy and we'll look at your account and address all of your concerns, they were saying. But yeah, so some users, some T-Mobile users, they believed when they saw this other information, they thought, whoa, whoa, whoa. Am I a victim of some kind of hack? Has someone broken into my account, put their details in? Is someone else offering to pay my mobile phone bill each month? Exactly. This must be some kind of scam. Yeah. T-Mobile support though, they responded and they said to the media that it was actually, it was all the fault. There wasn't a data breach, they said. It wasn't a data breach. This was the fault apparently of what they called a technology update, not necessarily a technology update which you actually want. So they said there's no cyberattack or breach at T-Mobile.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. Now, we don't have to report this to anybody. Don't worry.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. My view is, and I'd be interested in you two, your opinion as well. Is this a breach or not? Because I think it is a breach.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. Well, if someone screws up basically in the coding.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. If someone's data is leaked. It may not be the work of a hacker, but surely that is a breach, isn't it, Duck?

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PAUL DUCKLIN. Well, it's certainly a data leak, and that's covered by things like GDPR and privacy regulations. If I log into my account, I should see information that I expect to see and I shouldn't be allowed to see, or it shouldn't be possible for me to see other personally identifiable information for other people. I suppose to try and see it from T-Mobile's side, maybe they're thinking when we say breach, it means that someone steamed in and uploaded gigabytes or petabytes of stuff. So I think—

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CAROLE THERIAULT. Or downloaded and held it for ransom.

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PAUL DUCKLIN. Yeah, whatever it is. But I think the difference between a data breach and a data leak, I think that's a little bit of a semantic game.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. It's definitely a privacy breach. Yes, I would say someone's privacy has been breached.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. For the customer, it is, of course, 100%.

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PAUL DUCKLIN. And the weird thing is that in a case like this, it's very difficult to discover what the scale is, isn't it? If you know the crooks have been in and they've got absolutely everything, then you can basically fall on your sword and say, look, as far as we can tell, they stole 62 gigabytes and it affected 14.5% of our user base, and we will contact each and every one of those people to tell them what to do next.

But when you know that X could have seen Y's data, and quite a lot of Xs saw quite a lot of Ys, how do you know just how much leakage there was? And how do you decide how controllable it was by the person who's viewing it?

So, you know, Graham, you log in, you see Carole's data, and you think, wow, that's bad. But if you're more of a sort of Axel type who thinks, wow, something's gone wrong, let me see if I keep logging in, will I get more and more and more?

Can I automate this? Can I scrape data?

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CAROLE THERIAULT. Right.

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PAUL DUCKLIN. Very hard to say. Who saw what?

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GRAHAM CLULEY. So T-Mobile did try and clarify a little bit about the scale of this. They said it was a temporary system glitch related to a planned overnight technology update involving limited account information.

And they said for fewer than 100 customers. And they said we quickly resolved it.

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PAUL DUCKLIN. Oh, so they think they got the lid on it.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. That's certainly their message. Yeah.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. They think they got the lid on it. They think they did it fairly quickly.

They say fewer than 100 customers. Now, from what I've seen online, it's not fewer than 100 customers who saw other people's information.

It was, according to T-Mobile, fewer than 100 customers who had their information exposed to God knows how many people.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. Right.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. And some people did say, I logged in every 15 minutes and I was getting different people's information each time when I was logging in. So I don't know if they would have cycled through 100.

But, you know, again, I think it feels to me T-Mobile are trying to downplay this a little bit, saying, well, not, you know, okay, not a cyberattack. I get that.

It does feel to me it is a breach to my mind.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. But credit card details were involved.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. Come on. And people's addresses and their names and, you know, whether they've got an Android or an iPhone, which is, as Duck has explained, is a dangerous thing to know about somebody.

One person on Reddit, they said it wasn't a breach, it was a data exposure due to sheer incompetence. And I think in some ways, this is actually worse than a breach.

Okay, maybe less people have been affected. No, it's not.

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PAUL DUCKLIN. What?

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GRAHAM CLULEY. No.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. No.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. But don't you think? Don't you think?

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CAROLE THERIAULT. No, I think it's bad. It's better that they got a lid on it and it wasn't a third party that infiltrated and stole all the data and then is holding it for ransom.

As far as a customer perspective, it still sucks that somebody saw my data and that I don't know who and I don't know how many.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. But how could something this happen?

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PAUL DUCKLIN. Well, you can imagine lots of different ways, can't you? At least it doesn't sound what do they call it, an IDOR, or was it insecure direct object reference where there's /55 in the URL and when you put 56, you get the next customer and 57 and 58, 'cause then I bet you somebody would've scraped as much as they could.

But it does sound as though some kind of database index in the backend got corrupted so that Graham Cluley's account pointed at Carole Theriault's account or whatever.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. Yeah, the thing is though, you understand, Duck, is that Graham never screws up, right? So it's unfathomable to him that this could happen anywhere. It's obviously just sheer incompetence.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. I also wonder how long this problem was present for because some people on Reddit were claiming, "Well, I've been seeing this for over two weeks."

