Happy weekend, everyone! As of 6:00pm Friday evening, I am on vacation staycation for the next nine peaceful days. What do I have planned, you may ask?
I have absolutely nothing planned — I am almost squealing in delight! 😁
One thing I will be doing over the weekend is watching the premiere episode of the newest season of Project Runway. I am extremely excited to see the return of Heidi Klum and can’t wait to see what’s in store. I am equally as excited to resurrect my weekly episode recap write-ups. 🥳 For my fellow fans, I hope you enjoy reading them each week. These are recaps, so they will obviously contain spoilers — if you have not yet watched a particular episode, beware!
On the work front, in yesterday’s monthly administrators IT meeting, the director finally had the opportunity to reintroduce me to the departments. I’m no longer the senior desktop support technician, but I am now the policy/compliance/cybersecurity person for the school. We shall see how long the “adjustment” period lasts where folks stop contacting me directly with support issues or questions, and start contacting me with security-related issues or questions. 😂 Even though I have posted an article on our customer wiki site and added a bit to my email signature about offering “open office hours” for anyone to bring questions or concerns to me, it’s been relatively silent on that front. Hopefully my reintroduction will help with that, and I may have to revisit my email signature and tweak it a bit to make it a little more prominent and/or eye-catching. This is something I am excited and passionate about, and I want to make a difference in the school.
This Got Me Thinking
Given the usual events happened in the cybersecurity world this past week, there really was only one thing that stood out above everything else that I had to write about. There are stories you come across that give you pause, and then there are stories that make you tremble — not just with anger, but with sadness, with fear. The kind that rises to the surface from a truth many of us already know, but want to pretend that it doesn’t exist: for women online, safety is quite often merely an illusion.
About a week ago, an app on the Apple App Store called Tea — intending to be a safe space where women could share stories and experiences anonymously — suffered from not one, but two devastating breaches. The first breach exposed:
- approximately 72,000 images
- approximately 13,000 selfies and photo identification submitted by users for account verification
- approximately 59,000 images publicly viewable from posts, comments and direct messages
While Tea says this data came from a “legacy data storage system” — I still am not sure what exactly that means — Tea says that the data contained was from prior to February 2024.
Even more recently, a second breach occurred. This breach contained roughly 1.1 million private messages. This time, the private messages range from 2023 up until just last week — containing sensitive topics such as abortions or potentially cheating partners.
This story got me thinking about how incredibly and deeply broken our world still is — not just in terms of technical safeguards, but how it repeatedly fails to protect those who are most vulnerable. Women are told and encouraged to speak up, warn others, share their stories. But when they do, they are at risk of being exposed, ridiculed, or worse.
What kind of system tells women to be brave, yet punishes them for it?
This is just about bad security in my mind, but also about ethical failure. Building an app that invites conversations this intimate, this charged, this vulnerable, and to not prioritize encryption, access control, and incident response smacks of negligence of the highest caliber. It shows a complete disregard for human impact.
It makes me tired sometimes. Tired of trying to each empathy through breach reports. Especially tired of seeing tech treat women’s safety as a feature — often, an optional one at that — rather than a baseline.
I have no real lesson here, all wrapped up neatly with a bow — just hope. I hope that those of us in cybersecurity keep fighting the good fight, not just for data protection, but for human protection. I hope that we never lose sight of and are reminded of the fact that every app, every log file, every permission setting, it all impacts and touches real lives.
Finally, here is a look back at what I wore to work this week. I hope you all enjoy them, as well as enjoy reading what I write about each week. Have a wonderful and safe weekend — I will be back in a week or so.
-Terry
July 28
July 29
July 31
August 1
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