In This Issue

News

Toll hit with second cryptolocker, once again disabling customer bookings & call centre

Logistics/courier company Toll has admitted it's been hit with the Nefilim cryptolocker, only a few weeks after completing the restoration of services after getting totally owned by the Mailto cryptolocker. Customer bookings and contact centres are offline indefinitely - again. This isn't the same piece of malware spreading around because it was left remnant on some ancient system that got plugged back in, it's a second totally separate attack. Toll seems to think it got in via "exposed Remote Desktop Services". At least they'd know how to recover from it now that they've been through it recently?

Twitter wants to warn you before pressing send on an offensive or hurtful tweet

Twitter is testing a new feature that'll attempt to give you a heads up if your post has "offensive or hurtful language" before you push send on a reply to someone else's tweet. According to Twitter, they're "trying to encourage people to rethink their behavior and rethink their language before posting because they often are in the heat of the moment and they might say something they regret". Here I am thinking off the cuff hot takes that you regret 20 minutes later was Twitter's reason to exist, but apparently not. Instagram already has such a feature that'll warn you if you're getting spicy in the comments or in your post. I'd love details on the algorithms they use and what the people making those algorithms consider too hot to handle for social media.

Small bits of news from the last week that I didn’t think were important enough to mention when they were fresh

Here's some random news that I bookmarked the past few days but didn't think they were big enough to dedicate an entire paragraph to:

Not News

Telstra adds extra DNS filtering to help stem the flow of phishing and malware

Telstra has turned on what it calls "Cleaner Pipes" - DNS filtering by default (I think) on all Telstra internet connections. If users click on a known dodgy link (i.e: malware or a phishing site) they'll be re-directed to a warning like this. Of course it won't be perfect and stuff will slip through, but a baseline of filtering is probably a good idea for the majority of Telstra's customers. If you're not a fan of your ISP fiddling with DNS, Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 is a good choice or if you want to block advertising and tracking scripts as well as phishing and malware, NextDNS is what I use now instead of a local Pi-Hole instance. Unfortunately, most Telstra provided routers don't let you change the DNS settings (aarrgghdfghdfg) so you gotta change the DNS settings on each device instead of on your router.

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