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CAROLE THERIAULT. And I've said nothing?

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GRAHAM CLULEY. Oh, well, no, they say, "I told T-Mobile security team, but didn't get a response." And I was interested in that. I thought, "Well, hang on, what's going on in T-Mobile security team?" So I did a little bit of searching.

In middle of August, T-Mobile announced it was laying off 5,000 members of staff, mostly working in corporate back office and technology roles. So I wonder, is this why a bug like this managed to creep out there and was rolled out in this, quote, technology update?

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GRAHAM CLULEY. Hard to say. Some people actually, when the layoffs were announced, if you look back on some of those reports in mid-August, there were cynical journalists who said, "Well, I wonder if there are going to be more data breaches which follow because T-Mobile does have something of a poor history when it comes to securing data."

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PAUL DUCKLIN. Did you say cynical journalists?

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GRAHAM CLULEY. Yes, because I know it's—

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PAUL DUCKLIN. It's a sort of tautology.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. It's like military intelligence. It's the same kind of thing.

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PAUL DUCKLIN. Cynical or not, it is a good question. Like, will it have an effect? And I guess you'll never know, right?

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GRAHAM CLULEY. You don't know for certain, but it certainly didn't help them in this occasion, did it? I've been writing since 2018 about T-Mobile data breaches. Smashing Security, where hackers have stolen millions of customer details, names, phone numbers, billing addresses.

It's happened in 2018, happened in 2019. They stole employees' information and their emails and their customer account information in 2020, in 2021.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. Are you a preferred customer of theirs or?

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GRAHAM CLULEY. No. There was, there've been a couple of instances this year as well, actually. They exploited a weakness in the API.

They stole 37 million T-Mobile customer details in January. In April, and now this, now T-Mobile wants to set the record straight on this one.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. In April, there were stories that T-Mobile had suffered another hack involving employee details and names and Social Security numbers. And T-Mobile came out quite loudly and said, "Nothing to do with us. It's actually a third party called Connectivity Source."

And it was their customers and their employees who've had their names and socials and all that kind of detail stolen. Now, I went to Connectivity Source's website to find out more about them.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. And if you go to Connectivity Source, either on Twitter or on their website, try and tell me that they're not T-Mobile because all they've got are photographs of T-Mobile stores and staff wearing T-Mobile shirts. If you did business with Connectivity Source, you would think you were dealing with T-Mobile.

So yes, maybe it technically wasn't T-Mobile who was breached in that case, but I think many of their customers may have imagined the company was actually T-Mobile.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. So maybe if you're a T-Mobile user, you want to look at your Ts and Cs, you know?

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GRAHAM CLULEY. Well, maybe, maybe do a bit more than that.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. Maybe.

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PAUL DUCKLIN. And you certainly want to keep a closer eye than ever on your bank statements, just in case. You should always review them so you can complain whether you get money going out or coming in that you didn't expect.

But if you think you're at potentially higher risk than usual, just make sure that if you see something, you say something, because the sooner you point it out, the more quickly it will be sorted.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. Well, I think they've got a bad track record when it comes to data breaches.

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PAUL DUCKLIN. And that wasn't clear at all in your commentary.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. Well, but you know, also how many incidents don't we know about? How many times has this sort of thing happened and it hasn't been made public, or maybe even T-Mobile itself doesn't know about it?

If it's happening with this regularity, you have to say to yourself, well, you know, am I sensible being a T-Mobile customer? Would I be wiser to go elsewhere?

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PAUL DUCKLIN. Will T-Mobile be sponsoring the next podcast?

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GRAHAM CLULEY. Yes, most likely not. Duck, what have you got for us this week?

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PAUL DUCKLIN. Well, as I said at the top of the show, ThemeBleed, which is the latest Wayne bug with an impressive name, you know, where someone decides instead of just calling it CVE-long string of digits that no one ever remembers, let's give it a fancy name. Now, I'll start by saying it probably wasn't a great choice of name because when you say something, something, something bleed, everyone thinks of Heartbleed, which is that infamous bug from what, 2014, I think it was, where OpenSSL leaked data.

And so I like to reserve that word bleed for bugs where you can't really control it. It's just that data comes out in the wash, and if you milk that leaking data systematically enough, eventually you end up with a giant bucket full of stuff that you can milk for potential secrets.

Now, this is a little bit different because it relates to a specific vulnerability that fortunately Microsoft patched this Patch Tuesday, and it goes around Windows theme files.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. What is a Windows theme? Does that affect how Windows looks on your computer?

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PAUL DUCKLIN. Yes. So it says, I want this particular backdrop, I want this sort of color contrast, I want buttons to look like that.

So, you know, it's the kind of thing that if you're a Linux user where these things are more flexible and more competitive, if you like, there's a whole world of themes out there, ones where the contrast is so terrible that only hardcore hackers can read, you know, brown text on a black background because why make life easy? All of that sort of stuff.

