Security

I found out by accident that my house had not been protected in I do not know how long. At least six months. Possibly longer. I still do not have an exact number, and that gap is part of the story. Not because anything happened. Nothing did, which is exactly the problem. The cellular monitoring box from my national home security monitoring company, the piece of hardware that actually carries the signal to their monitoring center, had failed. Quietly. Completely. For at least six months, my system had been sending zero signals to their monitoring center. No alarms, no test pings, nothing. And in all that time, nobody there noticed, flagged it, or called to tell me my house had gone dark. ...

A contractor came out to my house not long ago to give me a quote. When he pulled out his phone to snap a few photos of the job, it was not a smartphone. It was a flip phone, the kind you have not seen at a store counter in a decade, the kind built to survive a fall off a ladder or a bath in drywall dust. I asked him about it. He told me he had cracked three smartphones on job sites and was done replacing them. The flip phone was not a downgrade. It was the right tool for the work he actually does. ...

I was at a local medical office for a routine checkup recently when something caught my eye. Mounted to the wall in the corner was a bright red sharps container, the kind used to safely dispose of needles and other biohazard materials. The thing was installed exactly right. It was mounted high on the wall, well out of reach of anyone who shouldn’t be touching it. It was secured to a bracket, not going anywhere. It bore a bright orange biohazard label, clearly communicating what it was and the danger it represented. A locking mechanism sat at the top, designed to prevent unauthorized access once the container reached capacity. ...

Ubiquiti shipped security updates this week addressing five vulnerabilities in UniFi OS, three of which carry maximum severity ratings. If you have UniFi Consoles or other UniFi OS-based devices in your environment, this is not one to let sit over a long weekend. What Was Patched The three maximum-severity flaws are: CVE-2026-34908 targets an Improper Access Control weakness that allows remote, unauthenticated attackers to make unauthorized changes to affected systems. ...