Every quarterly endeavor here gets a catchy name. We just laid PIAT to rest in An Oncoming Winter Of Discontent, out of respect for the ugly conditions weāre expecting. The world will simply have to do without the deep research that followed 2024ās Malign Influence Operations Safari.
One line in that article got lots of comments from reviewers:
And what even do you people want for Q4? I mean besides benzodiazepines and permission to build pillow forts as adults?
The comments were followed by pictures of pets/pillows, and I brought out this example. Here we see Fluff Warrior, doing what she does best, on a pillow commandeered after its former human user departed.
Iām taking this as a sign - Operation Pillow Fort commences forthwith. Weāre going to engage in some cyber nesting, leaving only a few peepholes so each of us can watch the action from within our personal refuge.
Attention Conservation Notice:
Weāre doing personal security stuff for the remainder of the year. You are encouraged to obtain additional cushion like devices if your existing collection does not provide enough room for you and your pet.
Brain Chemistry:
Looks like things are going to get ugly out there. I periodically make mention of diet & supplements stuff, hereās a short refresher on healthy ways to chill out. The benzos are bad news long term. These are readily available and good for you.
Magnesium chelate - biologically available magnesium is calming, donāt get the oxide form, youāre wasting money with that.
L-theanine - the stuff in green tea, acts quickly to immediately remove any rough edges.
Glycine - if youāre sleep deprived a couple grams of this right before bed is great.
Kava kava - OTC but works about as well as a benzo, without leading to bad habits. Shaves points on blood pressure and heart rate, goes harder than L-theanine, and lasts longer.
There are other things that fit this problem, these are mine. Some people like delta-8 THC. I dislike having my short term memory turned down to zero and waking up with a hangover grade headache, so I avoid. I hear good things about Valerian, have never tried it myself. There are a variety of less potent botanicals, feel free to explore till you get one you like, but mind the liver hazards some bring.
Alcohol is just not a good choice. Like delta-8 for me, everyone pays a price in using this. Marijuana products with delta-9 THC are favored by some. Iāve not touched that stuff in 30+ years and what I recall from back when is that it hit my math skills pretty hard. I donāt think habits here are good, but itās not as harmful as alcohol.
Housecleaning:
Some fourteen years ago I downloaded the HBGary Federal intrusion data and wrote a white paper about their schemes. Then I went off and built the analytical portions of what they were proposing to do for myself. Thatās kinda how I got where I am today.
The HBGary release was 70,000+ emails in mailboxes from five executives at the firm. This was my first time going through someone elseās stuff with a pad and pencil handy. Weāve done something similar with the MIOS: Iranās PressTV data. Between those two events, roughly once a year, I get intrusion or FOIA data to examine, so Iām an old hand at looking for openings.
Having done this a number of times, I donāt have much trouble seeing my own stuff through an intruderās eye, which is why Iām such a neat freak. I hope that you regular readers are already starting to be mindful of your personal environment and attendant digital shadow. Here are some things Iām doing in the moment, just a normal end of quarter sort of ritual for me.
Any chat rooms that havenāt moved in two months get queried, and if thereās no call for preservation, they get wiped.
Any surviving chat rooms get the hairy eyeball - if they arenāt already set to a one week timer, should they be?
Last July I went hard on cutting āthe sceneā out of my life, ghosting a dozen people on a variety of platforms, and that got reviewed this weekend.
Dead social media accounts get wiped down, then locked up with a LONG passphrase.
My email has long been compartmentalized, so Iām not mixing key messages with a bunch of digital shadow trash, but I periodically go through and delete ALL of the junk, so I can see whatās real.
Frantically deleting stuff after you or someone in your circles does something inadvisable has a name - itās called obstruction of justice. You can find the relevant federal statutes in Title 18 Chapter 73. Instead, do these things:
Never commit to email what could be a chat.
Never use pre-compromised systems like Telegram or WhatsApp.
Never use a long term Signal chat when a week timeout would do.
Never conduct one on one business in a group chat.
Never use chat for things that should be voice calls.
There are things that must be done in persons sans electronics.
I am in the habit of keeping a very clean environment, so much so that I might be courting an obstruction charge, were someone in my circles to misbehave. I counter that by memorializing things that are important, and keeping off site backups. This was once the gold standard, but Iām not sure itās a workable strategy in 2025, which is just one of the many reasons Iām limiting myself to broadcasting defensive tradecraft.
Various Cushions:
I actually am going to get a couple more throw pillow sized things, so Iām not fighting kitteh for my knee pillow. While I personally already have way too many computers and phones, I suspect a lot of you are singletons - one phone, one PC, your pair of devices is your whole world. Weāre going to focus on that, the goal here is to get everyone to level up.
The former advice about digging out a retired phone and an old laptop you didnāt pass down still holds, but in this case itās good if you want to try things before you commit your main devices to some course of action. I donāt think this is REQUIRED, but I can imagine some of you who start down this path wanting to go further. And this is the next step.
And since there will be new procedures, new passwords, and other things youāll want to keep, go old school and get yourself a small spiral notepad, one of the cell phone sized ones. This is handy if you lock yourself out of that one device that you own, and you can make a backup by taking pictures of the pages as they fill.
Conclusion:
Itās a mad, mad, MAD world out there, full of mad people whoāve been driven absolutely mad by maddening situations. Thatās it, thatās my full assessment for Q4. I donāt want to inspect things any closer, but I bet weāll be forced to do that, for safetyās sake.
But if we all run a little cleaner that will be for the best. Having slept on things, what I laid out in An Oncoming Winter Of Dissent seems to be a sensible course of action. Being truly āsecureā is orders of magnitude harder than you imagine, but we can all get to āmore trouble than itās worthā for the bad guys, and thatās a nice place to be.
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Phone network
Home & away wifi
Email services
Chat services
Device loss, seizure, theft, backup issues