And I guess Microsoft puts a lot of effort into making its own themes look quite neat, but even on a default Windows 11, you can go in and you can say, well, I want to re-theme my computer. So instead of everything looking bright and high contrast, I want it a slightly darker theme, or I want lower contrast or whatever.

And these themes are controlled by files that imaginatively have the extension .theme. Theme, right? Right. And if you go to the right place on Windows, you can just search for a file called Aero, Aero.theme.

And if you open it up, not by double-clicking on it, but say open it in Notepad, you'll be amazed to find, and you'll love this, Graham, from your early days as a Windows programmer, it's a good old .ini file.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. Oh, lovely.

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PAUL DUCKLIN. Yeah. You know, square bracket, section name, load of settings like color equals 3, background equals 2. Path equals whatever.

And so you think it's just a text file, it should be mostly harmless. And the idea is that that theme file, which is just text, so it can't execute, it's not a script, can contain a line that says path equals, and then it gives a file reference to, if you like, the secondary part of the theme.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. Right.

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PAUL DUCKLIN. Which is a file format called amazingly.exe. MSStyles. I think it's Harry's brother, or maybe it's his cousin, I'm not sure. Arf, arf. Sorry.

And so MSStyles files, weirdly, well, not weird, it's not weird what they contain. They contain things like Windows resources, text strings for localization, little buttons and, you know, all the widgets and gadgets and smidgets that you need to theme the appearance of the computer. And you think, well, maybe they'll put it in a zip file or maybe they'll put it in an MSI file or some kind of well-known archive.

Amazingly, these MSSTYLES files are stored as Windows executables, so-called PE or portable executable files, but files that have no executable code in them, which is really weird, but obviously, it is weird.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. So that means you could inject code into it and it wouldn't— it's in the right place. Is that right?

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PAUL DUCKLIN. That's what I thought. That obviously that's a dumb idea. It's going to be because it's— they've chosen the executable format. That's obviously the bug.

Now, Graham, I thought weird when I heard that, but when you think about it, it's not such a crazy idea because as you remember from your Windows coding days, the nice thing about Windows executables compared to the old DOS-style ones is that you didn't just have to have executable code. You could pack in your icons and your resources and your text strings and all that stuff.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. Yes, that's true. Yes.

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PAUL DUCKLIN. In separate sections. And there's no rule that says you have to have executable code in there. You just don't have an executable section.

And it's fairly easy to validate that a program doesn't have an executable section. And so it means that that file can then be processed with normal Windows processing functions to get out things like resources, string names, buttons, bits of bitmaps, all of that sort of stuff.

And of course, because it's a Windows executable file, it can be digitally signed using the same technology and checked with the same API calls that a program would. So actually, amazingly, the bug wasn't caused by the fact that this style file is a thinly disguised executable.

It's caused by a secret feature that a researcher called Gabe_K discovered when he was decompiling the theme processing part of the Windows operating system. He discovered that when it's reading this file, one of the things it asks the file for is, what's your version number?

And, you know, themes haven't evolved much, it seems, in Windows, even on Windows 11. The version number you'd expect today is 4. So I presume it started at 1 and it's gone up exactly 3 times.

Great. But in the code, there was this weird bit that said, if the version number is 999, which coincidentally is the UK emergency telephone call number for our overseas listeners, then hey, do this special thing.

And this special thing is run off, find a DLL with a weird name. It's _vrf.dll. I've no idea what it stands for.

Maybe it's version revision function or version revitalization feature. Who knows?

So by poking this weird undocumented secret version 999 into this executable file that isn't an executable file, you trick the system into going and fetching a DLL and running it, presumably so that you can, as an emergency way of handling new file types before they're built into the operating system, fully or something. Now—

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GRAHAM CLULEY. It sounds like something a programmer built in for their own purposes, maybe.

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PAUL DUCKLIN. It does, oh golly, we might need this, so let's just keep 999 up our sleeve for when the emergency call comes in. Now, the good news is, of course, the programmers didn't go, okay, we require that the style file gets digitally signed, but we'll let you feed it any DLL.

So the DLL, when it comes back, is checked for a valid Microsoft digital signature. But it has what is known in the jargon, it's one of my favorite names for a bug.

It sounds like a character out of Tintin comic or something. It's called ToCToU, which is time of check to time of use.

Basically, the code goes like this. Open the file, read in the DLL, verify its digital signature, close the file, then load the file.

And there's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip. Because it turns out you can actually put the path name to be somewhere remote so that when Windows calls home to get the file, if the attacker controls the server that's serving up the file, they can determine, ah, it's the first time they're asking for the magic DLL.

Let's feed them a Microsoft-signed file. You can actually, it seems, just feed back a style file, even though it doesn't have executable code in, it's got a valid signature.

And then immediately afterwards, you see a second call coming in saying, hey, send me the file again. And guess what?

