PODCAST · technology
Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons Podcast
by Carey Parker
A Podcast on Computer Security & Privacy for Non-Techies
Episodes
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IP Reputation Laundering
Residential proxy networks have become very popular ways for bad guys to launder their illicit activities through our normal home network traffic. By mixing in their traffic with ours, they are able to use (and abuse) the good reputation of our home IP address. Many of us have unwittingly allowed...
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Hold Off on Muse
Meta has released a very powerful new AI agent app called Muse. Likewise, OpenAI has released a similar app called Dots. Both apps feature charming, friendly and decidedly non-threatening avatars to perhaps assuage your fears of AI. But these agents ask for extensive access to your data and...
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Here’s to 500!!
Today marks an incredible milestone for this podcast: 500 episodes! Not only is that a crazy long run for any podcast, but I’ve also been astonishingly consistent. I’ve managed to put out an episode of this show every single week for 500 straight weeks! Okay… I did miss one week 8 years ago… I’ll...
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Solving the AI Paradox
In the last week, many news organizations have breathlessly covered the “AI doomer” comments by a former Anthropic employee, who said that many of his colleagues were secretly worried about AI ending all of humanity – and that it could happen in just a few years. But to me, there are more…
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Obscuring the Exit
While we do have some state privacy laws in the US that require companies to allow you to opt out of data collection, these companies have devised clever ways to make these options very hard to find and/or very hard to choose in a clear and consistent manner. The Electronic Privacy Information...
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Use a Secure Wi-Fi Router
Probably the single most important device on your home network in terms of security is your Wi-Fi router. In most cases, it’s the only thing between all your networked devices and the Internet’s bad guys. It’s crucial that you’re using an updated (and update-able) device from a reputable maker....
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Supply Chain Attacks
Software apps today are a hodgepodge of libraries, software development kits, and third party code, all stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster. Furthermore, software developers use common tools to create and deploy this software. The bad guys have figured out that by compromising one of...
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Digital Citizen: Phase 2
As part of my celebration of the upcoming 500th podcast, I’m launching Phase 2 of my “cyber neighbor” campaign to both help as many people be more secure and private as possible, but to also learn from this experience so I can improve these campaigns in the future. In particular, as I write the…
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DEF CON 34
It’s August, which means it’s time for Hacker Summer Camp once again! I flew out to a sweltering Las Vegas, Nevada, to attend two of the three major cybersecurity (“hacker”) conferences: BSides and DEF CON. I had an amazing week, spending time with new and old friends, meeting some of the people...
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AI Tech Support: Trust, but Verify
One of the most underrated uses for modern chatbots, in my estimation, is tech support. I don’t mean the chatbots offered by product websites, I mean using one of the “frontier” model bots to troubleshoot problems via chat conversations. They are extremely good at this – and they are infinitely...
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Top Cyber Threats 2026
With so many cyber threats to report on, it's easy to get lost in the weeds. It's good to take a step back and look at the big picture every so often. Today, I'll review some of the top security and privacy threats with investigative cybersecurity journalist Zack Whittaker from Tech Crunch. We'll...
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Update All the Things
Over the last 2-3 months, large software makers such as Microsoft have been releasing tons of fixes for vulnerabilities in their apps and operating systems. Did their software suddenly get a lot worse? No. They're using the latest AI tools to find these bugs that humans missed and that have been...
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Digital Provenance
With modern AI tools, how do we know which images and videos are real and which ones are generated? Wouldn't it be helpful to have some digitally verifiable way to tell where something came from and whether it has been altered? Turns out, that technology already exists. It's open and free to use,...
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Countdown to Episode 500!
It's time to start the official countdown to my 500th podcast episode! I've been publishing a podcast every single week for over nine years now, which is a rather amazing accomplishment (if I do say so myself). But the entire purpose of the podcast - as well as my book and my blog - has been to…
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Defending Device Data
Our Constitutional rights were written without any concept of modern technology such as cell phones and the internet. Much of our privacy laws are still geared towards the pre-digital age. Even though the internet is many decades old now, the era of traveling with smartphones and laptops is still...
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We Can Do This
With the 500th podcast and America's 250th anniversary approaching, I've been doing a lot of thinking about how we can be better digital neighbors and digital citizens. We're all in this together. Your security and privacy overlaps the security and privacy of many others. It's important to…
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A More Personal AI
Most of the chatbots in the news today are trained on public data (often including copyrighted data). But it doesn't have to be that way. What if you had a chatbot that could access all of your personal or company data, but hosted locally so that all the data was secure and private? You could ask...
