So yesterday, I emailed a state court system that appears to be linked to the exposed data I mentioned recently and that the host notified on or about July 28.

No reply was received.

Today, I sent a contact form message to the lawyer for a juvenile whose records were sealed. Sealed, except 11 of them were exposed to anyone who can access the data. I told him what was going on and suggested he contact the court and tell them to get the data secured.

No reply was received.

Today, I sent an email to the judge who ordered the juvenile's records sealed and I cc:d the district attorney. I gave them the juvenile's name, case number and that I could see all the sealed records. I urged them to have their IT or vendor call me and I could give them the IP address over the phone, etc.

No reply was received.

Dear Russia, China, and North Korea:

You do not need to hack our courts. They are leaking like sieves and do not respond when we try to tell them they need to secure the data.

Yours in total frustration,

/Dissent

#infosec #cybersecurity #incident_response #dataleak #databreach #WAKETHEFUCKUP

This is some really smart digging: realizing that Claude Code does not require user interaction for certain bash commands, they discovered that DNS lookups were specifically allowlisted, clearing a trivial path for well-known DNS exfiltration methods.

So when I say “all these implementations are ignoring years and decades of lessons learned the hard way” it’s not hyperbole. Anthropic 100% cleared the path for DNS exfil here.

h/t to @cR0w - thank you!

#infosec #genai

https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2025/claude-code-exfiltration-via-dns-requests/

A DEA agent used a local police officer’s password to the Flock automated license plate reader system to search for someone suspected of an “immigration violation.”

That DEA agent did this “without [the local police officer’s] knowledge,”

🔗 https://www.404media.co/feds-used-local-cops-password-to-do-immigration-surveillance-with-flock-cameras/

The 2025 Fediverse Needs Assessment is Open: Have Your Say

Every year, IFTAS asks the people who keep our communities safe to tell us what they need.The Fediverse Needs Assessment gathers input from moderators, administrators, and community managers across the decentralised social web and beyond.

Whether you run a Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy or Peertube instance, a Nostr relay, a Bluesky community, Matrix or Discord rooms, your experience matters. Any platform, any protocol. Single user service or a million person community. Doesn’t matter. We focus […]

https://about.iftas.org/2025/08/11/the-2025-fediverse-needs-assessment-is-open-have-your-say/

As you've probably seen or heard Dropsitenews has published a list (from a Meta whistleblower) of "the roughly 100,000 top websites and content delivery network addresses scraped to train Meta's proprietary AI models" -- including quite a few fedi sites. Meta denies everything of course, but they routinely lie through their teeth so who knows. In any case, whether the specific details in the report are accurate, it's certainly a threat worth thinking about.

So I'm wondering what defenses fedi admins are using today to try to defeat scrapers: robots.txt, user-agent blocking, firewall-level blocking of ip ranges, Cloudflare or Fastly AI scraper blocking, Anubis, stuff you don't want to disclose ... @deadsuperhero has some good discussion on We Distribute, and it would b e very interesting to hear what various instances are doing.

And a couple of more open-ended questions:

• Do you feel like your defenses against scraping are generally holding up pretty well?

• Are there other approaches that you think might be promising that you just haven't had the time or resources to try?

• Do you have any language in your terms of servive that attempts to prohibit training for AI?

Here's @FediPact's post with a link to the Dropsitenews report and (in the replies) a list of fedi instances and CDNs that show up on the list.

https://cyberpunk.lol/@FediPact/114999480874284493

@fediverse @fediversenews

#MastoAdmin #Meta #FediPact