You just feed it whatever you want. You feed it a rogue DLL and poof, pwned.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. That's very sneaky.

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PAUL DUCKLIN. So it's a tremendous warning not to embed hidden features in your code, because while I understand the need for it sometimes, it's the kind of thing that, oh, if variable name equals 999, then weird extra thing. It's the kind of thing that code reviewers go, oh, it's too hard, I don't want to ask.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. Yeah. And I don't think it's company necessarily approved.

I know many a developer that would do this just as a CYA move. Right?

You know, I'll be able to get in and jiggery-pokery about it if I have a secret route in.

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PAUL DUCKLIN. Well, it wasn't supposed to be a secret route in 'cause it still checks for the digital signature. It just didn't check in the way that if you were doing it in mainstream code, you'd probably do it because it—

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CAROLE THERIAULT. Yeah.

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PAUL DUCKLIN. So they tried to do the right thing, but maybe you're right. It's just a coder thinking, you know what, I've got the specifications, I'm gonna do it like this, but I know what's going to happen.

It reminds me, you know, the very early days of development of the Apple Macintosh. Apparently Steve Jobs had this religious zeal that said, you must not allow more than 100 and what was it, 128 kilobytes of RAM.

I don't want this thing overheating. I don't want too many RAM chips in there.

It will never need more than 128K. And the developers just knew because the operating system was gonna be quite big, it wasn't enough.

And they secretly enabled it to be able to take up to half a megabyte, and nobody noticed except them. They kept it a secret.

And when it came out and people were complaining, oh no, there's not enough RAM, guess what? They had some headroom and it saved the day.

So yeah, I guess code 999, folks. If there's something that people want in themes or something that doesn't work, we can feed in this VRF, version revision feature.

And my advice is, even with the best will in the world, if you're a coder, don't do that. Your intentions may be entirely honorable, but is it the play Julius Caesar?

The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones. And you know, that's sort of what happens, right?

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GRAHAM CLULEY. There's a lot of Shakespeare. There's a lot of Shakespeare today.

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PAUL DUCKLIN. Is there?

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CAROLE THERIAULT. Maybe you should head to drama. Maybe that could be your new foray.

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PAUL DUCKLIN. We're doing a lot of Shakespeare. What was the other Shakespeare we had?

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GRAHAM CLULEY. Wasn't there many's a slip between the— I can't remember what it was. There was a bit. There was something dramatic.

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PAUL DUCKLIN. Yeah, it's not a Shakespeare quote if you don't actually say, "as Shakespeare said," then it's just talking.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. Krow, what's your story for us this week?

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CAROLE THERIAULT. Okay, so imagine that the three of us are at a little eatery, maybe in Oxford town.

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PAUL DUCKLIN. It's a city, don't call it a town, people get annoyed and then you have to listen to them for hours about it.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. And we're having a little chat about the good old days working together. And casually, as I stir my flat white, I mention—

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GRAHAM CLULEY. I presume you're gonna bleep out that name, are you?

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CAROLE THERIAULT. Of course I'm gonna do all the bleeping.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. Okay, all right, okay, yes.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. And I say, "God, do you remember that guy?" Do you guys remember that?

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GRAHAM CLULEY. Yeah, I remember.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. Well, you don't have to say his name very often.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. Okay. You don't wanna bleep out?

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CAROLE THERIAULT. No, no.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. Okay.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. Do you remember that guy? Do you remember that guy? And you guys might go—

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PAUL DUCKLIN. Oh, is that a prompt? Oh, is this, are we role-playing here?

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CAROLE THERIAULT. If we could, it'd be nice.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. The pathological liar. That guy.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. Okay, maybe that could be a word, but just, and perhaps we'd natter about this for a few minutes, right? And Duck would make us double over with laughter with the kind of improv. Yeah, he's enjoying the conversation so far about—

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PAUL DUCKLIN. I don't know how this works. So I'm just listening to you guys. It's fascinating because it's going to burst into a sort of cybersecurity bubble in a minute. To be honest, I'm actually imagining that Carole's sitting there and has got the flat white, which means I've probably got, if we're at the right coffee shop, my favorite place in Oxford to get an Americano, and I'm just enjoying it.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. I've got a sparkling water.

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PAUL DUCKLIN. Not a cranberry juice anymore, Graham? Have you grown up now?

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GRAHAM CLULEY. No, no, no. Too many calories. Yeah.

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PAUL DUCKLIN. Really?

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CAROLE THERIAULT. You know, we move on to new topics, you know, having our little separate drinks, right? Having satiated our appetites for remembering the not so good old days, as well as the fab ones. And, you know, that should be that.

However, unbeknownst to us, imagine that we have been gossip TikTok'd. What is that, you say? I know you're dying to know.

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GRAHAM CLULEY. What's gossip TikTok'd?