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Backup Your Email Archive
In the final part of my series on downloading all of your historical emails from the cloud, we’ll make backups of your archive and make sure we store them in multiple places, following the 3-2-1 backup rule. I’ll also tell you about an interesting open source email archive project that you might...
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Transaction Denied
What would you do if you suddenly lost your bank account - and potentially access to all your funds? What about your credit cards? How long could your business stay afloat if you could no longer receive payments? Most of us take financial services for granted, but they can be taken away at any…
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Verify Your Email Archive
As part of my ongoing series on creating a full backup of all your old emails, we want to take some time to verify that we got everything okay. In today's Tip of the Week, I'll give you several pointers on how to go about doing this. In the last installment, we'll make a couple backups and...
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Bossware & Boundaries
When you're working for your employer, no matter where you are, you're on company time, using company equipment. Your employer has a responsibility to protect their assets - not just their equipment and facilities, but their data, as well. That gives employers several reasons to monitor you and…
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Download All Your Emails
In the next phase of withdrawing our email data from the cloud, we're going to download a complete archive of every email we've ever sent. It's not as easy as it should be, but it's also not that difficult. I'll give you an overview in today's Tip of the Week, but you should read the full blog…
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Cindy Cohn: Privacy’s Defender
Cindy Cohn has been on the front lines, defending your digital rights, for three decades. With the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), she has litigated several seminal legal cases that have directly impacted the lives of all Americans. As she retires from her role as Director of the EFF, she's...
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Withdraw Your Email Data
Probably the oldest online data you have - like, still have out there right now - is your emails. Did you have an AOL account? Or email through your internet service provider (ISP)? Statistically speaking, you probably have a Gmail, Yahoo Mail or Outlook (previously HotMail) account. Unless you...
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The Power of Prophecy
We have relied on prophets and seers for most of human history, largely because humans are obsessed with the future - specifically their own. But prophecy has often been used to determine or at least influence the future, not just predict it. In her new book, Prophecy, Carissa Véliz explains the...
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AI’s Promise and Peril
Artificial Intelligence - in particular, Large Language Models (LLMs) or "chatbots" - are increasing in power at an astonishing pace. In fact, the latest models from Anthropic (Claude Mythos) and OpenAI (ChatGPT 5.4 Cyber) are so good at reading software code and finding vulnerabilities, that…
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Identity Resolution
There are all sorts of things that can be used to identify us online and in the real world, beyond our names, addresses, and phone numbers. But data brokers are desperate to tie all of these unique pieces of information together, building a valuable marketing dossier. It's become a massive…
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Routers Behaving Badly
The US is planning to ban all foreign-made or foreign-designed home WiFi routers... which is basically all routers. It's true that many consumer routers are pretty crappy when it comes to security. TP-Link just fixed some bad vulnerabilities (which you need to patch ASAP). But what does this mean...
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Privacy Guides Panel
Nate Bartram and Jonah Aragon have been advocating for privacy for a long time. Their sites, The New Oil and Privacy Guides, have a ton of fabulous resources for anyone interested in guarding their data and defending their digital rights. Ever wonder what it's like being a privacy advocate in an...
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Spring Cleaning
When we think about improving security and privacy, we tend to add things: password managers, VPNs, encrypted communication apps. But one of the most effective ways to protect yourself is much simpler: remove what you don’t need. Safety through subtraction. Every app you install exposes you to…
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Surveillance Pricing
When you shop online or through an app, do you ever wonder if you're being charged the same as someone else for the same thing? Even controlling for things like shipping address and local taxes, it turns out that today it's not uncommon for pricing to dynamically change based on factors that may...
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Fixing ClickFix
Bad guys have found a willing accomplice for installing malware: YOU. This very effective malware delivery mechanism, dubbed ClickFix, accounted for over half of all infections last year. I’ll tell you how to avoid it, but also explain why you shouldn’t have to. In other news: Amazon's change to...
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Double Blind Armadillo
Cellular providers need to know your location in order to deliver calls and text message to your phone. But it turns out that they really don't need to know who you are to give you that service. They only need to know how to bill you - and that information can be at little as knowing your ZIP+4...
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New Google Alternatives
In my seemingly never-ending quest to replace all things Google, I've finally found some solid, private alternatives to Google Sheets and Google Forms. And we'll also talk about how the EU is looking to create competing products to reduce their dependence on Big Tech from Silicon Valley. In the...
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Professionally Paranoid
Today I speak with Yahoo CISO Sean Zadig - aka, the Chief Paranoid. Sean has had a long and varied career in cybersecurity, working both in law enforcement (at NASA!) and working security for Big Tech. I'll ask Sean how we can teach our kids about cybersecurity, and how to protect them from the...
