Apparently major TV station want to run a story about a couple of us unpaid amateur threat hunters in regards to the poor cybersecurity in Oz and the fact that there’s only 3 of us (it seems) who are proactively threat hunting, effectively, doing the job of the gov/corps that are not doing themselves.
Reporter is interested in the unpaid/volunteer angle also. Why we do it? etc.
Bradley, should I mention/show Phish Report as a tool we use?
Any important talking points that should be mentioned about phishing sites/threat hunting that anyone has I will be filming in a weeks time and am open to suggestions.
5 Likes
Our PR team is going to have fun with this 
Wow! Awesome opportunity. I don’t know why governments don’t put more effort into consumer phishing so hopefully this has some impact 
No pressure to do so, but it’d be incredible if you do!
2 Likes
Do any of the kits you’re tracking have open log files? I’ve always found it most impressive when I can literally show people: here’s a phishing site and here’s all the people who have already become victims
2 Likes
Wait, we were on TV?
1 Like
The film crew will be turning up in exactly a week from now -
Bradley, we have sincerely appreciated letting us use Phish Report, and it has saved us countless hours in threat hunting, so I will do my best to get them to film the screen as we do a takedown.
My only concern is that my real name /email of real name is on the top right of PR screen.
Is there any way I can hide/change/remove that for filming? or use a temp account for the day of filming.
I have come across open logs before, showing visitors, but not much else. The logs didnt display any credentials. Probably because they were brand new. On night before, or day of filming, maybe someone can send us an active Phish site with open logs to show. TV will eat this up.
I’m told the TV show will be on air sometime next month and will be broadcast to the whole country. Will surely send links.
- Our main talking points will be the substandard leadership that is doing almost nothing while public Oz gets scammed out of 10 Billion a year. Which is probably a worldwide problem I’d imagine.
Anecdotally, we have a story about a woman here who lost 30k. Someone hacked her accounts after she was caught up in 5 major breaches over 6 months - Bank didn’t care - she spoke to a certain politician here that admitted to her that the gov are ‘terrified’ over cyber security and they really have no clue what theyre doing…,.
Any of your talking points, any insider anecdotes, suggestions, we will try to cram as much into this interview as we can.
3 Likes
Easiest solution I can think is if I add some code to just hide your user email specifically 
Would be handy to have this as a setting anyone could use but the user setting system needs some fixing.
We can see that the email address of our account has been hidden.
Thanks so much Bradley,
Have been busy with assessments and sorting out my ‘trophy folder’ of assorted phishing scam site screenshots to show/give the Tv crew.
Also, found a couple of phishing kit zips I got from a couple of open dir sites a while ago.
They were fresh, so no victims, but at least they can see.
Interview questions came
"Introduce yourself - what you do in your spare time
What motives you to help people off your own bat for free?
What scam sites specifically do you look for (gov ones) and why?
How easy is it for scammers to impersonate a government website?
Tell me about how you search and take one down? How do you do it? How long does it take?
How many can you take down in a day?
Tell me about some of the other people your group? How did you meet and why do you all do it?
What is your message to gov?
Tell me about being ‘active’ and not reactive?"
We don’t have a ‘group’, just want to be taken seriously.
Apparently other threat hunter filmed his interview today and it went well.
We have ours in 48 hrs
if anyone wants to chime in, especially the last question, feel free.
2 Likes
I would like to chime in on this topic, however I currently do not have enough brain capacity to understand anything.
I think that’s an important point: if companies/governments are only reacting to reports of phishing it’s going to be too slow. We all know how long it takes to get a site taken down so if you only start that process after you receive the first report from a victim, the site will claim many victims before it’s neutralised.
But, if you’re proactive (like it sounds you are) there’s a hope of neutralising sites before anyone has been compromised
Thanks a pretty good answer Bradley, we are going to explain that being proactive versus reactionary is like only taking action, triage of victims AFTER the Lion has escaped its Zoo cage and is on a rampage, versus what we are doing - sitting outside the Lion cage with tranquilizer darts so there is no rampage and no victims to triage.
2 Likes
Same behavior for me!
Am a beta tester, I don’t know if this is for normal accounts.
UPDATE - Last night System27_Security helped us out last minute with our Cloudflare 1020 error You are Blocked problem. Thanks.
Interview went well - other threat hunter was on Zoom watching, he said it went well.
Kinda nervous, but managed to give shoutouts to System27 and also mentioned when they asked me how we take down phishing sites I said we use Phish Report to automate and how much time we save.
Hopefully they don’t cut the answers down too much. Or make us look like idiots.
Reminded of that Simpsons Episode with Homer being on Hard Copy…
Cheers.
2 Likes
This is wonderful 
Did they give you an estimate for when the story gets published live? I am really curious, I’ll make a memo in our calendar for that date 
I think they mentioned early July - tax refund time will start then - coincides with the tsunami of phishing sites for several months.
Will let you know when it airs.
1 Like
Since, you mentioned Taxes. I am legally required to share this video.
1 Like
TV show airs 2nd July, so next Sunday.
Heard interviewer reached out to our Minister of Cybersecurity -
- narrative of interview with us was how gov doesnt care and ignores us-
Minister ignores interviewer request for interview and pawns him off to the very gov body that they have pawned us off to every time. Irony will not be lost in proving our point.
Apparently is only 5 mins long… But will be up on youtube very shortly after airing, so will post link here. We just had another MAJOR breach - almost every other day - and details of major banks leaked out… again.
1 Like
Wasn’t Australia that had the Optus / Telstra hack?
Optus - some kid found an open, credential-less API and gained access to everything… Everything. Millions upon millions of Aussies data 10 million I think- and we only have a 26 million total population. API still open a full 24hrs after news broke the story… They tried claiming the ‘hacker’ just abandoned his pursuit of ransom. In reality, they would have paid him off, with extra to get him to claim he suddenly grew a heart.
It’s been downhill ever since - breach after breach.
Latitude financial, Medicare, etc. - 13 Biggest Data Breaches in Australia [Updated 2023] | UpGuard
Just this morning another major bank is having ‘difficulties’ with people not able to access their bank accounts.
Its a global joke - Pretty sure Ghana has more cybersecurity in place.
Australia is an open piggy bank for hackers.
1 Like