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. Well, in our old person parlance, right, it means someone overhears another separate group blathering away about something, figures out that they're shit slinging, and decides to film it. What? Exposing them for gossiping about— in our situation, it would be exposing us for gossiping about a guy called—

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. Okay, so we could be sat there having a little fun chat about a former colleague or maybe a rival security podcast.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. Sure.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. Slagging them off left, right, and center, and someone else is recording us. And what are they going to do with this recording? They're going to put it on TikTok?

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. Yeah, livestream it perhaps, or just post it to TikTok. And the idea is to alert the person they're shit talking about to let them know that they shouldn't be friends with these people.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. Right. So, well, he wasn't friends with us, was he? So that's fairly easy.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. Yeah, we wouldn't care probably a jot in our situation. But this whole viral — I hate the word — but popular TikTok meme started gaining popularity according to Know Your Meme, right? Because this TikToker posted a video in September showing a group of women at brunch badmouthing someone named Sarah.

And the TikToker reportedly explained on the video, addressing Sarah, they said that your coochie was out, you dressed sleazy. And then the TikToker points her camera at the table where the gossiping is going on and says to the viewers, hold on, I'm about to show you exactly who's talking about you, Sarah. And cue the amateur TikTok sleuths who digitally take flight to try and identify Sarah and warn her.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. Right. How do they do that then?

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. Well, they share the message. So this video is reported to have gathered more than 15 million views in 3 days. So that's probably how they're trying to reach her.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. Okay. So everyone's resharing it saying, do you know these assholes?

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. Kind of an exciting kind of feeding frenzy online.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. Right.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. And it's now known as the help me find Sarah, you know, brunch gossip TikTok. You know, hence a trend is born by people who think, well, hey, I can do that too. Because these gossip TikToks take few skills and potentially is limitless.

Because according to Rolling Stone, these types of posts tap into every requirement TikTok's algorithm rewards. It gets shares, it gets comments, it gets bookmarks.

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. No, but if it's livestreamed, it's got that, you know, hey, this wasn't a professional trying to game the system. This really happened.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. Another example from Rolling Stone, there's a 3-minute video. A TikToker tells her 160,000 TikTok followers that she's overheard a table of 3 bridesmaids gossiping about their wedding that they were recently in.

And the TikToker says in the video that the gossip went from tame to sinister, describing the women complaining about the bridesmaids' dresses, the wedding flowers, and how they were asked to style their hair. And she says in the video, you know, so she kind of goads it because she goes in the video and she goes, when I tell you, if I were that friend and I knew that these girls were talking about me like this, I would throw myself into traffic, right?

This is a girl who has 160,000 followers and this was viewed more than 1.2 million times. And what seems to be concerning is the call to action afterwards, right? So here's the story, find the person.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. Right.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. And it takes it from gossiping to almost policing.

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. So it's sort of in the end, what do you do? Dox the person, basically make them look bad.

And presumably if you're the kind of person who gets off on making these videos, then you kind of don't even need them to be real, do you? You can just film people talking about something and then just claim that what they were talking about was X or Y or Z or person A, B, or C, and sort of whip up a frenzy even though the conversation may have been either mostly or wholly innocent and not necessarily even referring to the individual concerned.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. Because you also hear just a snippet of it and make a whole judgment, right? You're not there for the entire call.

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. Yeah, there's probably quite a lot of people in, at least in the English-speaking world, called Sarah. Just got this inkling, you know what I mean?

So something like that can go an awful long way. And with the right sort of hints in the follow-up video, you could trick people into — air quotes, giant inserted here — finding the wrong person if you wanted.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. Look, I know you can't assume privacy in a public place.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. Yeah.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. But thinking if I'm a restaurateur and I allow people to come to my restaurant, I don't see my restaurant as a public place and I wouldn't take kindly to someone eavesdropping on a fellow diner. You know, to shame my patron. And I wonder if the actual establishment has any recourse.

And of course, what the fuck, like TikTok, do they not have any recourse for this either, to allow this to happen?

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. So Carole, you're talking about people distributing this video and they're resharing it in the hope that someone will recognize these people.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. Right.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. And so you're kind of relying on your followers and their followers. And, you know, it begins to escalate into potentially thousands of people resharing it, say, does anyone recognize these guys or whatever? But surely there's a potential here, though, as well to use technology because I was reading a story about this this week goes one step further as to what's going on on TikTok.

So there's an article by Joseph Cox. Joseph Cox was working for Vice and he and some of his mates have left Vice and they've now set up their own organization, 404 Media, where they're doing some great reporting.

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. Nice name, isn't it?

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. It's a great name.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. Yeah.

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. You sent me to one of their articles recently and you get 404 and you think, oh no, and there's the article.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. Yes. So they've got the logo and everything. Yeah, so, but anyway, they've been looking at this because there are now TikTok accounts where you can actually ask them, identify the person in this video.

And what they will do is they are taking screenshots. They're grabbing people's faces who could be in the background of videos or could be in the foreground, they're then putting those faces into sites like PimEyes, which we've spoken about before.

