Finding a former Australian prime minister’s passport number on Instagram (2020)
mango.pdf.zoneIt's interesting how Tony Abbott, the former Australian prime minister, was genuinely interested in understanding the technology behind the hack.
It reminded me of a nice anecdote from Chris Miller's book Chip War.
When former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull was deciding whether to ban Huawei from the country's 5G network, he "bought himself a 474-page-book titled a Comprehensive Guide to 5G Security to study the topic so that he could ask better questions of his tech experts."
Nice to see politicians getting into infosec, I guess?
Additionally (but not the main thing here) being interested in other people and their story is also a sign of manners and charisma often found in person in the leaders and bosses of the world which many find surprising when they meet them.
Or hackers going into politics like Beto O'Rourke [0] aka Psychedelic Warlord, (former?) member of Cult of the Dead Cow [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beto_O%27Rourke [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_Dead_Cow
Wow. I had no idea!
> For security reasons, we try to change our Prime Minister every six months, and to never use the same Prime Minister on multiple websites.
Made me laugh.
This joke’s also a reference to the fast turnover Australia had around that time of prime ministers, due to them getting replaced by their own party.
Since then, UK has claimed the global lead on this. Sorry Oz.
While visiting from Africa l loudly said “Australia’s has more coups than the Congo” which nobody seemed to like
> Okay so I didn’t tell the spoon thing to Tony Abbott, but I did tell him what I always told my mum, which was: “Mum you just gotta press all the buttons, to find out what they do” > > He was like “Oh, you just learn by trial and error”. Exactly!
This resonates with me. I've quite often heard people say something like "I think I broke it", when they've done nothing of the sort with their computer. There's a general fear or worry that some (a lot of?) people have that if they don't use their computer with care, they'll ruin something.
Of course, you can ruin things, but that willingness to experiment is how I suspect many of us got good at these things. Trying, experimenting, breaking, and then fixing.
Pretty fun read. PNR / reservation / confirmation numbers are a pretty interesting method for allowing quick changes. Obviously sharing them is ill-advised. However, how is the general, non-technical layperson supposed to know any better?
> However, how is the general, non-technical layperson supposed to know any better?
Exactly the point made by the former Australian Prime Minister, Tony "speedos" Abbott when he rang the blog author directly to discuss the boarding pass issue and gave permission to post about this.
Or, as Former PM T. Abbott put it:
( Cut to Simpson's Bart gets the Boot in Australia episode scene where "Asking the PM" involves yelling out a window to a guy floating in a tyre in a dam )“You could drop me in the bush and I’d feel perfectly confident navigating my way out, looking at the sun and direction of rivers and figuring out where to go, but this! Hah!”Abbott the luddite, gave us copper internet and spent 400% more than promised to hobble the national broadband network purely for Murdoch's profits and favours.
Abbott stopped the nationwide FttP rollout (that had just begun after years of preparing) at about 5% so his political opposition predecessors got no credit for a nation building project (and Murdoch profited maximally and his media loves Abbott and the Liberals ever since)
He gave us a lot of other things as well. 10 years of climate wars among much else. I though he was the worst PM in my lifetime, but then along came Morrison…
I believe that shame goes to Malcolm Turnbull (as Minister for Communications in Abbott Gov).
A Co-worker of mine actually sent a lengthy email to him explaining the limitations and all he got back in reply was that he disagreed.
Yeah, Turnbull. Who you’d have hoped would have known better having previously been CEO of one of the country’s largest ISPs. I seem to recall a video where Mark Pesce publicly called him out on how short sighted his decision was and Turnbull just scoffed.
Print right at the top in bold: Confidential information please do not share for privacy reasons.
Stop posting pictures to social networking. Seems easy.
That's a lot of words to say that someone posted their booking details online so you could log in and see their phone number.
I'm pretty sure that a half-page executive summary would convey the information, but I still enjoy the post. It's not a CVE report, it's a personal account of someone who has done something that happens to involve a former PM. I'm sure that not everyone would like how it's written (some don't like this stlye of humour and everyone has a story out there that they wouldn't read again), but I personally don't mind it.
Actually he found the phone number and more info by using the browser devtools, the phone number wasn't rendered on the webpage.
But yeah, lots of text written in a way that's just a little too obnoxious for me.
No time was wasted in dedicating 30mins of my life to reading this. I bloody enjoyed that haha
Not quite the same level as this, but I had a coworker a long time ago that used to leave sensitive travel information out in the open frequently. After a few times of changing their rental car reservation from a corporate-compliant small car over to a minivan or 12 person passenger van, they came to understand not to leak sensitive data.
Previous Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24488224
The blogpost itself is a really entertaining read.
> The blogpost itself is a really entertaining read.
It could do without all the cringe, the irony of writing a "I'm so zany and wacky guys, you don't even know how wacky I am" blog post and calling other people cringe is next level.
Ah, the last time it has an editorialized title. This time the correct title. Please don't change the title, or we cannot find the previous submissions.
Yes I remember reading this before.
What a fantastic read. Thanks for posting this!
When Alex did this post live at a conference once it was even better I thought https://youtu.be/somze2DW7vs
Maybe I'm becoming a curmudgeon but this type of writing is annoying. So much prose, so many attempts at humour, all to say you entered someones booking# and last name on the airlines website.
Great writing. Really enjoyed it. And it is crazy how much extra data some companies put in their HTML even if not even used (seen this before in other industries)
It’s a good article, so far, but I mean, it’s a novella. Unfortunately, I don’t have 60-90 minutes to read through the entirety of it.
Yeah, that post could’ve been cut down by half but still retain the literary flourish the author desired.
Entertaining and informative enough to power thru, though.
He was lucky to get Booking reference number from Baggage receipt which otherwise would have been impossible
I’ve read this before. I’ve read other posts by this guy. I’ve seen this guy talk. I absolutely cannot stand the self-involved writing style. I love comedic, casual writing and speaking. This however is just trying too hard. You’ve gotta be really funny to put this much weight on the jokes, and this guy just doesn’t meet that high bar. It comes across as very cringey.
This sounds a lot like a “you” problem.
You should click the top-right 'hard mode' checkbox.
Omg
> he since-deleted Instagram post showing the boarding pass and baggage receipt. The caption reads “coming back home from japan looking forward to seeing everyone! climate change isn’t real ok byeee”
literally fake news article. what a world we are living in. The original instagram text is even visible. Author should be ashamed of himself
It's fairly obvious that he author adds elements of humor to his post that are quite easy to read through, for example...
"This was possibly the most pure and powerful Australian energy a human can possess, and explains how we elected our strongest as our leader. The raw energy did in fact travel through the phone speaker and directly into my brain, killing me instantly."
I don't think he's dead, do you?
It's not fake news, it's simply a joke.