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Agents of Misfortune
The latest craze with artificial intelligence is agentic AI - exhibited most recently in the viral AI project called ClawdBot... or Moltbot... or OpenClaw. (The name has changed two times in less than a week.) You download this software, give it access to your AI chatbot accounts, and then give…
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Debunking Hacklore
We're all busy people with busy lives. We only have so much time and energy. So when security people dole out to-do lists, we really need to focus on the tips with the most bang for the buck. Conversely, we need to avoid wasting people's precious resources on advice that is no longer valid or…
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Zero-Knowledge Proofs
There exist many interesting technical tools which can greatly improve our privacy while still allowing us to use very personal data. In the next installment of my series on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, we'll look at zero-knowledge proofs - what they are, how they work and what types of…
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Honoring Auto Privacy Rights
Having data privacy laws are great. But if those laws can't be practically enforced or your rights easily asserted, they're not very useful. Modern cars are chock full of sensors, many of which are used to monitor the passengers and collect personal data. But cars are subject to privacy laws…
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Private AI Chat
AI has many problems, but also has promise. Today I'm going to focus on one particular problem that has some viable solutions: privacy. Chat bots like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude all require your queries to be processed in the cloud. All the personal questions we ask are probably being logged...
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Decentralized Messaging
There are a ton of messaging apps on the market - and there are actually quite a few that are very secure and private. I would argue that there is no such thing as a "perfect" secure messaging app. There are several threat models to account for, each with different requirements. Today we're going...
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Best of 2025 Bonus Content
Every week, I record a special, private bonus podcast for my patrons. Normally all of that content is restricted to my supporters. But today I’ve got a sampler platter of some of the best snippets from my bonus Q&A with my interview guests. You’ll hear from Yael Grauer (Consumer Reports), Josh...
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Replay: Stop Reusing Passwords
I’m digging into the vault for a classic interview - a blast from the past! I've done 460 episodes over the last nearly 9 years, and some of the best old episodes still hold up well today. I first interviewed Troy Hunt, creator of Have I Been Pwned, in February of 2019. It was Episode 102 and it...
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Best of 2025!
I’ve had some truly amazing interviews this past year. For your listening enjoyment, I’ve curated a set of clips from some of the best shows, creating a sampler platter of stellar audio content from some amazing guests! If you’ve never listened to my podcast, this will give you a taste of what...
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40 Years of Phrack
Way before the world wide web, computer enthusiasts were sharing information via digital bulletin board systems (BBS). This amounted to attaching a modem to your home computer and allowing other people to dial in from their computers (one at a time) to download "textfiles" and share "warez" - or...
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Be Wary of Holiday Scams
With the holiday season come holiday scams - and honestly, just more scammer activity across the board, in general. People are busy and buying lots of stuff, and it's a time when we're more vulnerable to schemes to take our money and infect our devices. Today we'll talk about a few current scams...
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Best & Worst Gifts for 2025!
Holiday shopping season is here! And that must mean that it's time again for my annual Best & Worst Gift Guide! But this time I've recruited some top minds from Consumer Reports to lend their expertise and enlighten us with their tech gift-giving strategies! Yael Grauer, Stacey Higginbotham and...
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Erasing Your Online Data
Data brokers are amassing tons of our personal information, often from public sources. You can try to find all of these brokers and request your data be deleted, but it's a lot easier to deputize a trustworthy and affordable service to do all that work for you - and to do so on a regular basis....
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Becoming Cyber Resilient
In the US alone, there are tens of thousands of small organizations that are responsible for critical infrastructure and vital community services. Most of them don't have an IT department let alone a cyber security expert on staff. And yet these organizations are being attacked by cyber criminal...
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Removing Old Accounts
Today we'll wrap up my series of tips for enumerating all your old online accounts and deciding whether to delete them or just dumb down the personal data they have on you. There are several things to consider - we'll go through them all! In other news: a study ranks the most private AI chatbots;...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
A Podcast on Computer Security & Privacy for Non-Techies
HOSTED BY
Carey Parker
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons Podcast have?
Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons Podcast currently has 501 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons Podcast about?
A Podcast on Computer Security & Privacy for Non-Techies
How often does Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons Podcast release new episodes?
Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons Podcast releases new episodes frequently with a large back catalog of 501 episodes. Check the episode list for recent publication dates.
Where can I listen to Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons Podcast?
You can listen to Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons Podcast on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons Podcast?
Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons Podcast is created and hosted by Carey Parker.
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