So PimEyes is a facial recognition database which spurts back at you people's employment, where they live.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. Social media accounts.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. But yeah, it does all of that. And so there have been people who've been finding, you know, they just see someone they fancy in a video. And so you could take this video you're talking about of these bridesmaids or whatever.

And rather than just, does anyone recognize them, pass them over to these TikTok accounts who are offering to do this for you using facial recognition technology.

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. Sort of like crowdsourced Clearview AI.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. Yeah. And TikTok isn't doing anything about this.

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. So these accounts that you appeal to, those are people who set themselves up as TikTokers whose hobby is finding, identifying, doxxing people. So they don't need to be using facial recognition. They could just have a bevy of followers hoping that one of them knows them.

It doesn't matter what the technology is that finds the person. They're there acting as unpaid, let's take our revenge on society.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. It could be that. I think they're gaining most of their followers, however, by simply putting people's pictures through things like PimEyes in order to get all that information. They then create their own video, which contains at first the original video and then has, it sort of pops up or something, the request from one of their followers.

Can you tell me who this guy is because I fancy him or something? And then up comes their social media profile and everything else and their name.

And so.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. But that could happen with any picture. Right, from anybody on the street, right? You could walk around with your phone just on video and do that.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. Absolutely. Absolutely. And people are feeling violated because they think they just had an innocent conversation with someone in a, you know, there's one guy who was, who said he was on holiday in South Africa and he, you know, someone just quickly filmed a little interview with him. Other people saw it and were intrigued as to who he was. And before he knew it, he was getting emails at his work. And thousands of friend requests and all sorts of things, which he did not want. And he didn't want his name out there.

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. Well, there was a cartoon in a recent Private Eye of the two blokes watching the Test cricket against when England were playing Australia. And the guy sitting with a hat with, you know, proverbial, the big wide-brimmed hat with corks on strings, which is supposed to mark him as an Australian. And he's leaning over and saying to the guy next to him, "Oh no, I'm not Australian, I'm English. I just don't want to get recognized by my boss because I called in sick this morning." You're just figuring that in the old days, you might get on television for a moment when the camera panned around the crowd.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. Yeah.

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. Today, when you're at a sporting event and people are waving their cameras around, how often are you just getting publicized to the world? Probably several times every day. So yeah, I don't know how you police that though.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. No, and the world is kind of, in my view, quite bonkers. Can I just show you something that I found during my research just to get your take on it before we close? Right. So it's called the egg crack challenge. Okay. And I've just put a link inside the show notes for you.

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. Yeah.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. So if you could just take a look at this.

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. Oh, are you going to Rickroll me back, Carole?

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. No, I will not.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. I'm, I'm, I'm watching a video of someone who's cracking an egg on her young child's forehead.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. Right, it's fucking disgusting.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. And she's laughing. She's laughing. The baby looks shocked and then bursts into tears.

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. And the kid's crying.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. But it's all right because it's been videoed to put up on TikTok.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. And it's humiliation thrums through all scenes. And it started off with people doing it with other adults. And then someone somewhere thought, hey, why not just do it on toddlers and children and babies? Fun. So, you know.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. You know what? I've got a solution to both this, both Duck's problem at the cricket match and to the egg crack challenge, which is we should all follow the guidance set by Lord Buckethead. And I don't know if you remember Lord Buckethead. He is a political candidate who stood in various British general elections with a great big bucket on his head.

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. Oh, did he take up the reins of Screaming Lord Sutch?

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. Yeah, yes. Yeah, he's in that vein. He's in the vein. So, when Boris Johnson or whoever, when a major political politician is up for election, you'll often get these sort of joke candidates as well. But if we all wore buckets over our head, that would stop our bosses recognizing us and stop the egg crack challenge.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. Yeah, good one. Okay.

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. Well, there's a famous American guitarist. He's a very, very good guitarist indeed, who goes by the name Buckethead. And every time he plays, he plays with a KFC bucket on his head.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. God, stink bug. Do you think he asked for clean ones, or do you think he's "Last night's will be fine"?

---

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And welcome back. Can you join us at our favorite podcast part of the show, the part of the show that we like to call Pick of the Week.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. Pick of the Week. Pick of the Week.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. Pick of the Week is the part of the show where everyone chooses something they like. Could be a funny story, a book that they've read, a TV show, a movie, a record, a podcast, a website, or an app. Whatever they like.

It doesn't have to be security related necessarily.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. Hmm, might be. What? You've got—

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. Well, it can be. That's all right. It can be, Carole. That's fine.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. It's my rules. Exactly.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. I changed my rules for this week. Yeah, doesn't have to be, doesn't mean it can't be.

My pick of the week this week, however, is not security related. My pick of the week this week is a documentary which I watched last night on the old Netflix.

It is all about freediving. Have either of you had any experience of freediving? I mean, have you ever gone to the bottom of a swimming pool and picked up a brick or something else unpleasant on the back of the bottom of a swimming pool?

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. I don't think that really counts as freediving, does it? Isn't freediving if you don't go 100 meters down, you haven't even started?

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. It's unbelievable. So this documentary is about an Italian freediver called Alessia Zecchini, and she keeps on breaking world records at freediving.

And it tells the story of her and Stephen Keenan, who's an expert safety diver. So they have— because this was the thing, right. So Alessia and her fellow freedivers, they go down 100 metres or whatever and come back.

But of course, they run out of air, right, because they're going very, very low down on one breath. They may be down for 4 minutes or whatever.

Extraordinarily long time. I was actually reading while preparing for this that the world record, there's some chap who goes freediving and he holds his breath for 24 minutes.

It's insane, isn't it? Absolutely. But anyway, so in this documentary, which is a beautifully filmed documentary, they show some of these people.

And of course, as they're coming back up, which is quite difficult in itself, they're almost out of the water. And quite often at that point they black out.

This is quite a common occurrence. And so there are safety divers there ready in case they black out because they have to revive them.

Because if you black out and your brain isn't getting any oxygen, obviously you could be brain damaged within a couple of minutes or dead. So it's quite horrific, quite an extreme sport.

Anyway, Alessia, this expert safety diver Stephen Keenan, she ends up in a relationship with. They are training and they are attempting to cross an infamous underwater arch in Egypt, which has claimed over 100 lives.

It's very far down. They're going to go under this arch.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. And come back up at the start. With no air supply?

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. No air supply, just the breath which you take at the beginning.

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. Oh, so that means they have to, whatever line they're on, they're going down, they have to unclip to go around the arch and clip back on?

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. Yes, I think they unclip or they hold it. I don't know what it is.

But yes, they have to free swim under the arch and then back up again. Right at the very beginning, you see this woman descend into deep, deep water.

And you just follow her the whole way. It's over 3 minutes.

And in your head, you're thinking, how can she still not have breathed? It's just going on and on and on and on.

It's a love story. It's also very emotional.

Did you cry? Carole, you know me. No spoilers, but it's a bit of a—

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. You blubbed. Graham blubbed.

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. Graham, that didn't answer the question, but—

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. Oh, he fell asleep. No, no, I know he didn't blub.

He fell asleep is what happened.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. I didn't fall asleep.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. So, what's it called?

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. It's called The Deepest Breath, and it is on Netflix. And that is my pick of the week.

Duck, what's your pick of the week?

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. Well, I'll be very quick. What with leaving Sophos and all that, I've got to tidy up my old email account to make sure that I haven't got personal bills going there. I'm desperately trying to do the right thing by my soon-to-be former boss who'll get my emails after I've left in case there are any bills left.

Because I've just got so used to, particularly to all the PR spam that you can imagine has built up after however many decades of dealing with journalists. I've just got used to ignoring it and just mostly hitting delete. But I think some of it, lots of it just gets left behind.

I suddenly actually started looking at a few of them today to see if it was worth unsubscribing. I realized that maybe this is a newish thing, but I've just missed how truly understandable so many of the communications from people who claim to be communications experts are.

The people who go, "I'm looping this back to the top of your inbox because obviously you didn't have time to look at it" by replying to their own mail, as though you're just thinking whoever fell for that?

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. This sounds like a nitpick of the week, doesn't it?

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. I didn't read it last time because it was horrible. And now you're saying, obviously you missed this because you were just too busy. You're going, I missed? I didn't miss it. I drove around it really carefully.

But then this morning I got one that said, and it was a PR release about, I need to talk to this person. And I kid you not, I've had to remove some of the words to make it into even into a sentence. But it says our CEO is available to discuss GDPR in NHS, DSPT and DTAC compliance.

And I thought, you know what, when it comes to health services, I'm really just looking for you to recommend some kind of lotion for a little insect bite I got.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. What does that mean? But Duck, would it be fair? I would say that perhaps maybe during your story, I got lost in all the acronyms that you take for granted.

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. I didn't put them in the headline. It wasn't the entire thing. That's true. Call us now. At least it's some understandable name. But it's just all letters.

And there weren't too many acronyms, if you think— So what's your pick of the week? Oh, this is supposed to be something that I pick because it's really great and you should do it too.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. No, no, it can now be a nitpick of the week. We've established this. If you want to have a nitpick.

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. Oh, I just picked it because I was so amazed that anyone would bother. I think just before coming, before setting up my mic to come on the show. Also, another example of this, I think it was Twitter I logged out of in my browser rather than on my phone.

And I got a message along the lines of, I think it goes something like, thanks for logging out. You can log back in again later if you like. And I'm just going, I would never have known if you hadn't told me.

You made me create an account. It took quite a while. I got to think up a password and give you my phone number. Not anymore. They don't do phone numbers. But you know, for two-factor authentication, I would never have occurred to me that because I had to log in in the first place to use the account, that I might ever want to log in again.

So that's my pick of the week is, come on, people. Communication isn't that hard, is it? Not that I feel strongly about it.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. He's very easy to work with, people. Super easy.

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. Oh, golly. Oh, thank you, Carole. I forgot about that.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. That was satire. Satire. That was satire.

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. And remember, if we're on the same team, I'm on your side. Right?

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. Yes, I can guarantee that. Yes, you are. Yes.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. Better to have him pissing out. Carole, what's your pick of the week?

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. Well, you know, my pick of the week's slightly security related. And it's close to our hearts, Duck, Graham, and Mark Stockley's and Anna Bradings'. And that is Naked Security, which we've talked about already.

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. Oh God, I'm going to tear up in a minute. Don't go too hard.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. It was our cybersecurity news site that we created way back from scratch. When was it, 2011? Is that right?

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. I don't know. No, it must have been 2010, October 2010. There you go.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. And it was really difficult to pull off because we had an extraordinary power play going on in the office. We had a meager budget, we had little time, but somehow we pulled it off, and it was fun, right? We had some good times, and we took—

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. And best of all, it was fun with a really serious side.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. Yes, we had it. I remember the dislike campaign we had when Facebook made one of its bullshit moves. We reported on breaches, arrests, campaigns, widespread malware, proof of concepts, everything.

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. That Facebook campaign, remember, our key thing was HTTPS everywhere. Yeah, they delivered it very quickly afterwards. And I like to think they did it more quickly because we made a keen point about it. And it wasn't drum banging. It was just saying, you guys can do this. You really can. You know, you're big enough to be able to get everyone across the line. And bless their hearts, love or hate Facebook, they were the first big org to do that, weren't they? And everyone else followed suit afterwards.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. I have to say, I've just gone to the Welcome to Naked Security blog post from the 28th of October 2010, which is of course on an HTTPS link. And my browser says connection not secure. Parts of this page, such as images, are not being transmitted securely. So I don't know, mate. Duck, I don't know if you've still got any contacts you can speak to. There may be some HTTP maybe on that page these days.

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. I'm sure there is. Yeah, maybe the links to the place where the images live.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. Or you could say, not my problem. My point is to say though, right, we did do some great stuff. We even managed to get our flagship software translated into Klingon. Do you remember? To celebrate the return of Star Trek movies.

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. I want to hear Graham singing YMCA in Klingon right now. We had YMCA in Klingon.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. I suspect the video we published of Klingon singing YMCA has been removed, however, by Sophos from its official YouTube channels.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. Thing is, guys, we may forget that we were award-winning. We had hits like a million hits a month, 1.5 million a month. And that was way back when.

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. I think over 2 million some months.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. Yeah. So, you know, and at the day of recording, it has been deactivated. The announcement has gone live, terminated, killed off after, what, 13 years? But I'm proud of it, actually. And I thank both of you for helping us make it. We created it together. We kept it alive. There are other people as well, like Mark and Anna and everyone else who's involved. And it was cool.

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. And Alice and Charlotte, don't forget those.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. And Yogi. Duck's been doing it single-handed the last few years though. He's been doing sterling work.

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. Yeah, since 2020, it's been article by Paul Ducklin, article by Paul Ducklin, article by Paul Ducklin, article by Paul Ducklin.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. My pick of the week, Naked Security, RIP, you'll always be in our hearts.

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. Onwards and upwards.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. Absolutely. Well, that just about wraps Duck Up for this week. I'm sure lots of our listeners would love to follow you online, Duck, and maybe offer you a job. Anyway, I'm sure lots of our listeners would love to follow you online, Duck. What's the best way for folks to do that?

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. X/Twitter, I'm @duckblog. You can find me on Facebook, Duck Blog, Instagram, and LinkedIn. I'm P. Ducklin.

Look for the little icon of a duck. It's a mallard, my favorite sort of duck. And yes, if you think that you could do with a fantastic writer, speaker, evangelist, company proselytizer, and person with a cybersecurity social conscience, I am looking for work.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. And you can follow us on Twitter @SmashingSecurity, no G, Twitter and LastPass have G. We're also on Mastodon.

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 Overcast.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. And shout out to this episode's sponsors, Drata, Gigamon, and Kolide. And of course, to our wonderful Patreon community.

It's thanks to them all that this show is free. For episode show notes, sponsorship info, guest list, and the entire back catalog of more than 340 episodes, check out smashingsecurity.com.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. Until next time, cheerio. Bye-bye.

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. Bye-bye. Bye.

Wow. Wow, I think that's our longest episode ever, Graham.

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. How long was that?

---

CAROLE THERIAULT. 1 hour 40. Jesus. No, we haven't.

---

GRAHAM CLULEY. No, it says 1 hour. I've got about 1 hour 10 here. We didn't start—

---

PAUL DUCKLIN. We didn't stop talking until half past the hour because Graham was moaning about it.

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CAROLE THERIAULT. Yeah, I think it's because I've had my headphones on for an hour and a half and my ears feel like they're gonna fall off.

-- TRANSCRIPT ENDS --